Non-fiction - written by a maths prof in the hope that he could show non-mathematicians that there's beauty in maths. "What if you had to take an art class in which you were taught only how to paint a fence, but were never shown the paintings of van Gogh or Picasso? Alas, this is how math is taught, and so for most of us it becomes the intellectual equivalent of watching paint dry".
Being a jew near Moscow he experienced trouble while growing up - anti-semitism as well as state oppression (printing/photocopying was difficult, so papers were hard to distribute). He started with Group theory, having private tuition from a mathematician who was sympathetic to his situation. In the book he soon moves onto the Langlands Program (which I've heard of - I did maths as a student and still read "popular science" articles on the topic). I hadn't heard of sheaves, and I didn't realise how much physics had provided ideas for maths. I've heard of mbranes but not "the worldsheet of the string" or "zero-brane". I know a bit about Ed Witten.
I'd be surprised if non-maths people could appreciate this book. I think the only way to entice them is to cherry pick maths topics from a much wider range than is shown here - Gödel, Cantor etc.
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