The guard tells the proof to his daughter, a mathematician named Paveen Jinnah, who is able to publish it and win a Fields Medal. She then has sex with a male Fields Medalist, a knot theorist. Much of the rest of the story concerns an anti-Islamic suicide bombing carried out by the son and the investigation that it sparks.

The same author wrote another story with a very similar setup in the first sentence. (See The Hangman's Brother.) It is interesting to compare and contrast the two. For instance, both mention the second woman to receive a Fields Medal, but in one it is the daughter of the Iranian guard and in the other it was a Russian woman who sleeps with the brother of the Iranian guard.

The author is an emeritus professor of psychology at Western Connecticut State University. In addition to these two stories, he also wrote Ahab’s Mercy which was published under the fiction heading in the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics.

Despite having some complaints, I did enjoy reading this story. For me, it was like an amusement park ride with lots of unexpected twists, which I suppose is appropriate considering the title and connection to knot theory! I can’t really say much more about Knots without spoilers. So, I encourage you to find a copy of this story to read for yourself before continuing. It was published in The Dalhausie Review (Volume 102 Issue 3) and free copies seem to be available here or here.

SPOILER ALERT! To enjoy the story for yourself, please read it before continuing. SPOILER ALERT!

• Of course, this story is a work of fiction, and the occurrences it describes are presumably intentionally improbable, but I worry about the author’s decision to write that a female mathematician won the Fields Medal based on work that was secretly done by a male mathematician. This would seem to both build on and reinforce unfair and harmful stereotypes. (These concerns are only partially addressed by the alternative version of this story in which the mathematician receiving the proof from his brother is male.)
• In the end, it turns out that the Fields Medalist in knot theory who was the father of Jinnah’s son was also a serial murderer and rapist who gained sadistic pleasure from tying his victims in exotic knots. Again, I worry that this may reinforce negative stereotypes of mathematicians as evil and monstrous. (Once again, this concern is not fully addressed by the mention of a similarly evil biologist in the same story.)
• It seems quite strange to me that after winning a Fields Medal for a result in number theory, Jinnah ends up working as a mathematician at the Large Hadron Collider. Those involve very different kinds of math and I am not aware of any actual mathematicians working at such opposing extremes of the pure/applied dichotomy. (David Mumford, who won a Fields Medal for work in algebraic geometry and then moved into the field of computer vision, is the closest I can think of.) Again, many of the events described in this story are very, very unlikely. Perhaps this is intended to be another one of those.