| Meg and Reid are an odd romantic couple. She is a professional letterer who thinks in words, especially hand-written ones with serifs and decorations. He is a mathematician on Wall Street who is good with patterns and numbers, but not with people.
Here are some details from the book, focusing (of course) on the mathematical aspects:
- The "meet cute": Meg was hired to create the program for Reid's wedding. However, after meeting with the couple, she thinks the marriage is doomed and so hides a secret message in her calligraphy. Reid, being good at patterns, notices the decorated letters spell out "mistake". The wedding ends up being cancelled, but he finds Meg to ask her how she knew.
- Since it is a common stereotype of mathematicians in fiction, it is not surprising that Reid is portrayed as being somewhat anti-social. He's also described as being rather old-fashioned, almost as if he was living in a Masterpiece Theater period piece instead of New York in the 21st century. But, Meg does also think he is very handsome.
- Reid brings up John Horton Conway as an example of someone whose serious professional work benefited from games and playfulness, something he is suggesting Meg incorporate into her project.
- When Reid mentions that he has both a master's degree and a PhD in mathematics, Meg (as the narrator) says that this is hard to believe because he appears to be not much more than 30 years old. (That's actually an odd thing to say. I would think that most people who earn a doctorate do so in their mid-20s, and so this should not be surprising.)
- To prepare for one of their dates, Meg looks up information about "quants" on the internet and finds the word "stochastic". She has no idea what that means, but feels as if it applies to Reid as a combination of the words "stoic" and "sarcastic".
- At one point, Reid explains that he's not happy at his job because his co-workers are "money people" not mathematicians. Meg tries to lighten the mood by saying "Would you say that money is the common denominator for your colleagues?" After an uncomfortable pause, Reid actually laughs at her little math joke.
- It is later revealed that Reid originally wanted to be a math teacher and then later a math professor. However, his poor people skills (and the fact that, as a prodigy, he was no older than the students he was teaching) made him a bad TA as a grad student, and that's how he ended up working as a quant instead.
- There is a bit more math later in the novel, but I can't really say much about it here that wouldn't be a spoiler. So, let me just conclude by saying that the high stakes drama near the end involves the FBI and a numerically encoded message sent from Reid to Meg.
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