Riemann, Topology, and Physics

Soviet citizens can buy Monastyrsky's biography of Riemann for eleven kopeks. This translated edition will cost considerably more, but it is still good value for the money. And we get Monastyrsky's monograph on topological methods in the bargain. It was a good idea of Birkhiiuser Boston to publish the two translations in one volume. The economics of publishing in a capitalist country make it impossible for us to produce the small cheap paperback booklets, low in quality of paper and high in quality of scholarship, at which the Soviet publishing industry excels. Monastyrsky's two booklets are out- standing examples of the genre. By putting them together, Birkhiiuser has enabled them to fit into the Western book-marketing system. The two booklets were written separately and each is complete in itself, but they complement each other beautifully. The Riemann biography is short and terse, like Riemann's own writings. It describes in few words and fewer equations the revolutionary ideas which Riemann brought into mathematics and physics a hundred and twenty years ago. The topological methods booklet describes how some of these same ideas, after lying dormant for a century, found new and fruitful applications in the physics of our own time.