When We Cease to Understand the World by Benjamin Labatut traces the lives of prominent mathematicians and physicists of the 20th century. The sections meld fiction and nonfiction, using both facts and imagination to describe major scientific discoveries and their effects. I’ve never read a book that prominently features pure mathematicians. I studied math in graduate school, so it was interesting to read about the imagined inner lives of people that I only knew from the equations named after them. This book explores the idea that you might not understand or grasp the consequences of scientific discovery until it’s too late. All the time in school, in pure math, people would ask what abstract research was used for in the real world. Often the answer was “I don’t know, but hopefully applied mathematicians will someday figure out how to apply it!” And what if your work gets used to hurt people? To kill? To change the course of history? And what to make of brilliant minds that spiral into madness? This was a really unique and interesting book, and I can see why it has captivated so many.