From the author of 'The Music of the Primes' and 'Finding Moonshine' comes a short, lively book on five mathematical problems that just refuse to be solved - and a look at how many everyday problems can be solved by maths.

The paperback of the critically-acclaimed popular science book by a writer who is fast becoming a celebrity mathematician.Prime numbers are the very atoms of arithmetic. They also embody one of the most tantalising enigmas in the pursuit of human knowledge. How can one predict when the next prime number will occur? Is there a formula which could generate primes? These apparently simple questions have confounded mathematicians ever since the Ancient Greeks.In 1859, the brilliant German mathematician Bernard Riemann put forward an idea which finally seemed to reveal a magical harmony at work in...