ONCE UPON A PRIME

A mathematician looks at fiction and poetry and discovers a great deal that excites her.

Hart opens by pointing out that Moby-Dick, Gulliver’s Travels, and Tristram Shandy all contain references to cycloids, a “beautiful mathematical curve.” Furthermore, Tolstoy writes about calculus, James Joyce about geometry. “Mathematical references in literary works,” writes Hart, “go back at least as far as Aristophanes’ The Birds, first performed in 414 BCE.” The author makes an entertaining case for the importance of math in literature, but literature lovers may or may not share her fascination. Genuine insights appear throughout along with a great deal of information that would be classified as oddball. Readers will be amused if not enlightened to learn about Georges Perec’s 1969 novel, La Disparition, in which the most common vowel, E, was absent. In the sequel, Perec used E but no other vowel. It’s unclear how many readers will share Hart’s wonder at books whose pages are scrambled or the chapters readable in any order. Much of her text is not concerned with mathematics but numerology, the popular if often mystical fascination with numbers and letters, but readers may perk up at her engrossing analysis of the significance of certain numbers in various cultures—e.g., “the nine realms of Norse mythology, the Five Pillars of Islam, and biblical references like seven deadly sins, the twelve apostles, the twelve tribes of Israel, the forty days and nights of Noah’s flood, [and] the seventh seal.” Hart detours into intriguing areas that require close attention, including fractals and cryptography. Halfway through, she returns to the classics, especially Melville, Tolstoy, Joyce, and Poe, with an entire chapter devoted to Swift and nearly as much to the only genuine mathematician among them, Lewis Carroll. Mathematics turns up here and there, but numerology continues to figure prominently, and Hart casts a critical eye on writers’ calculations and science, both of which are often incorrect.

Scattershot but often ingenious.