Moby Dick and mathematics – 05/09/2023 – Marcelo Viana

As a teenager, I read almost all the classics of youth literature: “Treasure Island”, “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer”, “The Call of the Wild”, “The Hobbit”, “Gulliver’s Travels”, “The Three Musketeers “, “Robinson Crusoe, “Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea” and many others.

Of all of them, only one disappointed me: “Moby Dick”, by Herman Melville. Ishmael, sailor aboard the ship Pequod, narrates Captain Ahab’s obsessive search for the great white whale Moby Dick, which caused the loss of his leg, in a spiral of irrationality that leads to tragedy. It’s not the adventure story my teenage self expected to find.

I was not the first in this. The work that brought Melville immortality was received, at the time of publication, with reactions ranging from indifference to severe criticism. The one about which the Englishman DH Lawrence wrote –”it is a great book, a very great book, the greatest sea book ever written, it moves our soul”– earned, in the author’s lifetime, a mere US$ 556.37 in sales .

Nor was I the first, nor the last, to miss the many, often subtle, references to mathematics in the text of “Moby Dick.” By the way, this is a striking feature of Melville’s writing, without us knowing why. In “Mardi”, his third book, published in 1849, the character Babbalanja shouts: “Man, man, man! You are more difficult to understand than integral calculus!”. Later, another character, frustrated with Babbalanja’s philosophies, complains, “Enough of logic and conic sections!”

But “Mardi” was so poorly received that Melville promised his publisher that the next book would contain “neither metaphysics nor conic sections, but pies and beer!” He even fulfilled in “Redburn”, published in the same year. But two years later, with “Moby Dick,” he had forgotten that promise.

Commenting on the fact that Moby Dick’s eyes are on opposite sides of his head, unlike ours, Ishmael speculates whether this will allow the whale to deal with two different ideas or objects at the same time. “If so, then there is a wonderful thing about it, as if a man could think of proofs of two separate theorems of Euclid at the same time. And this comparison makes perfect sense.”

In another scene, a problem from classical Greek geometry –is it possible to construct a square with an area equal to that of a given circle with a ruler and compass?– helps to explain the difficulty in understanding Moby Dick’s behavior. “His brain looks like that geometric circle that is impossible to square”. The geometry problem was only solved, in the negative, in 1882, by Ferdinand von Lindemann. The whale, that one, Ahab never understood.

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