Math as Metaphor for Life

Two recent novels I've read  have left me pondering about the beauty of math and mathematical concepts and how they could relate to human relationships: The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa and The Solitude of Prime Numbers by Paolo Giordano.

Ogawa's book was a community-wide selection at Brookline High School, suggested by my Swat classmate and Brookline High math teacher Bruce Mallory '83. We had been dicussing the movie "Memento", where the protagonist has lost his short-term memory. Much of the movie is told in multiple flashbacks, leaving the audience to put together what is happening on screen. Similarly, one of the main characters in Ogawa's novel, a brilliant math professor, has lost his short-term memory due to a traffic accident. He can remember things for 84 minutes and then his brain resets. He walks around with hundreds of notes pinned to his clothes, reminding him of who he is, what has happened to him, and who everyone else is in his small, necessarily circumscribed world. We see the action of the novel not through his eyes but through the eyes of his new housekeeper, a single mother struggling to raise her little boy (nicknamed "Root" by the Professor). The Professor, unable to remember anything from one day to the next, greets his housekeeper every morning by asking her what her birth date is or her phone number and then creating a kind of magic trick with the numbers, relating some amazing and intricate mathematical concept revealing a depth and a beauty in the numbers she gives him. It comes down to numbers and to relationships, like in the Professor's description of amicable numbers (two different numbers so related that the sum of the factors of each is equal to the other number, e.g. 220 and 284) or twin primes (prime numbers separated by only one number, e.g. 41 and 43). This is a small, quiet novel about math, baseball, memory and relationships.

Girodano's The Solitude of Prime Numbers is a different kind of book entirely. The two protagonists have each been damaged by a childhood trauma that has left them separate and apart. The world can be cruel and unforgiving, and each has been left with scars. The connection between Mattia and Alice is tenuous and unexplained but it is clear that they are drawn to each other, recognizing in the other the pain and the separateness that defines them: "Mattia thought that he and Alice were like that, twin primes, alone and lost, close but not close enough to really touch each other." Unlike Ogawa, Giordano's prose is bold, brash, and, at times, startling. I felt like he was trying to get a rise out of me, like in his characterization of one of the evil girls who torments Alice through her teenaged years, or in the physical manifestations and repercussions of Mattia's guilt. Even so, the writing is beautiful--it left me wondering about the translator--and I'd be eager to see what Girodano comes up with next (this is his first novel).

Those of you who know me know that math ain't my strong suit. But I love finding new ways to see beauty and elegance, and I can truly appreciate how math can be a vehicle or a lens with which to see and understand beauty in all its forms, especially in human relationships.