I was contacted by Princeton University Press to comment on the comic book/graphic novel Prime Suspects (The Anatomy of Integers and Permutations), by Andrew Granville (mathematician) & Jennifer Granville (writer), and Robert Lewis (illustrator), and they sent me the book. I am not a big fan of graphic book entries to mathematical even less than to statistical notions (Logicomix being sort of an exception for its historical perspective and nice drawing style) and this book did nothing to change my perspective on the subject. First, the plot is mostly a pretense at introducing number theory concepts and I found it hard to follow it for more than a few pages. The [noires maths] story is that “forensic maths” detectives are looking at murders that connects prime integers and permutations… The ensuing NCIS-style investigation gives the authors the opportunity to skim through the whole cenacle of number theorists, plus a few other mathematicians, who appear as more or less central characters. Even illusory ones like Nicolas Bourbaki. And Alexander Grothendieck as a recluse and clairvoyant hermit [who in real life did not live in a Pyrénées cavern!!!]. Second, I [and nor is Andrew who was in my office when the book arrived!] am not particularly enjoying the drawings or the page composition or the colours of this graphic novel, especially because I find the characters drawn quite inconsistently from one strip to the next, to the point of being unrecognisable, and, if it matters, hardly resembling their real-world equivalent (as seen in the portrait of Persi Diaconis). To be completely honest, the drawings look both ugly and very conventional to me, in that I do not find much of a characteristic style to them. To contemplate what Jacques Tardi, François Schuiten or José Muñoz could have achieved with the same material… (Or even Edmond Baudoin, who drew the strips for the graphic novels he coauthored with Cédric Villani.) The graphic novel (with a prime 181 pages) is postfaced with explanations about the true persons behind the characters, from Carl Friedriech Gauß to Terry Tao, and of course on the mathematical theory for the analogies between the prime and cycles frequencies behind the story. Which I find much more interesting and readable, obviously. (With a surprise appearance of Kingman’s coalescent!) But also somewhat self-defeating in that so much has to be explained on the side for the links between the story, the characters and the background heavily loaded with “obscure references” to make sense to more than a few mathematician readers. Who may prove to be the core readership of this book.
There is also a bit of a Gödel-Escher-and-Bach flavour in that a piece by Robert Schneider called Réverie in Prime Time Signature is included, while an Escher’s infinite stairway appears in one page, not far from what looks like Milano Vittorio Emmanuelle gallery (On the side, I am puzzled by the footnote on p.208 that “I should clarify that selecting a random permutation and a random prime, as described, can be done easily, quickly, and correctly”. This may be connected to the fact that the description of Bach’s algorithm provided therein is incomplete.)
[Disclaimer about potential self-plagiarism: this post or an edited version will eventually appear in my Books Review section in CHANCE. As appropriate for a book about Chance!]
Read Guerre (War) by Louis-Ferdinand Céline (with a cover by Tardi, as for the other books of his in the Folio collection), a recent recovery of a 1934 manuscript that had been stolen from his Paris apartment in 1944 when he fled to Sigamaringen along with the collaborationist Pétain government. As described (with much whining and cynicism) in D’un château l’Autre (Castle to Castle). If Voyage au Bout de la Nuit is to be considered as one of the strongest anti-war novels ever, Guerre sounds like the original, uncensored , unedited—a few words and the earlier pages are missing—, version of this book, despite being written later. A short but intense 150 pages raw fall into the mindset of a surviving WWI soldier that feels like treading a sewer but offers an in-your-face testimony on the unlimited amorality of war and men, with no heroes… As mentioned earlier, I also read Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, which is another kind of shell-shocking journey in three mindsets around the central figure of the sister fasting herself to death, whose perspective is barely heard. Raw, again, with introspection and returns to childhood trauma, impressive in many respects and so original!
Made jars and jars of green tomato jam as the tomato plants had started to rot due to the enormous volume of rain we got in September and October. Also made a pie with chestnuts and chocolate and the very last raspberries, after my attempt at chestnut butter did not prove successful. With a sprinkle of matcha to substitute for sugar. (Figs are also almost done for the season, after a massive harvest that I mostly shared with my Dauphine colleagues.)
