Words and numbers

Of all the subjects we may have studied in school, math and literature might have seemed to have had the least in common. Sarah Hart begs to differ in her intriguing book Once Upon a Prime (2023).

Hart is a British mathematician who also enjoys reading a good book, and she has noticed that mathematics plays a vital role in a great many notable literary works, such as Moby-Dick, Ulysses and Middlemarch.

She observes, for example, that haiku poetry is built on prime numbers: three lines including two with five syllables and one with seven syllables, for a total of 17 syllables. She describes a short book that contains 100 trillion poems, more than you could read in a lifetime. How is this possible? She tells us how.

Some notable literary works were written by mathematicians and not surprisingly are full of mathematical ideas. These writers include Lewis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland) and Edwin Abbott (Flatland). Other fiction has been written by people such as Herman Melville, George Eliot and James Joyce who were simply fascinated by mathematics.

Her analysis includes several contemporary novels, such as The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton and A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles.

The professor checks the work of all these writers and doesn't give all of them a passing grade. Jonathan Swift, for example, got much of  his math wrong in Gulliver's Travels, as did Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code. Of the latter novel she writes, "my goodness, there's a lot of mathematical nonsense in it."

She includes a section on novels about mathematicians, although she somehow ignores A Doubter's Almanac by Ethan Canin.

This good-humored book will delight many who love either math or literature. For those who love both, as Sarah Hart does, it may be a priceless joy.