| A man travels to another planet in an attemp to resolve a bizarre memory problem in this absurdist science fiction novel. As in his other works, Earls includes tidbits of computational number theory. For instance, the protagonist encounters a magic square whose row sum is 666 and he attempts to memorizes the decimal expansions of transcendental numbers such as 22π+4e considering it part of his Buddhist religion. (Presumably, this is a pun on the mathematical and spiritual meanings of the word "transcendental"!)
It may seem as if these are rather trivial bits of mathematics (not important theorems or useful new definitions). Rather, it is what the author calls "recreational" mathematics. In fact, the book says
| (quoted from Red Zen)
Math can be beautiful. But I like it better when it is campy
or cheesy. The mathematical concepts and objects a real
mathematician would think of as useless or silly are the ones I
like best. Later I will give you examples of what I mean by
campy math.
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Later examples of such campy math is finding primes in the decimal expansion of 1/89 or a square array of digits which spells out "Red Zen" when the 9's are colored differently than the other digits and is used to build a prime number. (In an appendix he promises to build such a "textual prime" to make any picture or phrase that you might want.)
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