10 It’s worth noting that as so much contemporary poetry, classical music, etc. becomes ever more abstract and involute and technically complex, their own audiences get ever smaller and more specialized. With very few exceptions, the people who truly “appreciate” a piece of language-poetry or an atonal fugue are people with extensive educations in the history and theory of these arts. And this increasing exclusivity in the U.S. arts has much less to do with good old “cultural elitism” than with our era’s tendency toward greater and greater specialization — it is not at all an accident that the majority of people who read contemporary poetry are themselves contemporary poets.
11 “Math Anxiety” is now a recognized term in educational psychology, and variants of the “I’m-back-in-high-school-and-sitting-in-my-AP-Calc-final-and-I’ve-forgotten-to-study-or-it-turns-out-all-my-pencils-have-pimento-in-them-instead-of-graphite” nightmare are so common they’re almost clichés.
12 “Average reader” is kind of a synecdoche for “people who read mainly for diversion or entertainment.” These people are American genre fiction’s basic audience. It is true that Hardy’s Apology, as well as novels from Don DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow to Neal Stephenson’s Cryptonomicon have already deployed higher math in interesting and significant ways — but books like these are belle lettres, literature, for which the audience is, again, usually small and rather specialized. Genre books are mass books and are marketed accordingly.
13 The putative author of this problem, one “Anatole Millechamps de Beauregard” (b. 1791), is also fictitious, a kind of biographical hybrid of von Neumann and Galois, on whose florid life story—“Beauregard had a magnetic personality, and his appetite for wine, women and song was as great as for knowledge”; “One of Beauregard’s closest friends caught him in bed with his wife. Blind with rage, he strangled them both”—WN spends most of a chapter. The specular pun of Beauregard’s name, by the way, is not an accident: people in this novel are constantly saying stuff to each other like “Your findings lead directly into the high country of number theory. The view you offer is breathtaking.”
14 Like many of UPGC’s UPGiewsupporting characters, Ramanujan was a real number-theorist, an Indian savant discovered and mentored by Hardy. Robert Kanigal’s The Man Who Knew Infinity: A Life of the Genius Ramanujan is another of the post-Fermat math-bios now on the market.
15 The real source of this insight is Hardy, in his Apology’s famous “No mathematician should ever allow himself to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man’s game,” which UPGC’s narrator rips off without any attribution at all (p. 78: “Mathematics, you see, is a young man’s game. It is one of the few human endeavors where youth is a necessary requirement [sic] for greatness”). Actually, this FN is probably the place to point out that Doxiadis’s novel is filled with what appear to be little more than very slight rephrasings of stuff in Hardy’s Apology and/or C. P. Snow’s famous Foreword to it. Flipping through the two books at random, one might, e.g., compare UPGC’s “Anybody who claims that scientists — even the purest of the pure, the most abstract, high-flying mathematicians — are motivated exclusively by the Pursuit of Truth for the Good of Mankind, either has no idea what he’s talking about or is blatantly lying” with Hardy’s “So if a mathematician, or a chemist, or even a physiologist, were to tell me that the driving force in his work had been the desire to benefit humanity, then I should not believe him.” Or see Hardy’s “Galois died at twenty-one, Abel at twenty-seven, Ramanujan at thirty-three, Riemann at forty,” and UPGC’s “Riemann had died at thirty-nine, Niels Henrik Abel at twenty-seven and Evariste Galois at a mere tragic twenty…”; or C. P. Snow’s description of the Hardy-Littlewood team as “the most famous collaboration in the history of mathematics” vs. Doxiadis’s narrator calling it “one of the most renowned partnerships in the history of mathematics.” On UPGC pages 129–30, Doxiadis even cribs nearly word for word a deathbed exchange between Hardy and Ramanujan and tags it with the footnote “Hardy also recounts the incident in his Mathematician’s Apology without, however, acknowledging my uncle’s presence,” which is not only intrusive and irritating but wrong, since it is not in the Apology but in Snow’s Foreword to it that the scene really appears.
It’s hard to know just how indictable UPGC is for its reliance on Hardy. It doesn’t seem like outright plagiarism, because plagiarism implies sneakiness, and Doxiadis has a fully attributed Hardy-quotation right up front as the novel’s epigraph. Plus it’s true that much commercial genre fiction has a long history of liberating stuff from established literary works. For the record, though, it’s still one of the more irksome things about UPGC.
16 The work Isaac’s doing for Arkanov is on “calibrator sets” and “K-reducibility,” two made-up terms that figure prominently in the plot’s math but are never specified or explained.
17 (Here the reviewer’s assumption is that if the T.P.P. is unfamiliar or the analogy unhelpful it can just be passed over with no hard feelings on either side.)
18 Rather than ever being specific about what all the complicated reasoning and complex equations are, WN employs the metaphor of mountain-climbing to try to evoke and describe what it feels like to do higher math. Actually, “employs” is the wrong word; the book repeats, exhausts, strip-mines the metaphor, pounding it again and again—“Every step I took, no matter how small, revealed new mountain- ne the wrongtops and unexpected canyons in this magnificent and bizarre region of mathematics”; “Another part of me had rushed ahead: it stood on the mountain pass, catching its breath as it watched the sun rising over a land that no human eyes had ever yet beheld”—until it becomes first grating—“Having completed the climb, we threw down our heavy backpacks and wiped the sweat from our brows. We were now standing together on the mountain pass, marvelling [sic] at the mathematical landscape”—and finally kind of funny—“Every time, I came tumbling back into base camp, dragging an avalanche of mistaken notions down with me.”
19 (Schogt’s original Dutch prose might, of course, be a thing of wonder)
20 The Wild Numbers’ American publisher seems equally culpable for the prose here. If Four Walls Eight Windows, Inc. is going to let an only semi-bilingual Philibert Schogt translate his own Dutch, why didn’t the FWEW editor bother to tell him that “television mast” should be “aerial” or “transmitter,” that “to pout” is intransitive and “to accommodate” takes a direct object, that phrases like “Shucks” and “city slicker” and “wine, women, and song” are now not idioms but ghastly clichés, or even that — no kidding — contemporary Americans do not bow to each other in formal greeting? Where was the editor? Was there an editor? Who did they think was going to read this stuff?