I am beginning to think that histories of mathematical struggle and failure are my favorite kind. One that is similarly a tale of challenging and repeated failures on an unintuitive subject is thermodynamics, and an amazing book on this subject is The Tragicomical History of Thermodynamics, 1822–1854by Clifford Truesdell, himself a mathematical physicist most famous for continuum mechanics.
I am beginning to think that histories of mathematical struggle and failure are my favorite kind. One that is similarly a tale of challenging and repeated failures on an unintuitive subject is thermodynamics, and an amazing book on this subject is The Tragicomical History of Thermodynamics, 1822–1854 by Clifford Truesdell, himself a mathematical physicist most famous for continuum mechanics.