Karen Olsson. 2015. The Weil Conjectures. On maths and the pursuit of the unknown. New York: Bloomsbury. 214 pp.

Here Karen Olsson threads her own memoir through the stories of philosopher Simone Weil and her brother, number theory mathematician André Weil. To learn about these figures efficiently I had to look elsewhere. The attempt to weave together the three memoirs was only a distraction, I didn’t find a reason for the author’s own memoir to be included. Simone Weil seems to have been something of a mystic and I didn’t find her philosophy (including emptying her thoughts to await incoming intellects of revelations, even god) to be of any moment, even if she did hang out with Trotsky. André Weil was more interesting, but his autobiography reviewed here would have been a better choice to read.