Review - Math and Mathic

[jack]

Today I got up late due to having foolishly vowed to finish something at work and having worked a 15 hour day. Don't worry, I won't work much the rest of the week. And turned on the TV for breakfast.

There was an 'edutainment' type show, with a touch of James Bond spoof. The villain had conquered a pyramid, and set up a radio transmitter that made people say the opposite of what they meant. Math sent Mathic off to stop him, with some holograms of children immune to the ray. He got to the desert, where there were a lot of camels, and only one which knew the way to the pyramid. The villain wouldn't tell him which until he answered a series of 'odd one out' questions about quadrilaterals. This bothered me because:

(1) The arbitrary nature of the plot (I know teasing the hero with riddles is traditional, but this was rank stupidity even for for a villain) seem to emphasise that maths is about learning arbitrary facts useful only for arbitrary challenges, whcih is about as opposite of how I think as possible.

(2) The whole 'opposite of what you mean' promised a lot of logic-puzzle shenanigans, ("Are the answers to 'is the beam on' and 'is this the way' different?") which never materialised.

(3) There's more to spoof than changing a letter in a name. That *can* be funny, but it's a pun, so it needs some build up.[1]

OK, I'm being too hard on it. There just needs to be more good maths fiction[2]. And I'm nostalgic -- I'm sure at school we once watched this thing about a spaceship crew who had to understand fibbonacci numbers to operate a wormhole and get home. That was more like it :)

[1] One of the best was Sluggy Freelance's spoof of Harry Potter II. They didn't just have a big snake with a slightly different name, they had something else compeltely, that managed to turn three different people to choclate through apparent coincidences, making fun of what's actually a weak point in the original, why so many people got petrified when you'd expect them to die.

[2] How often does a mathmo get sucked into a strange world? I can think of one book that made the point that he was actually, surprisingly, fairly well off as he was *used* to stipulating physics and stipulating different physics wasn't really and different. But it wasn't that good, and I can't remember the title. Otherwise? Stephenson's Cryptonomicon's Waterhouse is pretty good as a mathmo hero :) Anything else?

Comments

[mair_in_grenderich]

Well, I don't like the way he wraps up his stories, killing everyone off. But I thought the beginning and middle were ok.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

The plot seemed ok. He sometimes just seems very patronising somehow.

Eventually one of them explained what Becker had already surmised. The scrambled text was a code-a "cipher-text"-groups of numbers and letters representing encrypted words. The cryptographers' job was to study the code and extract from it the original message, or "cleartext." The NSA had called Becker because they suspected the original message was written in Mandarin Chinese; he was to translate the symbols as the cryptographers decrypted them.

Cryptonomicon went into even more detail, but somehow it seems to be suggesting that on learning you can replace letters with different ones and that's a code you should be in awe of Brown. Maybe it's just me.

And I was bothered by the girl in Da Vinci Code -- if my grandfather had KILLED someone I'd give him at least one sentence to explain if there was a reason, and she never spoke to him again because he had sex. DUH! He's your grandfather, he logically must have had sex. And if that's SUCH a big deal to you, then why does the idea that someone built a religion round it make it BETTER?

[mair_in_grenderich]

I didn't like the da vinci code much, too many religious bits.

prefer Michael Crichton to Dan Brown on the whole, anyway. Can't think of any mathmos in his books though.

incidentally, enigma, deception point, cryptonomicon - they all do codes. can't think of any mathmos who do anything else at all. there must be, right?

my bookshelves are full of geeks, scientists, and spies.
and many, many, women seeking love.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

There was actually, I'd forgotten. Harry... someone, in Sphere. The black dude. He was cool, but in massive asshole with a chip on his shoulder sort of way. One of the few fictional mathmos who don't fit either "complete academic unaware of the real world" or "foxy chick who never does any maths but is *supposed* to be fancied for her brain."

You're right about codes. I guess it's because it's the most relevent bit of maths for ages.

Or I suppose you could count Newton in Stephenson's Baroque Cycle, which I suspect is widely innacurate, and portrayed as almost pathetic in some ways, but I found sympathetic .

[mair_in_grenderich]

ah, was he a mathmo? I should read slower ;-)

I've not read that Stephenson (those?), should I?

on the subject of sexy intelligent chicks, have you read this?

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

MMmmmm... sexy and intelligent chicks. And LOL!

I'd say the Baroque Cycle (Quicksilver, Something, and System of the World) are to Cryptonomicon what Cryptonomicon is to other crypto books. Ie. harder to read, more obscure language, less coherent plot. For me, Cryponomicon was the optimum, so if you liked that most, you might want to try them. If that wasn't your favorite book, I'd say don't bother.

[filecoreinuse.livejournal.com]

Can't think of any mathmos in his books though.

Ian Malcom in Jurassic Park?

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

True. Who was pretty cool too. But chaos theory so doesn't apply to theme parks the way he said.