03/05/2023

Folha: Viana explores mathematical references in literature.

Crédito: Freepik

Reproduction of Marcelo Viana's column in Folha de S. Paulo.

In 2002, I attended a great production of the play "The Test" by the American playwright David Auburn (1969) in Rio de Janeiro. The actress Andréa Beltrão won the Shell Award that year for her portrayal of the protagonist, Catherine, daughter of the recently deceased university professor and prodigy mathematician Robert.

A student of Robert's finds in the professor's drawer the proof of a spectacular theorem about prime numbers, and Catherine feels compelled to investigate who the author is and whether the proof is correct or not. This rekindles her fear of following in her father's footsteps, both in her scientific career and in the mental illness that led to his death.

The second volume of Steig Larsson's "Millennium" trilogy makes a curious meta-reference to mathematics. The protagonist, Lisbeth Salander, develops a fascination with Fermat's Last Theorem after reading "Dimensions in Mathematics" by L.C. Parnault, published by Harvard University in 1999.

Parnault recounts that, in 1637, Pierre de Fermat wrote in the margin of a book that he had "a truly marvelous proof" of the fact that the equation xn+yn=zn has no positive integer solutions when the exponent n is greater than 2, "but the margin is too narrow to contain it". The proof was only discovered by the Englishman Andrew Wiles in 1993.

But Lisbeth is dissatisfied. Fermat couldn't have found Wiles's proof, because much of that mathematics hadn't yet been discovered in the 17th century. Suddenly, she has a revelation: they misunderstood; Fermat's phrase was about something else, a riddle! "No wonder the mathematicians were tearing their hair out," she says, amused.

The novel sparked enormous interest in Parnault's book, which "presents all the human knowledge achieved by humanity, guiding both the professional mathematician and the layman through the deepest mysteries of mathematics." To such an extent that Harvard University Press felt compelled to state that, "if memory serves us right, we never published such a book."

The work of the Argentinian Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) is also full of mathematical references. One of my favorites is the "Library of Babel," "composed of an indefinite, and perhaps infinite, number of hexagonal galleries with vast ventilation shafts." Within its spaces are all books, in all languages, with no two books being identical. Many are nothing more than meaningless combinations of letters. How to find, among these, the precious works that reveal the secrets of the Universe and humanity?

To read the full text, visit the newspaper's website.