| This is one of those novels that interweaves storylines in two different time periods. The contemporary one is narrated by Marie Jiang (aka Jiang Li-ling) who is a math professor in British Columbia. Although she does talk about math and her career occasionally, the main subject is the people she has lost: her father (a musician/composer who committed suicide after the protests in Tiananmen Square), her mother who died of cancer, and a young woman from China who came to live with them but disappeared. The story in the historical portion concerns the suffering of a family under the rule of Chariman Mao. One member of that family was a musical mentor to Marie's father and it was his daughter Ai-ming who came to live with Marie in Canada.
Most of the mathematical content, of course, occurs in the parts about the math professor. Here are a few examples to give you an idea of what they are like.
- This passage from near the beginning introduces Marie as a mathematician:
| (quoted from Do Not Say We Have Nothing)
In my twenties, in the difficult years after both my parents had passed away, I gave my life wholeheartedly to numbers -- observation, conjecture, logic and proof, the tools we mathematicians have not only to interpret, but simply to describe the world. For the last decade I have been a professor at Simon Fraser University in Canada. Numbers have allowed me to move between the unimaginably large and the magnificently small; to live an existence away from my parents, their affairs and unrequited dreams and, I used to think, my own.
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- A similar quote from much later in the book:
| (quoted from Do Not Say We Have Nothing)
By the time I turned twenty-five I had finished my Ph.D. and, thanks to a well-received paper I had published in Inventiones Mathematicae, I was offered teaching positions in Canada, the United States, Korea and Germany. To the surprise of my professors, i chose to stay in Vancouver. A year later, I was teaching Galois theory, calculus and number theory, as well as a seminar on the symmetry and combinatorial structure of Bach's Goldberg Variations. I had a small, but close, circle of friends. In and out of my research time, I continued to be preoccupied by Ma's death and by the statistical improbability of finding Ai-ming. My mind was full of numbers; I was not lonely.
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- It was Sparrow's daughter who introduces Marie to advanced mathematics:
| (quoted from Do Not Say We Have Nothing)
With Ai-ming, I felt grown-up and worldly, a true sophisticate. She, after all, came from Beijing, a city that, in 1991, had eleven million people. Ai-ming had explained to me the law of large numbers (LLN), and the various methods of constructing a mathematical proof, including the the "proof without words" which used only visual images. I marvelled at statements like If we know x, we also know y, because... or if p then q...
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- Even her mother's diagnosis becomes tinged with mathematics:
| (quoted from Do Not Say We Have Nothing)
I was only nineteen years old, and needed to believe she would be the one to defy the numbers. When her chemotherapy began, I had been at university, a mathematics major at last, and I could think of all sorts of statistical reasons why she should not die. I spent many hours brooding over just this problem, as if Ma's life and death were a simple question of numbers and probabilities.
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There are no mathematicians in the historical portion of the book, but occasionally mathematical terminology and metaphors are used to describe things. I interpreted that as an indication that Marie is narrating those portions as well.
This nicely-written novel certainly qualifies as "mathematical fiction". However, even though I probably pay more attention to the mathematical content than most readers of fiction, I do not find myself thinking much about the math in this book. The indelible image that I keep being drawn back to is the horrible conditions under which Sparrow finds his aunt and other inmates at a "re-education camp".
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