Novels by the numbers

Being the unreconstructed English major that I am, I never suspected I could delight in a novel about a mathematician, but that was before I read The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa (thank you, Lillian, for the recommendation!).  In this little gem of a book, the housekeeper must re-introduce herself every morning to the elderly, retired mathematics professor, whose memory lasts for only 80 minutes, except for everything that happened prior to an auto accident in 1975.  He tries to cope by pasting reminder notes all over his tattered clothing, and he spends long hours in his study working out mathematical challenges.  Eventually he and the housekeeper find a kind of shared solace in prime numbers and amicable numbers and other mathematical ideas, and he and the housekeeper’s young son create a bond around their shared love of baseball.  Trust me, you won’t mind seeing algebraic equations in this charming tale of what it means to be a family.

So then I started to wonder, are there other novels that feature mathematicians?  Indeed there are.  Real-life mathematicians people the pages of these two novels:  Beyond the Limit: the Dream of Sofya Kovalevskaya by Joan Spicci, about the girl who became the first Russian woman to earn a doctoral degree in mathematics during the unsettled times of the 1860’s and 70’s, and The Indian Clerk by David Leavitt about Srinivasa Ramanujan, an unschooled mathematical genius who came to the attention of a well-respected British mathematician, G. H. Hardy, in 1913, and all the strange and tragic things that happened later.  And then there’s A Madman Dreams of Turing Machines by Janna Levin, a novel that re-imagines the lives of Alan Turing, who cracked the Enigma Code in WWII, and Kurt Godel, the famous logician.  Both of these men were “besotted with mathematics,” hoping to find truth in numbers, but instead living lives of secrets and delusions.

Maybe mathematicians are all madmen.  Certainly that’s a conclusion it would be easy to reach in The Wild Numbers by Philibert Schogt, in which Isaac Swift thinks he has solved “Beauregard’s wild number problem,” a belief that leads to intrigue and violence.  Another novel full of intrigue and mystery is The 351 Books of Irma Arcuri by David Bajo, in which mathematician Philip Masryk searches through his lover’s library for clues to her disappearance.  And finally, there’s The Last Theorem by Arthur C. Clarke and Frederik Pohl.  In this novel, a young Sri Lankan writes a new, elegant proof of Fermat’s famous (real!) theorem, which brings him to the attention of a shadowy, secretive UN organization, Pax per Fidem.  Intrigue!  And space aliens!  Can a mathematician save Earth from destruction?  Read, and find out!   ~   Beth d.