Mathematics everywhere in literature – 02/05/2023 – Marcelo Viana

In 2002, in Rio de Janeiro, I attended an excellent production of the play “A Prova”, by the American playwright David Auburn (1969). Actress Andréa Beltrão won the Shell Prize that year for her portrayal of the protagonist, Catherine, daughter of university professor and mathematician prodigy Robert, recently deceased.

A student of Robert’s finds in the professor’s drawer the proof of a spectacular theorem about prime numbers, and Catherine is compelled to investigate who the author is and whether the proof is correct or not. In this way, she rekindles the fear of following in her father’s footsteps, both in his scientific career and in the mental illness that led to his death.

The second volume of the “Millenium” trilogy, by Steig Larsson, makes a curious meta-reference to mathematics. The protagonist, Lisbeth Salander, develops a fascination with Fermat’s Theorem after reading “Dimensions in Mathematics”, by LC Parnault, published by Harvard University in 1999.

Parnault relates that, in 1637, Pierre de Fermat wrote in the margin of a book that he had “a really wonderful proof” of the fact that the equation xⁿ+yⁿ=zⁿ has no positive integer solutions when the exponent n is greater than 2, “but the margin is too narrow to contain it”. The proof was only discovered by Englishman Andrew Wiles in 1993.

But Lisbeth is dissatisfied. Fermat couldn’t have found Wiles’s proof, because much of that math wasn’t discovered in the 17th century. Suddenly, she has a revelation: they got it wrong; Fermat’s sentence was about something else, a riddle! “No wonder mathematicians have been pulling their hair out,” he laughs.

The novel aroused enormous interest in Parnault’s book, which “presents all human knowledge attained by mankind, leading both professional and lay mathematician through the deepest mysteries of mathematics”. So much so that the publisher at Harvard University was forced to inform that, “if memory serves us, we never published such a book”.

The work of Argentine Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) is also full of mathematical references. One of my favorites is the “Library of Babel”, “composed of an indefinite, and perhaps infinite, number of hexagonal galleries with vast ventilation shafts”. In its spaces are all books, in all languages, with no two identical books. Many are mere meaningless combinations of letters. How to find, among these, the precious works that reveal the secrets of the Universe and of humanity?

But, with regard to the presence of mathematics in literature, perhaps the most surprising case is that of “Moby Dick”, by Herman Melville. It’s for next week.

PRESENT LINK: Did you like this text? Subscriber can release five free hits of any link per day. Just click the blue F below.