For many years Serge Lang has given talks to undergraduates on selected items in mathematics which could be extracted at a level understandable by students who have had calculus. Written in a conversational tone, Lang now presents a collection of those talks as a book. The talks could be given by faculty, but even better, they may be given by students in seminars run by the students themselves. Undergraduates, and even some high school students, will enjoy the talks which cover prime numbers, the abc conjecture, approximation theorems of analysis, Bruhat-Tits spaces, harmonic and symmetric polynomials, and more in a lively and informal style.

Serge Lang (May 19, 1927 – September 12, 2005) was a French-born American mathematician. He is known for his work in number theory and for his mathematics textbooks, including the influential Algebra. He was a member of the Bourbaki group.

Lang was born in Paris in 1927, and moved with his family to California as a teenager, where he graduated in 1943 from Beverly Hills High School. He subsequently graduated from the California Institute of Technology in 1946, and received a doctorate from Princeton University in 1951. He held faculty positions at the University of Chicago and Columbia University (from 1955, leaving in 1971 in a dispute). At the time of his death he was professor emeritus of mathematics at Yale University.