Writing in the Daily Beast, Manil Suri (who visits Albany tomorrow) discusses the creation of his "mathematically impossible" novel, The City of Devi (2013).
"In September, 2009, while on a four-week writing retreat at the Ucross Colony in Clearmont, Wyoming, I came to a startling realization. The novel, The City of Devi, that I’d started nine years ago was hopeless—I needed to abandon it. No matter how I proceeded, I would not be able to tie up its myriad strands. I even had a mathematical proof of this fact!"
More: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/03/15/a-mathematically-impossible-novel-manil-suri-explains-the-city-of-devi.html
Showing posts with label mathematics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label mathematics. Show all posts
Thursday, April 18, 2013
Suri discusses his "mathematically impossible" novel
Wednesday, April 17, 2013
The Mathematics of Writing a Novel
Bestselling novelist Manil Suri will deliver a powerpoint presentation about the mathematical thinking behind his new novel, The City of Devi (2013), Friday, 8PM, UAlbany Campus Center.
From a Mumbai-based reviewer:
"The highlight of the programme was Suri’s power point presentation (ppt) on his novel. It was definitely the most entertaining ppt I’ve ever sat through in my life, besides being the first one by an author on his novel."
"Suri had included sound effects, cut-outs of faces to represent his characters, and used visual elements such as a maze and a pomegranate to illustrate the various aspects of his novel. The most fascinating dimension of his writing process was the mingling of the literary and the mathematical."
"He had actually plotted the various narrative arcs, only to end up with ‘mathematical proof’ that The City of Devi could not be written. Just as he was ready to give up, his agent/editor wanted to take a look at whatever he’d written till then. He decided to polish the draft one last time before sending it to her. And that’s when he found a way to approach his material afresh, and eventually managed to ‘balance’ the fictional equation."
Read more in DNA India: http://www.dnaindia.com/analysis/1792748/report-third-degree-manil-suri-and-the-mystery-of-the-closed-door-book-launch
More on Suri's visit: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/suri_manil13.html
Monday, April 15, 2013
A Novelist and a Mathematician
Manil Suri, mathematician and novelist who visits Albany this Friday, is interviewed in the Times Union.
Q: When did you start to write? And did your math colleagues think you were crazy?
A: It began as a hobby, once I started teaching in 1983. I looked around me at all my colleagues busy doing math and nothing else, and decided I needed another dimension in my life. So I started writing — purely as a hobby — maybe a story or so every year. I kept it a secret. I wanted to be taken seriously as a mathematician, get tenure. I even drove all the way to Washington, D.C., to attend writing groups so nobody would know what I was doing.
Read more of Elizabeth Floyd Mair's interview here: http://www.timesunion.com/default/article/Math-figures-into-The-City-of-Devi-4427739.php
Read more about Suri's visit: http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/archives/suri_manil13.html
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
"Global Warming's Terrifying New Math"
From this week's Rolling Stone:
"If the pictures of those towering wildfires in Colorado haven't convinced you, or the size of your AC bill this summer, here are some hard numbers about climate change: June broke or tied 3,215 high-temperature records across the United States. That followed the warmest May on record for the Northern Hemisphere – the 327th consecutive month in which the temperature of the entire globe exceeded the 20th-century average, the odds of which occurring by simple chance were 3.7 x 10-99, a number considerably larger than the number of stars in the universe."
More. Read More......
Tuesday, February 7, 2012
Brilliant? Yes. Crazy? Yes.
Masha Gessen, who visits from Moscow on 3/8, answers questions on the Amazon website about her 2009 biography of Grigori Perelman, the eccentric Russian genius who solved the Poincare Conjecture, perhaps the most important mathematical achievement of the last century.
Q: So he is as crazy as they say?
A: I think crazy generally means that a person has an internally consistent view of the world that is entirely different from the view most people consider normal. I think this is true of Perelman. The interesting thing, of course, was to figure out what this internally consistent view of the world was.
Q: And did you manage to figure it out?
A: I think so. I concluded that this view, and the rigidity with which he holds to it, is actually directly related to the reason he was able to solve the hardest mathematical problem ever solved. He has a mind that is capable of taking in more information, and embracing more-complex systems, than any mind that has come before. His mind is like a universal math compactor. He grasps hugely complex problems and reduces them to their solvable essence. The problem is, he expects the world of humans to be similarly subject to reduction. He expects the world to function in accordance with a set of strictly laid out rules, and he absolutely cannot take in anything that does not conform to those rules. The world of humans is unruly, though, so Perelman has had to cut off successive chunks of it until all that was left was the apartment he shares with his mother.
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