I’m a mathematician and incurable book-lover. It’s been one of the joys of my life to explore the links between mathematics and literature. The stories we tell ourselves about mathematics and mathematicians are fascinating, and especially the ways in which mathematicians are portrayed in fiction. I’m the first female Professor of Geometry at Gresham College, London, a role created in 1597. I don’t fit the mathematician stereotype of the dishevelled old man, obsessed only with numbers (well, perhaps I am slightly dishevelled), so I particularly relish books featuring mathematicians who bring more to the party than this. I hope you’ll enjoy my recommended books as much as I did!
I wrote
Once Upon a Prime: The Wondrous Connections Between Mathematics and Literature
Uncle Petros, whose story is told by his nephew, devotes his entire mathematical career to “Goldbach’s conjecture”, a deceptively simple observation that every even number from 4 upwards is the sum of two prime numbers.
It’s true for every even number we try, but nobody’s been able to prove it will always work. This book does perhaps the best job in fiction of capturing the emotional experience of abstract mathematics research. That feeling of doing battle with problems so hard they can take years to make any progress at all, problems that you could spend your whole life failing to solve.
I first read it as an aspiring teenage mathematician, and having since experienced the joys and frustrations of a research career, I love it even more now.
Uncle Petros is a family joke. An ageing recluse, he lives alone in a suburb of Athens, playing chess and tending to his garden. If you didn't know better, you'd surely think he was one of life's failures. But his young nephew suspects otherwise. For Uncle Petros, he discovers, was once a celebrated mathematician, brilliant and foolhardy enough to stake everything on solving a problem that had defied all attempts at proof for nearly three centuries - Goldbach's Conjecture.
His quest brings him into contact with some of the century's greatest mathematicians, including the Indian prodigy Ramanujan and the young…
Christopher Boone is a boy who loves mathematics. Numbers and patterns make sense to him – they don’t tell lies like people do.
When his neighbour’s dog is found dead, he decides to investigate, using pure logic like his hero Sherlock Holmes. It’s clear that Christopher is neurodiverse in some way, he’s possibly autistic, but (and I really like this about the book) no specific label is given.
This is a conscious choice by the author because there is no “typical” autistic person – as Mark Haddon says, they are as large and diverse a group as any other group in society. You could say the same thing about mathematicians!
'Mark Haddon's portrayal of an emotionally dissociated mind is a superb achievement... Wise and bleakly funny' Ian McEwan
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time is a murder mystery novel like no other. The detective, and narrator, is Christopher Boone. Christopher is fifteen and has Asperger's Syndrome. He knows a very great deal about maths and very little about human beings. He loves lists, patterns and the truth. He hates the colours yellow and brown and being touched. He has never gone further than the…
In Odenigbo, the Professor of Statistics at Nsukka University who is a main character in Adichie’s powerful novel, she gives us a mathematician who is both brilliant and flawed, both good and bad.
He is a mass of contradictions, as we all are: a fully-rounded person. Adichie’s parents were caught up in the Biafran-Nigerian civil war – the subject of this book – and her father James Nwoye Adichie was a real-life Nsukka statistician.
There’s a tell-tale gap in his research output: between 1967 and 1974 he published no papers. Call me sentimental, but when Adichie gives to Odenigbo’s lost research articles titles that might fit with her father’s work, I like to think that it’s a tribute to the work he also did not have the chance to complete.
Winner of the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction 2007, this is a heartbreaking, exquisitely written literary masterpiece
This highly anticipated novel from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is set in Nigeria during the 1960s, at the time of a vicious civil war in which a million people died and thousands were massacred in cold blood.
The three main characters in the novel are swept up in the violence during these turbulent years. One is a young boy from a poor village who is employed at a university lecturer's house. The other is a…
This play is a total delight. Read it, of course, and then if it ever comes to a theatre anywhere near you, go see it!
It’s set in 1809 and the present-ish day, and features exuberant mathematical prodigy Thomasina Coverly, who definitely isn’t meant to be Ada Lovelace, says Tom Stoppard (but maybe she is a bit).
The dialogue is like the most invigorating dinner party conversation you ever had: it’s funny, it’s clever, it references fractals, Fermat’s Last Theorem, the silly competitiveness of academia, Lord Byron, landscape gardening, and a million other things. I love it.
In a large country house in Derbyshire in April 1809 sits Lady Thomasina Coverly, aged thirteen, and her tutor, Septimus Hodge. Through the window may be seen some of the '500 acres inclusive of lake' where Capability Brown's idealized landscape is about to give way to the 'picturesque' Gothic style: 'everything but vampires', as the garden historian Hannah Jarvis remarks to Bernard Nightingale when they stand in the same room 180 years later.
Bernard has arrived to uncover the scandal which is said to have taken place when Lord Byron stayed at Sidley Park.
Too Much Happiness, the title story in a 2009 collection by Alice Munro, is a fictionalised account of the last days in the life of mathematician Sofya Kovalevskaya.
What really grabbed me was the way Munro managed to express, with wonderful economy, the way that Kovalevskaya’s acceptance as a woman mathematician in the 19th century felt conditional – she won prizes but had to fight to get a job; if she travelled for work people would allude to the daughter at home who might need her: “a jab there, a suggestion familiar to her, of faulty motherhood”.
It’s a beautiful and poignant portrayal of a complicated, brilliant woman.
These are beguiling, provocative stories about manipulative men and the women who outwit them, about destructive marriages and curdled friendships, about mothers and sons, about moments which change or haunt a life. Alice Munro's stories surprise and delight, turning lives into art, expanding our world and shedding light on the strange workings of the human heart.
We often think of mathematics and literature as polar opposites. But what if, instead, they were fundamentally linked? In her clear, insightful, laugh-out-loud funny debut, Once Upon a Prime, Professor Sarah Hart shows us the myriad connections between math and literature, and how understanding those connections can enhance our enjoyment of both.
From sonnets to fairytales to experimental French literature, Professor Hart shows how math and literature are complementary parts of the same quest, to understand human life and our place in the universe. As the first woman to hold England’s oldest mathematical chair, Professor Hart is the ideal tour guide, taking us on an unforgettable journey through the books we thought we knew, revealing new layers of beauty and wonder. As she promises, you’re going to need a bigger bookcase.
Not So Little Things by Kyle Ann Robertson unravels the meticulously crafted life of Tina, an artist engrossed in the intricate world of historically accurate miniatures. As she dutifully honors her deceased father's desire for her to follow in his artistic and historical footsteps, Tina's controlled existence is shaken by the emergence of long-buried secrets when she takes a commission to build a replica of Jake Martin’s family mansion.
Robertson navigates the delicate balance between Tina's devotion to her father's wishes and the disruptions caused by revelations from the past. The novel beautifully explores the complexity of familial expectations and…
Tina Edwards loved her childhood and creating fairy houses, a passion shared with her father, a world-renowned architect. But at nine years old, she found him dead at his desk and is haunted by this memory. Tina's mother abruptly moved away leaving Tina with feelings of abandonment and suspicion. Raised by her loving, wheelchair-bound Aunt Liddy, her father's sister, 33 year old Tina has become a miniature room artist and cherishes the control she has over her life in Northeast Georgia as she works hard to please her beloved dead father's wishes of following in his footsteps in art and…
