It's a wonderful novel that invents a history for Einstein's illegitimate daughter, about whom little is known. In the novel, she's a mathematician who becomes obsessed with her father's refusal to acknowledge her and twists her mathematical talents into a vehicle for revenge.

Desanka had wanted to withdraw me from the Mehanovics' school, claiming that there was more useful work I could be doing, even if I was only seven years old, in Ferdi's rescued inheritance. I had dug my heels in, mainly because I would miss the mathematics too much. I was nearly top of the class in mathematics and it was the only time in my life I ever felt like I had done anything remotely right.

My mother's role in this was still not clear. 'My mother,' I said. 'My mother, too? Does she write down ideas?'

'No, sweetheart. Your mother just does your father's mathematics. He thinks she has too little learning to do more.'

I sat in the hay barn, floating along on square roots, vulgar fractions, and the Italian method of decimal division. When I did mathematics, I was beginning to learn, I could forget myself. Lost in the numbers, I no longer knew who I was. I forgot the time, the hours passing, forgot anything of who I had been -- all that was left was the shining thread of numbers, sometimes twisting and turning on itself, sometimes doubling and redoubling, but I could follow it along until I arrived at whatever answer was to be found. When it came to numbers, I could see. And with that sight, I was immune to the world. Immune, because I could leave it.

'How did you do that?'

'Don't you know how to square numbers near fifty? I said. "Look, you square fifty -- that's two thousand five hundred -- and subtract one hundred times the difference of your number from fifty. In this case it's only one, so you take away one hundred and get two thousand four hundred. To get the number exactly, you square the difference and add it on. One squared is still one. So it's two thousand four hundred and one.'

It took me much longer to explain it than it did to do it, but when Herr Grünbaum asked me again how I did it, I couldn't explain.

"It's how I do any long string of calculations and multiplications, I said. 'I just look.'

'You don't work it all out methodically and then arrive at an answer?'

'No. That would take too long. I generally get the answer first. I do the calculations afterwards, if I have to. First of all, I see.'

'You see?'

'Plain as day.' We went through square roots, cube roots, logarithms and the main principles of Euclidean geometry to determine exactly how far I could see, before Fraulein Freisler declared the lunch ready. It was an evil-looking carp. Herr Grünbaum smiled. 'I will get you the Principia', he said.

He turned to Fraulein Freisler. 'Is her German up to it?'

'Pretty much, said Fraulein Freisler. 'She is a hard worker?'

'She is a good mathematician.' He smiled again and patted me on the head. I did not smile back. It wasn't a compliment, it was only the truth.

'After all, once they took your stupid cosmological constant out of the equations...

He made a weak noise that I thought must be a laugh. 'Greatest blunder I've ever made.'

'Once you took that out, the equations worked fine. Almost as good as mine. I've got Mileva's gift for mathematics, you know?'

'You're lucky."

"That's a matter of opinion. But they're good equations. And there's no end to what they predict..."