The Probability of Murder

Finished October 24

The Probability of Murder by Ada Madison

This novel is the second in a series of cosy mysteries featuring mathematics professor Sophie Knowles. Sophie holds weekly parties on campus that have a scientific theme with a short presentation. One of these, on Mobius strips, is just winding up when news of a death on campus begins to filter in. Charlotte Crocker, the librarian, has been found dead in the stacks. Sophie was a friend of hers, and is shocked at the news. Sophie's boyfriend, medevac pilot Bruce Granville, is leaving for a climbing adventure up in Vermont the next morning, and so the two forego plans for the rest of the day in light of the incident. 

When Sophie makes an unexpected discovery around something Charlotte left with her, she seeks counsel first from a friend before going to the police, and then decides that she needs to follow up on the clues she has to figure out if her friend was really a friend, or a criminal. When Sophie becomes a target herself, she is even more determined to find the truth.

With interesting mathematical problems scattered throughout, this is a series with its own particular draw, and Sophie's use of deductive reasoning drawing from her mathematical background gives great reasons for her own investigation. 

I liked the main characters and found the mystery very engaging. 

Measuring the World

Finished March 20

Measuring the World by Daniel Kehlmann, translated by Carol Brown Janeway

This novel focuses on real historical figures from the late eighteenth /early nineteenth centuries, naturalist Alexander von Humboldt, and mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss. Humboldt collaborated with another scientist, Bonpland, and spent more than five years in Central and South America, gathering plant samples, examining the fauna, following rivers to find where they met, and climbing mountains including several volcanoes. Humboldt's interest in science expanded to include meteorology, magnetism, ocean currents and astronomy. 

Gauss was a mathematician and physicist, a child prodigy who preferred a quiet life delving deeper into the science that he loved, was deeply affected by the loss of his first wife. His discoveries formed the basis for the work of other scientists as well. 

The two men, Humboldt and Gauss, did meet, but this book is a fictionalized account of both their lives, their interactions and correspondence and their scientific interests and achievements. 

Kehlmann brings the men to life, with complex personalities, individual quirks, and sometimes strange behaviour. This book has touches of humour, fantasy, and emotion. Enlightening and revealing. 

X + Y

Finished December 31

X + Y: A Mathematician's Manifesto for Rethinking Gender by Eugenia Cheng

I was looking for a book to help meet a reading challenge and came across this book which got me thinking about many things in different ways. The author is a mathematician and an artist. She teaches mathematics at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. In her career, and in other aspects of her life, she has encountered sexism and racism. She has thought a lot about this and how often gender issues are substituted for behaviour issues. She outlines how our society favours more aggressive, competitive, individualistic behaviour, and about how that behaviour has come to be seen as masculine. 

She has come up with new descriptors for this issue around behaviour that take the gender out of the discussion, eliminating one red herring to change. She describes two behaviour types as ingressive and congressive, where ingressive is the current valued type of behaviour that values competition, winners, contests, and individual success. The other type of behaviour, congressive, values understanding, sharing, working together, collaboration, and societal success. She makes a great argument for this new set of descriptors and how using them and thinking of them more in the behavioural sense and not tying them to gender norms can overcome not only gender bias, but also other biases in our society that favour the status quo. 

I found myself easily understanding her descriptions of category theory mathematics (I was a math major in my first year of university) and seeing how it applies to this idea of behavioural categories. She advocates gradual change, using congressive approaches and responses to replace ingressive or passive ones, and finding a way forward that will benefit not only society as a whole, but individuals more broadly as well. 

This is a fascinating book that needs to be read by more people and have them seriously consider her suggestions. 

Let's Add Up!

Finished November 27

Let's Add Up! by Victoria Allenby, illustrated by Maggie Zeng

I always like finding good number books for children, so this is a winner. A careful look at the cover gives a clue to the theme of the book, the number 10. The book goes over various combinations of numbers that add up to 10, and also uses the same combination to introduce the idea of sorting. For example the first combination of 5 drums and 5 tambourines equals 10, but it also shows the concept of these two different things also being sorted as musical instruments, and then follows that with the introduction of them being put to use, resulting in a band. The pictures bring even more depth to this, with each drum being different from the others and each tambourine unlike the others. 

The book gives so much to explore with this in terms of sorting and adding that it can support a lot of discussion. 

I also really like the diversity of the children depicted here, showing different races and abilities among them. The drawings have movement and interest, and looking closely offer more things to talk about. At the end of the book, suggestions are given for more activities that involve classification, adding, observing, counting, and being creative. A great choice for any young reader.

No One You Know

Finished March 20

No One You Know by Michelle Richmond

This book starts with a woman meeting someone unexpectedly and then jumps back twenty years to when he first became a person she was aware of. The main character here, Ellie Enderlin, had an older sister Lila who was a math prodigy. Lila had given up her other love, riding her horse Dorothy, to focus on math. She was specifically focused on proving Goldbach's Conjecture. Both sisters are still living at home with their parents in San Francisco, and Ellie is a sophomore at college when Lila doesn't come home one night. Less than a week later, her body was found, with head damage near a hiking trail. 

The police enquiry didn't result in an arrest, and Ellie was able to confide all her feelings in a professor that she was close to, Andrew Thorpe. He showed sympathy when she asked for an incomplete in his course, and then encouraged her to talk to him about Lila. Ellie was unaware that Andrew had an agenda. But a few months later, after she'd confided quite a bit about her sister and her own life in regards to her, Andrew revealed that he was writing a book, a book about Lila. Despite Ellie requesting several times that he not do this, that he had betrayed her trust, he went ahead with the book, and in it he named who he thought had killed Lila. That man was never arrested, but his life was changed irrevocably anyway thanks to Thorpe's book. His marriage ended and he lost access to his son. He left his job and moved far away.

Lila had eventually read the book and accepted the version there, but after meeting the man Thorpe accused, she begins to question things. She meets with Thorpe and begins looking at other possibilities. This is a book about secrets, about noticing the small things, about trust and the loss of it, and about relationships in a larger way. 

Richmond is a great writer and she has a sense of the absurd that comes through in the plot here and in one quirky scene where she references one of her own earlier novels. I really enjoyed Ellie's foray into the facts of her sister's death, and how she came to know her more fully as a result. I also found Ellie's career interesting. She is a coffee taster and buyer for a small coffee company, and I enjoyed learning some of the detail of her job.

Divide Me by Zero

Finished June 29
Divide Me by Zero by Lara Vapnyar

An interesting novel. The narrator and main character, Katya Geller grew up in Russia and emigrated to the United States as a young adult with her mother and new husband. Katya's father was in the Russian navy and was killed at sea when she was very young. Her mother was very affected by this loss, and only gradually came back to herself and Katya mentally. Her mother was a mathematician and a mathematics teacher, and she wrote quite a few textbooks on the subject in Russia.
As the book opens, Katya is in the middle of a divorce, and has just realized that her mother is dying. Over the course of the book, we discover how she came to this place in her life.
When she was a schoolgirl, she fell in love with one of her friend's teachers, referred to throughout as B. He had a special relationship with her and yet emigrated to the United States with his wife and child. Katya eventually moved on and fell in love with a young man, Len. Len is a computer scientist, and although had not planned to leave Russia before marrying Katya, is easily convinced when she and her mother get accepted to immigrate.
Katya finds life in the States different than she expected, and struggles to find a job and a way forward. She and Len have two children, and her mother lives with them as well.
The chapters of the novel are interspersed with mathematical phrases and statements written by Katya's mother as part of a new textbook she is working on. Katya is both narrator and a writer herself, seemingly of the novel we are reading. Katya has strong emotions and often acts before thinking, especially in her personal life.
This is a very different novel, with elements of Russian novelistic style as well as the elements of math that repeatedly appear throughout.

The Last Train to London

Finished January 15
The Last Train to London by Meg Waite Clayton

This novel is set mostly in the Netherlands and Austria. In the Netherlands, the main character is Truus (Geertruida) Wijsmuller-Meijer, a woman who smuggled children out of Nazi Germany, and then out of other countries controlled by the Nazis, prior to and during the Second World War. She told the children that she was saving to call her Tante Truus, and although she longed for children of her own, she and her husband Joop never were blessed with them. Truus was a real life woman who did this work, and although she was taken prisoner a couple of times by the Nazis, she lived through the war and was held in high esteem and with great affection by the children she saved. While most of Truus' story is based in fact, some small liberties were taken for the purpose of the novel.
In Austria, we follow young Stephan Neuman, born into a wealthy Jewish family who made chocolates, as he turns sixteen, seventeen, and nears eighteen as his world falls apart when the Nazis take over Austria, his parents' business, and his home in Vienna. Here we also see his little brother Walter, who has a much-loved Peter Rabbit doll he takes almost everywhere with him. Stephen wants to be a writer, specifically a playwright, and his model is Austrian writer Stefan Zweig. One of Stephen's classmates is Zofie-Helene Perger, who is a mathematical prodigy and the daughter of journalists. Her father died mysteriously on a trip to Germany before the story begins, and her mother has continued the newspaper they owned even as her own life and liberty become threatened by the Nazis.
As we see Truus' mission to save children become more difficult and dangerous, we also see her determination and the special relationship she and her husband had that made her work possible. In Austria, we see how Stephen's world collapsed so quickly from one of privilege and opportunity to one where he had to struggle just to stay alive. We see his mother's determination to save her children, despite her own illness, and the trust of young Walter that things would be better. For Zofie, we see her determination to stay true to her friendship with Stephen even when their differences in religion divided them under the Nazi regime, and how she defied her grandfather, who was trying to protect her, in helping Stephen in the ways that she could.
Clayton brings these times to life, with all the emotion that the characters felt. A great read.

Hungry for Math

Finished January 31
Hungry for Math: Poems to Munch On by Kari-Lynn Winters + Lori Sherritt-Fleming + Peggy Collins

This collection of poetry for children is a great way to start them on the road to numerical/financial literacy. The poems here cover lots of areas of math: shapes, counting, measuring, and estimating  in lots of fun ways like finding things in the pictures, looking at shapes hidden in other shapes, counting coins, and logic. Of course, as the title says, there is lots of eating going on here too.
A nice list of some math terms is included at the back to help readers learn terms that may be new to them. As a lover of both math and poetry, I loved this fun book.

Intellectual Mystery

Finished December 14
The Oxford Murders by Guillermo Martinez
The narrator of this mystery is a young mathematician from Argentina who has come to study at Oxford. Shortly after his arrival he is one of the two people to discover his elderly landlady dead. There is an odd clue that was left in a note to another mathematician, who was a friend, with a cryptic symbol and the words 'the first in the series'.
As he and the older mathematics professor, Seldom, try to work out the series before it takes place, the young student also tries to look at other aspects of the case.
A knowledge of mathematics is not necessary to appreciate the nuances of this mystery, as we slowly work with the student toward the solution.

Gem of a Novel

Finished April 19
The Housekeeper and the Professor by Yoko Ogawa
This lovely little novel tells the story of a young woman who works for a housekeeping agency and gets assigned to the home of a mathematics professor. The professor was injured in a car accident and his short term memory only lasts eighty minutes. Every morning the housekeeper must introduce herself again to him. He attaches notes to his clothing with binder clips, with the notes reminding him of things that are important, from medication to his memory loss, to the identity of his housekeeper. When he discovers that she has a young son, he insists that her son come to his house after work rather than go home to an empty apartment. The relationship that develops between the three is a fascinating one. His life is driven by mathematics and he spends his days working on problems for contests and sending them in to win prizes. His first question to the housekeeper is about her shoe size, and he uses numbers to tell stories about life. The housekeeper and her son, whom the professor nicknames Root, get drawn into the world of math and into his life.
While I admit that I have always had a love for math, I also found the relationship aspect of this book wonderfully written.