This is a modern novel about mathematics. A teenager and an old university professor meet in the remote village La Fouly, on Val Ferret, in the Swiss Alps. They go hiking in the surrounding mountains. During this period, they talk, informally, about the content of different chapters from old and recent domains of mathematics (Algebra, Calculus, Set theory, Geometry, Functional Analysis, Topology, Number theory, Optimization, Linear programming, Simulation, Probability theory, Statistics, Information theory, Cryptography, Game theory, Decision theory, System theory) and about the lives of some important contributors to the development of these domains (Newton, Leibniz, Gauss, Euler, Fermat, Descartes, Hilbert, Abel, Galois, Riemann, Ramanujan, Bolyai, Boole, Cantor, Bourbaki, Godel, Erdos, Grothendieck, von Neumann, Shannon).

 The main objective of this book is to show that mathematics is a dynamic, vivid science and that the little known and small community of mathematicians has had many remarkable human beings and dramas inside it.

 The book is meant for those who think that mathematics is an important component of our culture and are willing to learn more about it. The large majority of its pages contain no formulas.

A reader who feels uncomfortable about them could skip the respective sections and focus only on the lives of some remarkable mathematicians and on the casual conversation between the two main characters of the book.