| This is an ambitious novel which attempts to be as overwhelming as Pynchon, to deconstruct what it means to be human like Vonnegut and to tie together bits of history like Forrest Gump. For a few readers, it seems to have achieved these goals, but others find that it does not quite "work".
In any case, our interest here is in the mathematical content. But, of course, with so much going on mathematics can only be a small component. The mathematician character, Anthony Burden, works on a paper about mathematics inspired by D'arcy Thompson's mathematical approach to nature, has a brief sexual encounter with Alan Turing, and ponders the use of the Fibonacci sequence to model coastlines(?), but mostly is occupied by the non-mathematical aspects of his life (fathering a child in a London alleyway during a German blitz, living on a kibbutz with his Zionist wife, working for clandestine communist organizations, etc.)
If you like Pynchon, Vonnegut and Gump, you might want to give this novel a try to see whether you like it...but the mathematics alone, (shallow and sparse) is not sufficient to justify reading it. |
