A calculating look at literature

Once Upon a Prime: The Wondrous Connections between Mathematics and Literature
By Sarah Hart

Mudlark (Harper Collins) UK

Pages: 304

Price: 1,454

How do you compose 100 trillion sonnets and pack them into ten pages? Here’s a clue: A sonnet is a 14-line poem, and 100 trillion is 10 to the power of 14. French poet-mathematician Raymond Queneau wrote 10 sonnets with the same exact rhyme schemes and, therefore, interchangeable lines. Pick a first line at random, a second line at random, et voila you have your 100 trillion sonnets!

Queneau was part of the Oulipo, a French collective of artists, mathematicians and writers (including luminaries such as Italo Calvino and Marcel Duchamp), whose members experimented with unusual mathematical structures. Apart from walking through playful curiosities like this, Once Upon A Prime offers a delightful look at how maths seeps naturally into literature.

Sarah Hart is the Gresham Professor of Geometry at the University of London. She is the first woman appointed to a post endowed by Sir Thomas Gresham back in 1597. She is also an eclectic reader, and one of the leading lights of a book club that rejoices in the name of “Ladies Wot Read” and sets itself “tasks” like chugging through the Booker shortlist within a week of its release.

In addition to her erudition and the analytical skills she displays, Professor Hart is a charming stylist, lacing humour with elegant poison. Her stylish prose even makes the footnotes, bibliography and endnotes a pleasure to read.

For example, she eviscerates Dan Brown in her discourse on cryptography. She describes all his books as “totally different stories each involving a beautiful young female cryptographer and an older male academic in a race against time to uncover secrets… ” and adds there should be a trigger warning for mathematicians.

The maths doesn’t require much in the way of knowledge and where required, Hart doesn’t shy away from equations, thus ignoring Stephen Hawking’s Famous Assertion (“Somebody told me every Equation I included [in A Brief History of Time] would halve the sales”). 

The only sections that may require more than secondary school knowledge are on cryptography and fractal dimensions. The explanations are crystal clear without being dumbed down. Otherwise, we deal with basic stuff like infinite series, Fibonacci sequence, geometry, calculus and probability theory – essentially secondary-level maths used cleverly in literature. Of course, intractable problems such as Fermat’s Last Theorem, the Riemann Hypothesis and the Goldbach Conjecture are mentioned since serious literary works have centered on these.

The book is divided into three sections. The first deals with the maths of poetry and other constrained forms (novels without the letter “e” for example) and with books structured around conceits such as each chapter being half the length of the prior, or a narrative chronology using Fibonacci sequences.

Indophiles will be delighted to find “Lilavati” with its poetic algebraic equations, and the syllable count of Sanskrit poetry featured, and later in the book, the Kama Sutra appears with its exhortations that women learn the art of writing ciphers. So does Japanese poetry, along with an odd Japanese game of matching perfumes, which is mathematically equivalent to poetic rhyming.

The second and third parts are inclined towards the review and analysis of prose. The author actually spends far more time dealing with literary characters more noteworthy than beautiful cryptographers.

One must mention the incisive analyses of various mathematical references in George Eliot, Edgar Allan Poe, Moby Dick, Jules Verne, Gulliver’s Travels, Rabelais, Voltaire, H G Wells, James Joyce, Jorge Luis Borges, Tom Stoppard, Kurt Vonnegut, Jurassic Park, O’Henry, Chimamanda Adichie, Mark Haddon and, of course, Lewis Carroll. Yes, that’s a very wide swathe!

Could Gulliver have eaten enough to survive in Lilliput? How large is Borge’s Library of Babel and how many books does it contain? As a pure mathematician, Professor Hart doesn’t mind dabbling in fantasy and applying the tools of logic to test for internal consistency. (Joyce was sloppy by the way and Lisbeth Salander shouldn’t have found a short proof of Fermat’s Theorem.)

There are other intriguing connections mapped. Carroll was a professional mathematician of course, (along with being a clergyman). He was also rather fond of the number 42, which Douglas Adams later immortalised. Poe (who wrote the first cryptographic thrillers) and Melville who casually sprinkled mathematical references into his books, were both gifted mathematicians. George Eliot studied maths for relaxation in-between writing her rather gloomy books (which also incorporated a fair amount of maths).    

But how did O. Henry, who wasn’t very mathematically inclined, come up with a code that foxed serious students of cryptography like the author? And, how do new mathematical ideas end up influencing the literature of the time?

Conan Doyle’s most celebrated villain obviously plays a lead role in an essay about the role of the mathematical genius in literature, as does the hero of Haddon’s classic thriller “The Curious Incident of the Dog”. In addition, the book looks at the way real-life mathematicians like Sofya Kovalevskaya and Alan Turing have been portrayed in fiction. Along the line, Hart makes a passionate argument against the stereotyping of mathematicians as young, male and weird, or as emotionless, amoral beings.

The subject being what it is, there’s lots she didn’t cover despite packing so much in the way of thought-provoking discourse into this book. I would love to know for instance, what she thinks of Thomas Pynchon, or attempts to set a chronology to the Mahabharata. This is a must-read, that leaves you waiting expectantly for the next book.