Who's Counting: Math in Narratives

May 1, 2005 -- -- At first glance (and maybe the second one too), narrative and mathematics don't seem to be natural companions, but recent years have made the juxtaposition much more common.

There have, for example, been many biographies about mathematicians ranging from Sylvia Nasar's "A Beautiful Mind" about John Nash to Rebecca Goldstein's just released "Incompleteness: The Proof and Paradox of Kurt Godel."

There have been many narrative accounts of mathematical ideas and theorems as well, ranging from Simon Singh's Fermat's "Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World's Greatest Mathematical Problem" to a spate of tomes on the Riemann Hypothesis by Karl Sabbagh, John Derbyshire, Marcus Du Sautoy and others.

There have also been dramatic renditions of mathematical ideas or mathematicians in works such as David Auburn's "Proof," Tom Stoppard's "Arcadia," John Barrow's "Infinities" and Apostolos Doxiadis' "Uncle Petros and the Goldbach Conjecture."

There's even a new television murder mystery show, "Numb3rs," featuring a crime-solving mathematician. (This latter reminds me of a joke that generally appeals only to mathematicians: How do you spell Henry? Answer. Hen3ry. The 3 is silent.) And these just scratch the surface. Countless -- well, not really, you can count them -- narrative renderings of things mathematical have poured forth in recent years.

Arguably even books such as "The Da Vinci Code," which are about neither mathematics nor mathematicians, derive some of their appeal from mathematical elements within them. So, I think, does much humor but that's another story.

With all this ferment it's perhaps not surprising that the phenomenon has attracted academic interest. Scheduled for July 12-15 in Mykonos, Greece, an international conference on Mathematics and Narrative will explore the interplay between these two seemingly disparate ways of viewing the world. There will be mathematicians (among them, myself), computer scientists, writers and none-of-the-aboves who will examine the math-narrative nexus from many different perspectives.