Math Is A Wonderful Thing

This is the first time I’ve encountered a novel entirely about math. Sure, there are novels inspired by math, but this one is entirely math from beginning until end. The authors have taken a new and quite interesting approach of conveying math to the people. They deviated from what scholars like them usually do; construct a book with hard facts and highly technical terms that make your brain bleed out and just want to close the book. Because let’s face it, you would rather read a fiction book than a non-fiction book. So, the idea of incorporating math and a novel is genius because they not only piqued the interests of the general readers but also express their message in an imaginative and understandable way.

The book is about an Indian named Ravi, a student who lost his passion for math with his grandfather’s passing when he was a boy. Through the course “Thinking about Infinity”, his professor Nico Aliprantis, and old records of his grandfather he uncovered, he regained his interest for math; in a way fulfilling his Bauji’s wish for him. The narrative of the story is pure fiction, but the mathematics is entirely true. The book encompasses infinity, set theory, Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry, and other fields such as philosophy and religion. The authors have done a wonderful job in making the mathematics easy to understand (and with visual aids) for the benefit of the readers.

What I liked best about the novel was that, for once, it did not make math boring. It was actually a page-turner and very educational. Since it’s a combination of fiction and non-fiction, I saw mathematics in a different light. For me, it’s like Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon series. You’ll get interested and learn a lot about things that you did not bother to learn about before.

The authors have made the novel for the general public to realize the beauty of mathematics, in which they believed was best done through a novel because “... it is human beings who feel beauty and it is human beings who feel the immediacy of philosophical questions. And the only way to get human beings into the picture is to tell a story.” For what counts the most, they were successful.