Sarah Hart
HarperCollins (UK, out 13 April) and Macmillan (US, out 11 April)
DID you know that cycloids, the curves traced by a point on a circle as it rolls along a straight line, appear in Moby-Dick? Or that Leo Tolstoy made extensive use of calculus in War and Peace? Or that George Eliot talked about taking “a dose of mathematics every day” and that this interest is central to her novel, Daniel Deronda?
These are just some of the stories you will come across in Once Upon a Prime: The wondrous connections between mathematics and literature. Sarah Hart, a mathematician at Birkbeck, University of London, traces mathematical references in literature going as far back as Aristophanes in 414 BC, and argues that we should see mathematics and literature as complementary parts of the same quest for an understanding of human life and our place in the world.
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Georges Perec would doubtless agree. He was a member of the France-based Oulipo group that deliberately set out to work within mathematical constraints, and his most famous work was a novel – La Disparation – written entirely without the use of the letter “e”. Of course, the question has to be asked whether such restrictions add to the quality of the literature.
I recently enjoyed Amor Towles’s A Gentleman in Moscow, in which we revisit the protagonist in his hotel at time intervals that double and then, at the halfway point, begin to halve. But I didn’t notice this pattern as I read the book and I can’t imagine many do. So was it there just for the writer’s private entertainment?
Hart quotes Perec saying that mathematical constraints helped to stimulate his creativity. This point is echoed by Towles, who says that rules – even artificial ones – can aid a writer, in much the same way that the rules relating to a sonnet can help a poet.
Hart covers a lot of ground. In one section, we get a detailed and amusing analysis of the various giants and little people that have appeared in stories over the years, from Gulliver’s Travels to The Borrowers. Most giants would have collapsed under their own weight, apparently, whereas the tiny Lilliputians Gulliver met would have been surprisingly strong.
It isn’t entirely convincing that this section covers a key link between maths and literature. Likewise, the discussion of the prominence of the numbers 3, 7 and 12 in fairy tales. But elsewhere, Hart makes a compelling case. The significance of maths to Lewis Carroll is no surprise – the author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was a renowned mathematician – but Hart shows us how deeply it was woven into his fiction.
Overall, the book isn’t overly academic. It allows itself moments of levity and is engaging, permeated with a love of good writing as well as good maths. Perhaps that is how it should be read: as a homage to both.
Tom Tierney is a writer based in Dublin, Ireland
