Paperback Edition

The paperback edition of Prime Obsession was published May 25, 2004 by Plume, a division of Penguin Books. 

A book goes into paperback only if the hardback edition is successful with the reading public.  I therefore owe heartfelt thanks to all readers who helped make the hardback a success.  *** THANK YOU!! ***   And I hope you will encourage interested persons who do not yet have a copy of Prime Obsession to buy the paperback...

The paperback does not differ in any important way from the hardback, other than in having a new jacket design.  We have, though, cleaned up a few remaining errors in the text, and added a couple of paragraphs in places where I thought my explanations were inadequate.

...In spite of which, readers continue to spot errors in the paperback, a year and a half after first publication of the hardback.  I take the point of view that if this is an embarrassment, most of it belongs to the publisher, not to me; and so I dutifully and unblushingly record here any errors additional to those in the Errata page relating to the original hardback.

Errata

On page 253 I give the nationality of Emil Du Bois-Reymond as French.  He was in fact German.

Some readers have objected to my translating Princeps Mathematicorum (p.48) as "Prince of Mathematics."  They point out that a strict translation of the Latin is "Prince of Mathematicians."  ("...of mathematics" would be "...mathematicae.")  True:  but a prince should have a domain, and "mathematicians" is not a domain.  As a recovering monarchist, I am going to stick with this principle, and leave my translation as it is.

Since the text of the paperback hardly differs from that of the hardback, for questions arising from the text, I refer readers to the FAQs posted for the hardback edition, to which I may make additions as more questions come in.

On the third line of page 81, "x" should be "s."

I took the quote on page 29 from the English-language "Introduction" to the 1953 Dover edition of Riemann's Collected Works.  While the German "Vorrede" is indeed by Heinrich Weber, the English-language "Introduction" to the Dover edition seems to be by Professor Hans Lewy.  These words are therefore his, not Weber's.

The word "primary," four lines from the bottom of p.345, should really be changed to "principal" for consistency (see four lines higher).

My spellings "Leibnitz" (for "Leibniz") and "Hapsburg" (for "Habsburg"), while borderline-permissible, are, according to Google, eccentric.  In mitigation, I plead the undoubted fact that German spelling did not really "settle" until the 20th century.  Some older spellings (e.g. "Carl" for "Karl") are still used for proper names that were widely known before the "settling."  This is like writing "Chiang Kai-shek" for "Jiang Jieshi."

On page 85 I describe datum as the gerund of dare.  Perhaps I should have said "participle"; I am told the gerund is a slightly different thing.  I was just using the word loosely to mean "verbal noun."

Added 12/16/05:  The Greek translator of my book, Tefcros Michaelides, has been exceptionally diligent in spotting questionable points.  Here are things he noticed.

Section 17.iii, second paragraph:  "By a 'zeta function' I mean a function of a complex argument defined over the field of complex numbers..."  The field in question is not the usual field of complex numbers, so Tefcros suggests "defined over a field similar to..."  I think this is OK—my sin here was oversimplifying a little too far.

Section 20.v:  That first reference in parentheses should be to 11.ii, not 11.v.

Note to lines 19-20 of Tom Apostol's song:  "[I]f von Koch's result is true, the RH follows."  Since von Koch's result is actually that if the RH is true, then that big-Oh equality holds, this is sloppily worded.   I should have said that if the big-Oh result is true, the RH follows.