| Contributed by
Vijay Fafat
A detective, one Mr. Pearson, catches the crooks using a little geometry. As the story tagline says,
| (quoted from Mathematical Doom)
“Crooks try to subtract a copper from life - and find he had added up a Mathematical Doom for them!”
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Pearson was kidnapped by some gang members and was being taken in a car to be executed. He had the presence of mind to keep a count of a particular sound in the car and once he escaped, it was a relatively easy way for the police to catch the gangsters. As the spoiler ahead recounts:
| (quoted from Mathematical Doom)
Sure,” said Pearson. “ I got the idea as soon as I heard it. Count the number of times that loose chain slapped the fender between each turn, and you’d have the distance the car went with me blindfolded in it. So I did. “We went fifteen hundred slaps north from the electric bread sign, eight hundred and twelve to the left, sixteen hundred and fifty-four to the right. But on the last turn I stopped us at fourteen hundred before we gave our hand away. That left two hundred and fiftyfour more turns of the wheel. Thirty-two inches wheel-diameter, times 3.141, or about three and a seventh. is the number of inches the car travels with each wheel turn. Multiply ’em out and you get four tenths of a mile —which was the distance ahead of us to Golden’s hang-out.”
Ames shook his head.
“God help the crooks in this burg if you ever get past mathematics and start using algebra on them!” he said.
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Normally, I would not consider a work of fiction including simple arithmetic to be a candidate for this database of mathematical fiction. However, I was convinced to create an entry for it by Vijay Fafat, a frequent contributor to this site.
Mathematical Doom was originally published in the June 1, 1936 issue of The Shadow Magazine, pages 102--110.
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