‘Moby Dick’ and mathematics – 05/16/2023 – Marcelo Viana

Herman Melville was born in New York in 1819. Upon the death of his father, an unsuccessful businessman, he had to leave school, aged just 13, to help support the family. In 1841 he enlisted as a seaman on a whaling ship: “It was my Yale College and my Harvard University,” he later wrote.

After several trips and a stay with the Typee tribe in Polynesia, he returned to the United States and decided to write about his experiences in the Pacific. His first books, “Typee” and “Omoo”, met the taste of the time for travel stories and were successful.

But the third, “Mardi”, was more dense and introspective and displeased fans. The same happened with subsequent books, including “Moby Dick”, his masterpiece. Melville died in 1891, forgotten and in relative poverty. Today he is considered one of the great writers of the English language and there is an academic journal, “Leviathan”, dedicated exclusively to the study of his works.

A curious feature of his writing are the references to mathematics. Sometimes they are elementary concepts, as in “Moby Dick” when Captain Ahab praises his cabin boy. “You are loyal, boy, as the circumference is to its center.” Other times, the math is sophisticated. On washing the iron pots in which meals are prepared, he comments: “It is also a place for deep mathematical meditation. It was in the left cauldron of the Pequod, with the soapstone circulating diligently around me, that I was first touched. for the remarkable fact that, in geometry, all bodies that slide along the cycloid, my soapstone, for example, will descend from any point in exactly the same time”.

Where and when did Melville, with his broken academic record, learn about the cycloid, a remarkable curve only taught in advanced courses? Why did mathematics so impress him that he sprinkled his works with mathematical ideas? Biographers disagree.

But it is likely that the answer is the same as for so many other vocations: a good teacher. We know that at age 12 he was enrolled at the Albany Academy, the top school in the state of New York, and that he won an award for being “top of his class in cryptography.” We also know that the mathematics and physics teacher in his class was Joseph Henry, a respected scientist who went on to head the reputed Smithsonian Institution.

In any case, in “Moby Dick” he made it very clear how he saw the role of mathematics. On the night when Captain Ahab, in his insanity, renounces calculations and destroys the navigational instruments, there is a great storm and the Pequod ship irreversibly loses course. Abandoning mathematics, we are left adrift.

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