RHETORIC AND THE MATH MELODRAMA
MATH’S CULTURAL STOCK HAS risen hard in recent years, no doubt driven by the same booming and metastatic Knowledge Economy that’s turned yesterday’s non grata nerd into today’s cyber-tycoon. Call the phenomenon “Geek Chic” or “Hip(2b)2” or whatever you wilclass="underline" abstract tech is now sexy, the mathematician a viable commercial hero — see for example the success of recent films like Good Will Hunting and π.
Or a better instance of math’s new cachet here is Amir D. Aczel’s Fermat’s Last Theorem: Unlocking the Secret of an Ancient Mathematical Problem, which made nonfiction bestseller lists in 1996 and transformed Princeton’s Andrew Wiles into a weird kind of horn-rimmed pop icon, and in the wake of which has appeared everything from Paul Hoffman’s The Man Who Loved Only Numbers and Sylvia Nasar’s A Beautiful Mind1 to David Berlinski’s Newton’s Gift and Charles Seife’s Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea.
Though fiction, Philibert Schogt’s The Wild Numbers and Apostolos Doxiadis’s Uncle Petros & Goldbach’s Conjecture both draw heavily on Aczel’s Fermat’s Last Theorem (as well as on G. H. Hardy’s A Mathematician’s Apology2). And there are other, rather striking similarities between these two novels. Both are set in the world of academic mathematics and feature characters whose specialty is number theory,3 higher math’s most purely abstract branch. Both novels revolve around their protagonists’ quests to solve famous and long-standing number-theoretic problems. And both WN and UPGC have been translated by their own authors from foreign-language originals.
The facts of these two novels’ close resemblance and near-simultaneous release here in the States, as well as the vigor with which their U.S. publishers are hyping them,4 appear to signal the inception of a whole new commercial genre — the “Math Melodrama,” as it were. This is a development that should come as no surprise, given the success of some of the other titles mentioned supra, not to mention the commercial success in recent years of other nascent tech-intensive genres (the cyberpunk of Neuromancer et seq., the Clancy-style technothriller, the plucky-young-hackers-thwarting-evil-monolithic-institutions of Sneakers, Hackers, The Matrix, etc.).
As exemplified by WN and UPGC in fiction and Fermat’s Last Theorem and A Beautiful Mind in non-, the Math Melodrama can be roughly characterized as combining the “Vocational Travelogue”5 charms of genre authors like Arthur Hailey and Michael Crichton with some of the weightier allegorical functions that other genres and their heroes often serve — the Western sheriff as emblem of Apollonian order, the Noir private eye as existential hero, the plucky young hacker as Odyssean trickster. The Math Melodrama’s own allegorical template appears to be more classically Tragic, its hero a kind of Prometheus-Icarus figure whose high-altitude genius is also hubris and Fatal Flaw.6 If this sounds a bit grandiose, well, it is; but it’s also a fair description of the way Math Melodramas characterize the project of pure math — as nothing less than the mortal quest for Divine Truth. What’s odd here is that whether a particular reader accepts this characterization or sees it as pretentious and silly will often depend less on the qualities of the Math Melodramas themselves than on certain biographical facts about the reader himself, namely how much knowledge and experience of higher math he happens to have.
This sort of oddity is, in fact, a frequent problem in reviewing or assessing “genre fiction,” which is a type of narrative it’s usually fair to call “the sort of thing someone who likes this sort of thing is apt to like." The evaluative criteria tend to be rather special for genre fiction. Instead of the basically aesthetic assay the reviewer gets to make of most literary fiction—“Is this piece of fiction good?”—criticism of genre fiction is ultimately more rhetorical—“To whom will this piece of fiction appeal?” In other words, as is the case with all but the broadest and coarsest genre fiction, the central questions about novels like WN and UPGC concern what rhetoricians call “audience”: What is the intended audience for these books? And is this audience apt to find the novels satisfying on the same terms by which it finds other Math Melodramas satisfying? And if not, are there other audiences whom these books are more likely to satisfy? And so on. One reason this is a problem for reviewers is that book reviews are usually supposed to be short, clear, and relatively simple, and rhetorical criteria tend to yield very complex, sometimes even paradoxical conclusions. In the case of The Wild Numbers and Uncle Petros & Goldbach’s Conjecture, the paradox is that the type of audience most likely to accept and appreciate these novels’ lofty, encomiastic view of pure math is also the audience most apt to be disappointed by the variously vague, reductive, or inconsistent ways the novels handle the actual mathematics they’re concerned with.
To put it in a simpler, more book review-ish way: neither of these novels is very good (one, in fact, is downright bad); but the precise ways in which they’re not very good will vary directly with how much an individual reader already knows about the extraordinary field these two books are trying to dramatize.7
Not just professional mathematicians, but just about anyone lucky enough ever to have studied higher math understands what a pity it is that most students never pursue the subject past its introductory levels and therefore know only the dry and brutal problem-solving of Calc I or Intro Stats (which is roughly analogous to halting one’s study of poetry at the level of grammar and syntax). Modern math is like a pyramid, and the broad fundament is often not fun. It is at the higher and apical levels of geometry, topology, analysis, number theory, and mathematical logic that the fun and profundity start, when the calculators and contextless formulae fall away and all that’s left are pencil & paper and what gets called “genius,” viz. the particular blend of reason and ecstatic creativity that characterizes what is best about the human mind. Those who’ve been privileged (or forced) to study it understand that the practice of higher mathematics is, in fact, an “art”8 and that it depends no less than other arts on inspiration, courage, toil, etc…. but with the added stricture that the “truths” the art of math tries to express are deductive, necessary, a priori truths, capable of both derivation and demonstration by logical proof.9