As if that wasn't enough, Earth also makes "first contact" with an intelligent alien species at the very same time. So, the historical geniuses that the WMC has gathered can also work on decoding the messages from space.

Anderson brings lots of different ideas together in this novel: dolphin communication, math and music as universal languages, Mersenne primes, a pattern in the decimal expansion of π, Bayesian statistics, feminism, and military coups. For me, it was all a bit too much, especially since I couldn't suspend disbelief enough to accept the idea that human violence stems from an inability to communicate. But, there are many people who seem to love this book! If you are one of them, please do write a review that I can post here.

There certainly is a lot of mathematics discussed in the book, and real mathematicians like Euclid, Ramanujan, and Lobachevsky appear as characters.

NB The end of the book, which leaves many threads untied, makes it clear that this is the first book in a planned series.