In literature, mathematics is a weapon of seduction and solves crimes – 04/18/2023 – Marcelo Viana

I wrote here last week that references to mathematics in literary works are much more frequent than you might think. Let’s look at some more examples.

The French Georges Perec (1936–1982) is one of the exponents of the literary research group OuLiPo (abbreviation of Oficina de Literatura Potencial, in French), formed by writers and mathematicians who propose to liberate writing, in an apparently contradictory way, subjecting it to to different types of restrictions.

In 1978, Perec was distinguished with the Médicis prize for “A Vida Modo de Uso”, in which he describes with vertiginous detail a Parisian building and its contents. Among other originalities, the narrative moves from one room to another according to the movement of the knight on the chessboard: one step in one direction, two in the orthogonal direction. The mathematical study of horse motion was started in the West by none other than Leonhard Euler, but dates back to the 9th century in India.

At the end of the mystery novel “The Thin Man”, published in 1934 by the American Dashiel Hammet (1894–1961), detective Nick Charles and his wife, Nora, discuss the difference between theory and practice in police investigation. “When murders are committed by mathematicians, you can solve them using math,” says Nick, adding, “but in most cases, they’re not, and this one we’ve just solved certainly wasn’t.”

Mathematics is also useful in the art of seduction. At least that’s what the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821–1881) suggests in his masterpiece “Crime and Punishment”.

In the book, Dmitry Razumihin talks with Doctor Zosimov about a lady they are both interested in. “She doesn’t care if it’s you or me, as long as someone sits next to her and sighs. See, you’re good at math and working on the subject right now. Start by teaching her integral calculus! On my soul, I’m not kidding , it will be the same for her. She will look at you in awe and sigh for a year.”

Thomasina Coverly, the protagonist of the play “Arcádia”, published in 1993 by the English playwright Tom Stoppard (1937), is a precocious teenager, with knowledge and ideas about mathematics and other sciences far beyond her years.

In the first act of the play, she already questions why the jelly mixed in the pudding cannot be “unmixed”, raising delicate questions about determinism and entropy. Further on, it reveals deep knowledge of chaos theory, which we mathematicians prefer to call “system dynamics”—my area of ​​research.

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