Authors of all genres seem to share one view in common: a contempt for genre.
Genre, they say, is a marketing gimmick. A needless box. The closing down of a conversation. Genre pre-chews your food, telling you how to read a text: what tropes, conventions, and emotions to prepare for. Ridiculous, the authors say. “There is only one genre in fiction,” writes Matt Haig, “and that genre is called book.”
Fair enough. But you know what desperately needs this treatment?
Mathematics.
Too many readers don’t know the tropes or conventions. Thus, they experience no emotions when reading mathematics. If every novel is unique, then every equation is the same: a sprawl of inscrutable symbols. Whereas genre impoverishes the reading of novels, it would (I argue) enrich the reading of equations.
In that spirit, allow me to tour the corner bookshop of equations…
Many definitions in mathematics operate as a kind of science fiction. They are first encounters with unknown beings. All the ensuing equations, spelling out strange and marvelous consequences, are simply playing out the logic of that stunning first contact.
A conditional equation is a mystery.
A good mystery? An interesting mystery? A mystery with a single culprit?
No, not necessarily… but a mystery nevertheless.
Much mathematics consists of the following activities, familiar to any mystery fan:
- Laying out mysteries
- Solving mysteries
- Explaining why certain mysteries cannot be solved
- Explaining why certain mysteries can be “solved,” but not by us, because the solutions are impossible to state within the bounds of our familiar language
Okay, maybe math is a weird form of literature. But that’s why we love it.
Not all equations are true.
(Especially not all equations written by students.)
In fact, some equations — if taken as general statements, and not as specific mysteries that are true only for a few values — are so world-shattering, so apocalyptic, that I shudder to read them.
The most romantic equations bring together characters in happy unions.
This is perhaps the most famous and heart-warming such romance, the When Harry Met Sally of the mathematical realm.
Some of the greatest equations in math are not about meeting a new character.
They’re about the moment that an old character becomes someone new altogether.
The moment that an old concept emerges transformed from a cocoon, spreads its wings, and takes off into the bright blue yonder.
Exponentiation is born as repeated multiplication. But once you realize that it obeys this rule — that it is, in a sense, the operation that turns products into sums — then life is never the same again. Thus begin new adventures of which the old exponential could scarcely have dreamt.
Okay, Hamlet maybe doesn’t make for great mathematics. What can I say; not all literature makes sense in translation.
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