It’s not often that I encounter an entertaining, provocative novel that also happens to have a strong mathematical component or even mathematicians as characters. That’s what I found in the case of PopCo, written by Scarlett Thomas.
Thomas ably weaves mathematics into her narrative, making it seem quite natural for sophisticated topics such as the Riemann hypothesis, cellular automata, prime factorization, small-world networks, and more to come up in practically everyday conversation.
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