Comment

Book review: ‘Once Upon a Prime’

Sarah Fairbairn reviews a “glorious” book by a Walthamstow maths professor

(Credit: HarperCollins)

Once Upon A Prime, the just-released exploration of maths and literature by Professor Sarah Hart, is a book that absolutely fizzes with its author’s enthusiasm. From the very first pages, it is clear this is a book for anyone who gets excited discovering new ways of looking at things. Hart claims “mathematics… is the key to an entirely different perspective on literature” and her argument – which touches on a host of well-loved and well-read titles, linking them together with a keen interest and barely containable joy – is a true revelation.

Maths, as the book explains, has only recently been deemed a science, after hundreds of years when it was considered a liberal art. Our forebears considered maths a way of distilling their view of the world in much the same way as poetry or painting; indeed Einstein once described maths as the “poetry of logical ideas”. It thus follows that authors would readily draw on mathematical concepts in their art, assuming a level of fluency in their readers that might surprise a modern-day audience. The work of Tolstoy, Eliot, Joyce, Poe and Swift all feature maths-based jokes that would have been easily recognisable in their day but fly invisibly over the heads of unsuspecting readers today.

Thankfully, Sarah Hart’s position as Professor of Geometry at Gresham College in London – notably the first woman to hold the role since its creation in 1597 – means she is more than equipped to clue the modern public in. Her experience as an educator, making complicated ideas as accessible as possible, is obvious from the deftness and clarity of her writing and the fact even simple explanations are backed up by examples and diagrams. If, like me, you are a little less fluent in quadratics than you were 20 years ago, you’ll still find yourself able to follow the theatre trees, fractal pictures and cycloids without wanting to go hide under the kitchen table.

Overall, Once Upon A Prime is a glorious example of non-fiction writing. Playful, learned and wide-ranging, it expertly draws together a vast array of sources and concepts and lays them out for the reader in a way that is both authoritative and unpretentious. Sarah Hart wears lightly the huge amount of biographical research and reading that must have gone into such a well-informed book, pulling out only the juiciest details, the most enlightening facets and the most gleeful discoveries for her reader to enjoy.


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