Lots of fun with a zany plot. Any story featuring cone snails is a-okay with me. ( )

Did not make it past 60 pages. Totally disappointing. ( )

Lyrical first-person prose and under-the-gun action kept me reading this interesting, if completely chaotic and dubious story about a competition between two hyper-hormonal math grad students for a woman. Guided by their testosterone (to the edge of satire and beyond) they accomplish feats of mathematical theory and practice, rock-and-roll, fame, fortune, enlightenment, and other adventures, of a magnitude on par with Baron Munchausen. The math theory was fascinating. I had difficulty overcoming one character after another presented as ethically inept and psychologically fixed in stone. The book ends with the protagonist having grown not a single beard hair. So what was the point of the big balls anyway? Maybe it's love. ( )

A decade ago, i knew a man who went by the moniker “The Professor” (Fess). we all called him that because he was our leather clad, pc geek, rivet head savant. Dustin, as his parents called him, was a real gem of a human.

fond memories of fess prior to his demise include drunken ramblings regarding “abstract mathematics”. the professor did not hold the same view on abstraction as core mathematicians. core math removes the ties to physical objects thus breaking out into pure theory and crossing standard mathematical boundaries. Fess firmly believed that standard abstraction was wrong and the ties to physicality are ultimately more important.

in the professors perspective:

couch + toilet paper (wristwatch/french fries) = lower half of a broken gi joe.

likewise (pressed flower/4th of july fireworks) * (glow worms/butter knife) / baton rouge area code = mink coat

Mathematicians in Love was like having the professor back. he would have truly enjoyed this book

Characters Paul and Bela are mathematicians, they have minimal in common. they became friends while in school, as room mates. they are very competitive and nervous about intellectual theft. both are close to being done with their final thesis work, and both are missing key concepts to complete. they also have alma.

alma approaches bela with the intent of interviewing him for a local rag e-paper. he falls for her almost instantly. when bela brings her home, so does paul. 3, 2, 1… FIGHT

strangely enough, though Alma is the key to the whole story, she is not the story in itself. This would actually be washer drop, the Gobrane paracomputer, and the morphic classification theorem.

Washer drop is Bela’s band, the band that did not exist before he destroys the washing machine while filming a live feed to rabid non-fans (intentionally vague). washer drops creation and the mayhem involved is fundamental to the plot. bela is a rockstar in a geeks body. but in this dimension (similar to our Berkley) math geeks are pretty much rockstars anyway.

The Gobrane paracomputer is a nu-technology available in this incarnation of earth. it is a simple binary computer system that is functionally more like a crystal ball and the i-ching smashed together with a hammer and them spit shined. they do not resemble a standard windows pc in our world, though some functions could be the same. its form can be a simple box or a shining membrane. it is essentially a codec, with proper usage, it can decode life itself.

and the morphic classification theorem. this is the thesis that paul and bela are working on for school. this is what causes all the trouble as a gobrane cant exist with out it. with out the theorem, there would be no washer drop or rabid now-fanbase.

as stated in the book -

“five basic morphons. Fish, dish, rake, birthday cake, teapot. They’re like the cross-cap and the torus in algebraic topology [...:]

[...:] Each morphon had a characteristic activity– the fish swam; the dish shattered; the teapot poured; the rake dragged,; and the birthday cake blazed with candles. implicit in these behaviors were five fundamental processes: rhythm, fracture, flow, aggregation, transformation. [...:]

[...:] The dish morphon goes under the birthday cake, with the teapot sitting on the cake inside the circle of candles. The fish is inside the teapot peeking out. [...:]“

ultimately, when all the pieces are together, you can program anything you would like, toss in a fractal, or perhaps some car keys and you get the root of everything.

wish you could have read this one Fess. would be a good read with wumpscut playing in the background.
( )

In a parallel universe close to our own, Bela and Paul are two doctoral students in mathamatics. The two are friends and roomates who come up with a new theory that will predict the future and eventually becomes the way to break down the barrier from one parallel universe to the other. Into this equation comes Alma, who at first is romantically linked to Bela but then dumps him for Paul.

Bela's more than a little upset and uses the new math theory to travel to parallel universes to win back Alma. Along the way, he starts a rock band, becomes a reality show star and finds out a universe with giant jellyfish ruling it.

If it all sounds a bit absurd, it probably is. But within the context of Rudy Rucker's "Mathmaticians in Love" it all makes perfect sense. This is one of those books that, were it a tv show, you'd say turn off your brain and go with it. But Rucker delivers a loopy plot that has some through provoking moments of mathmatics that don't talk down to readers and feel natural within the context of the story. If you've ever been in the world of academics, I bet there are a lot more in-jokes there that went right over my head.

That said, there was still a lot that didn't and I enjoyed the book a great deal. ( )