The 3,200-page tome begins with middle-aged mathematics professor Rucker in his study puzzling through some tedious theorems associated with the well-known NP = P problem. The real novelty, however, is explained in the introduction where the reader (browser) is told that after reading a passage, one can proceed forward linearly, backtrack to a previous passage, or move horizontally by focusing on any major word or phrase in the passage, and then be directed to a further elaboration of it....

For example, Rucker idly picks his nose while thinking about his theorems, and if the reader chooses to follow up on this, he is directed to a page (on the disk version the alternatives are listed on a menu which appears at the bottom of the monitor) where Rucker's keen interest in proboscis probing is discussed at length...

Despite such narrative twists, it is the almost sentient matrix of diversion, digression, and horizontal movement within the work which vivifies Rucker and his exploits and which most impresses the reader. Details, both big and small, on matters both critical and trivial, tumble forth from this baroque, multidimensional chronicle. To those of us in mathematics, Halberstam seems to be saying that human consciousness - like endlessly jagged coastlines, or creased and varicose mountain surfaces, or the whorls and eddies of turbulent water, or a host of other "fractured" phenomena - can best be modeled using the geometrical notion of a fractal. The definition isn't important here, but unlimited branching and complexity are characteristic of the notion as is a peculiar property of self-similarity, whereby a fractal entity (in this case, the book) has the same look or feel no matter on what scale one views it (just the main events or finer details as well).