——— Note ———
The paperback edition of Prime Obsession was published in May, 2004 by Plume, a division of Penguin Books. I have established a separate set of pages for the paperback edition, which you can view here.
Newsflash Sept. 16, 2005: Researchers Roger Plymen and Kuok Fai Chao over in the U.K. have published a paper on the "Littlewood violation" (p. 236 of Prime Obsession) in which they claim to have improved the Bays-Hudson result. The paper is on the internet here.
Prime Obsession is a nonfiction book on the Riemann Hypothesis, a famous unsolved problem in higher mathematics.
The book was published April 16, 2003 by Joseph Henry Press of Washington, D.C. It can be ordered on Amazon.com and BarnesAndNoble.com, and is available in bookstores and libraries. A paperback edition was published in May, 2004.
In these pages (see "Navigate down" at the left there) I offer a brief description of the book, all the reviews I am aware of, a list of promotional events, and a log of any errors found in the text, together with interesting comments from readers (including some of the people named in the book).
The book has an appendix containing Tom Apostol's song about the Riemann Hypothesis, with a full explanation of the lyrics. By going to the song page, you can hear an audio clip of me singing the entire song a cappella, or view a video clip of me singing just the first verse.
I am also building up a list of FAQs (i.e. frequently-asked questions), which includes a suggestion for how an utterly nonmathematical reader might find the book rewarding.
In reader responses to the book, some interesting points have come up concerning the book's very cursory and non-controversial (so, at any rate, I intended!) references to political and religious topics. I have added these points, and my responses to them, on a separate page here.
In response to a kind suggestion by the editors of FOCUS, the monthly newsletter of the Mathematical Association of America, I wrote up a brief account on the making and selling of Prime Obsession. This account, under the title "So You Want to Write a Pop-Math Book?" was published in the March 2004 issue of FOCUS, and I have put an image here.