About the book
Constance Reid's biography of David Hilbert presents a mathematician whose life can be read as the story of mathematics in his era. The narrative runs from his early years in Konigsberg, where his radical early work was written off as theology, to Gottingen in its prime, where young mathematicians and physicists flocked to study with him before and between the World Wars, until, within months of Hitler taking power, the Hilbert school was wiped out. The twenty-three problems he put forward in 1900 for the new century set the course of much later mathematics. The account is nontechnical. At his death, Nature observed that scarcely any mathematician's work did not derive from Hilbert's.
In his essay How You Know, Paul Graham called Constance Reid's biography of Hilbert excellent.
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A few months ago, as I was reading Constance Reid's excellent biography of Hilbert, I figured out if not the answer to this question, at least something that made me feel better about it.
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