I'm not a math nerd, but if I were, this would have been more like 4 stars. I am, however, other kinds of nerd and I found the non-math parts of the book to be absolutely bonkers, but not in the joyful way. Weir has given us a protagonist with zero backstory. And I don't mean his amnesia. He ends up remembering how he got on the ship, but apparently those few months were all there was to his life. There's no family, no friends, no flings, no hobbies, no likes or dislikes--and mind you, the book is almost 500 pages in length. When he does finally make a friend, he doesn't even notice that it's the first friend he's ever had. There's no emotional interiority to this guy at all. He's just there to solve puzzles. This is truly science fantasy, not science fiction. There's nothing believable about the majority of science in this, the character isn't believable, and yet I read to the end. Rocky truly saves this book from being impossible, but despite him, I can't recommend this one.