MATHEMATICAL FICTION:

a list compiled by Alex Kasman (College of Charleston)

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A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East (2003)
László Krasznahorkai
(click on names to see more mathematical fiction by the same author)
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Most of this novel is about the grandson of Prince Genji wandering around a monastery in Kyoto trying to find the secret garden. It is written in the author's usual style, with run-on sentences and a pervading sense of confusion. Nobody seems to be around, and neither the main character nor the reader really understands why. Many critics found the book deep and serene, and it is cited as one of the masterworks for which Krasznahorkai was awarded the 2025 Nobel Prize in Literature. (This sort of literature is not exactly to my personal taste, but I have given it a literary ranking of 5 out of 5 to acknowledge the acclaim it has received from others.)

The mathematical content is all contained in Chapter XXXVIII which describes a bizarre math text that the grandson of Prince Genji finds laying on the bed in the abbot's room. The book, by Sir William Stanley Gilmore of the Gilmore-Grothendieck-Nelson Institut des Haute Etudes in Bures-Sur-Yvette, claims to constitute a disproof of the mathematical concept of infinity. (FYI The IHES is real, and the mathematician Alexander Grothendieck was associated with it, but Gilmore himself and the idea of including "Gilmore-Grothendieck-Nelson" in the institute's name are both part of the fiction here.)

We are told that the foreword to Gilmore's book speaks so flatteringly of Gilmore that it is clear he wrote it himself. Moreover, it uses crude expletives that one would not expect to find in the preface to a serious math book.

The content of Gilmore's monograph itself consists mostly of a long list of natural numbers, followed by a characterization of what it claims is the largest number:

(quoted from A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East)

The book, consisting of more than two thousand pages, was printed on so-called parchment paper, and was comprised almost entirely of Arabic numerals. The title page contained the author's name, the title of the work, and the year of publication, then a blank page followed, on the overleaf of which there was the colophon, printed in tiny letters, then there followed, on the following page, without any textual explanation of any sort, a succession of Arabic numerals from zero to one, then two, then three, then four, five, six, seven, eight, and nine, up until the number ten, and onward, the numbers came one after the other, densely and typeset in nearly microscopic size, quickly followed by the hundreds, thousands, ten thousands, and hundred thousands, but all of them, each individual number, according to the linear, strictly progressing order of the given series, then the millions, the billions, and the trillions, not omitting, leaving out, or skipping over -- with dreadful precision and thoroughness -- a single number,...

... in the very last line we reach the final result, which will be ALL THE NUMBER NINES that can be written down, with the smallest possible numerals, on all inscribable objects as can be found in the world and the universe; this, the author concludes his own revolutionary train of thought, is the LAST NUMBER, the largest number, and no number greater than this can exist in reality, because reality is finite, he informs the exhausted and shocked reader, we are able to construct infinity exclusively by virtue of ingenious abstractions and the nature of human consciousness, as the true immenseness of the quantity of the finite exceeds the imaginary possibilities and the grasp of this consciousness to such a degree, that, unable to follow this really existing great quantity, inconceivable on its behalf, it perceives that which, naturally, appears to be nearly the same as infinite as infinite, it is not, however, identical with the reality of the infinite, not at all, because only the so-called theoretical mathematicians—nefarious, evil to their core, spellbound in a game and not in any examination of reality—dared, with their abstract mechanisms, to make this claim, for example by employing such constructions that state, let's say, that there will always exist a number greater than the largest number, therefore according to them, this already forms indisputable proof of the infinite, the so-called refutation of his life's work, namely, of the thesis of this book, only that this is no refutation, writes the resident of the Gilmore-Grothendieck-Nelson Institute, this is merely a construction, we cannot, in reality, discover its validity, we may not prove it for the simple reason that reality does not recognize the infinite number, because it does not know the infinite quantity: as far as reality is concerned, the infinite quantity does not exist...

The end of Gilmore's book is a diatribe against mathematicians who have utilized the concept of infinity:

(quoted from A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East)

At the very end of his book, there is a brief Note, in which the author, with coarse words of varying strength and of varying registers, but in every case accompanied by extraordinarily obscene expressions, curses the following mathematicians, in the first place a certain Georg Cantor, then Bolzano, Dedekind, Frege, Zermelo, Frankel, Brouwer, Whitehead, and Paul Cohen all get what's coming to them, so that then the author, with the harshest of words, tears into a certain David Hilbert, where in nearly every sentence there figures such expressions as "*** you," "your mother," "****," and other similarly crude expressions, in the end returning again and again to one single name, but returning to it with indefatigable, inexhaustible rage, the name of Georg Cantor, the author's wrath boiling over if he so much as mentions Cantor's name, it is perceptible between the lines as the blood rushes to his head, because Cantor, he writes, is the one who—despite the precautions of a certain sober-minded Kronecker -- sealed the intellectual world of the West, the history of the scandalously limited scientific thinking of the West -- he, this unfortunate Platonist, this pitiful God-believer, this deranged person suffering from serious depression, managed to convince this limited Western world that the infinite exists, that the infinite is itself a part of reality, he, this Georg Cantor, who does not even deserve -- as he writes in the last line of his book -- for his name to be forgotten.

According to this review by David Auerbach, Krasznahorkai mentions infinity (and displays some skepticism about the concept) in most of his writings. See also the separate entry in this database for Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming.

The novel's original title in Hungarian is "Eszakrol hegy, delrol to, nyugatrol hegyek, keletrol folyo" (with accents and diacritics that my system unfortunately will not allow me to reproduce here). The quotes above are from the 2022 English translation by Ottilie Mulzet.

More information about this work can be found at www.amazon.com.
(Note: This is just one work of mathematical fiction from the list. To see the entire list or to see more works of mathematical fiction, return to the Homepage.)

Works Similar to A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East
According to my `secret formula', the following works of mathematical fiction are similar to this one:
  1. Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming [Báró Wenckheim hazatér] by László Krasznahorkai
  2. Diary of a Bad Year by John Maxwell Coetzee
  3. Mulligan Stew by Gilbert Sorrentino
  4. De Impossibilitate Vitae and Prognoscendi by Stanislaw Lem
  5. Cantor's War by Christopher Anvil
  6. Going Out by Scarlett Thomas
  7. Schild's Ladder by Greg Egan
  8. The Housekeeper and the Professor (Hakase No Aishita Sushiki) by Yoko Ogawa
  9. The Wild Numbers by Philibert Schogt
  10. Psychohistorical Crisis by Donald Kingsbury
Ratings for A Mountain to the North, a Lake to the South, Paths to the West, a River to the East:
RatingsHave you seen/read this work of mathematical fiction? Then click here to enter your own votes on its mathematical content and literary quality or send me comments to post on this Webpage.
Mathematical Content:
2/5 (1 votes)
..
Literary Quality:
5/5 (1 votes)
.

Categories:
Genre
Motif
TopicInfinity, Fictional Mathematics,
MediumNovels,

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Exciting News: The 1,600th entry was recently added to this database of mathematical fiction! Also, for those of you interested in non-fictional math books let me (shamelessly) plug the recent release of the second edition of my soliton theory textbook.

(Maintained by Alex Kasman, College of Charleston)