Mathematicians in Love - Hardcover

Rucker, Rudy V. B.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 076531584X ISBN 13: 9780765315847

Verlag: Tor Books, 2006

Inhaltsangabe

A riveting new science fiction novel from the writer who twice won the Philip K. Dick Award for best SF novel.

Bela and Paul, two wild young mathematicians, are friends and roommates, and in love with the same woman, who happens to be Alma, Bela's girlfriend. They fight it out by changing reality using cutting edge math, to change who gets the girl. The contemporary world they live in is not quite this one, but much like Berkeley, California, and the two graduate students are trying to finish their degrees and get jobs. It doesn't help that their unpredictable advisor Roland is a mad mathematical genius who has figured out a way to predict isolated and specific bits of the future that can cause a lot of trouble. . .and he's starting to see monsters in mirrors.

Bela and Paul start to mess around with reality, and when that happens, all heaven and hell break loose. Those monsters of Roland's were really there, but who are they? 

This novel is a romantic comedy with a whole corkscrew of SF twists.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

RUDY RUCKER lives in Los Gatos, California.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One

 
Bela, Paul, and Alma
 
My tale begins on an alternate Earth in the university town that we called Humelocke, a close match for your Berkeley. And the book will end with me here in your San Jose, California, writing up my adventures--and preparing to move on.
 
To make my story easier to read, I won't use each and every alternate place name we had on my original world. But I'll keep "Humelocke," in fond memory of that specific place and time where I first came to know wonder, madness, and love.
 
 
It was an April morning in Humelocke, and I was working on my Ph.D. thesis; that is, I was staring out my apartment window and imagining Minkowski hyperplanes buttressed by homotopy sheaves, with the whole twinkling cloud castle tethered to a trio of animated figurines shaped like, oh, a rake, a fish, and a teapot. Three morphons.
 
Say what? I'm a mathematician.
 
My thesis adviser, Roland Haut, had set me in pursuit of a fabulous mathematical unicorn called the Morphic Classification Theorem. I was up to my ears in student loan debt, and I wanted to finish very soon. Another doctoral candidate was on the hunt as well, Paul Bridge, who happened to be my roommate. Paul was making better progress.
 
As I thought of Paul, my view of mathematical paradise dissolved and I was staring at a puny tree in our apartment complex's dingy courtyard. Mathematics lent even this humble object some borrowed glory. The leaf-bud-studded branches were rocking in the fitful spring breeze and, the branches being compound pendulums, their motions were deliciously chaotic. I savored the subtle whispering of the wind. Combining the sights and sounds, I could visualize the turbulent air currents in the wind-shadow of the tree: corkscrews and vortex tubes, realtime physical graffiti far gnarlier than the sheaves and hyperplanes I kept trying to dream. Why was I trying to outthink Nature? Why not embrace the world and go surfing?
 
I glanced down at my binder full of penciled thesis notes, with little turds of eraser rubber stuck to the pages. I had a nice big sketch of my latest image: the hyperplanes like disconnected floors of a building, the sheaves like bulbous elevator shafts, and the morphon figurines off to one side like control knobs. I dug it, but Roland Haut wouldn't like it. My monthly meeting with him was in an hour. I seemed unable to produce the kind of thesis he expected. I'd lost my way in the enchanted forest and a magic pig was eating my lunch.
 
Literally. I could hear him behind me, rooting through the fridge, popping off a container's plastic lid. It made a faint B-flat note.
 
"Leave the mashed peas alone, Paul. They're mine."
 
"I'll only take half." He was dipping the peas out with two fingers that he kept pressed together and slightly curved, as if to mimic a legitimate spoon. "How much did they cost?" asked Paul. "You can add half that amount to my share of the rent."
 
"Plus a thirty-four-dollars-an-hour personal-shopper fee prorated for my twenty-seven minutes at the market plus eight-and-a-half percent sales tax, an eleven-percent convenience charge, and a per-transaction accounting charge of a dollar seventy-seven," said I.
 
"How many items did you buy on that particular shopping trip?" challenged Paul. "If you're charging for shopping time, you need to divide by the number of items you bought." He mimed a brisk division-slash in the air, keeping his spoon fingers stiff and bent, the fingers clotted with green paste, wet with spit.
 
Paul's wallet was on the counter, the wallet's edges precisely aligned with the counter's. I plucked it up and extracted a five-dollar bill. Even though Paul argued about money, he usually had some. His arguing was more for sport. My arguing, on the other hand, was more for money. I'm--call it frugal. I get that from my mother, Xiao-Xiao; she's half-Chinese, a widow, runs a tiny eatery in the South Bay. My father, Tibor, had been a Hungarian computer-chip engineer and a willful tyrant. Right before his heart attack, he'd blown all of the family's savings in Reno. Jerk. My big sister Margit and I had needed to take out big student loans to go to college.
 
"Peas all yours now," I said, pocketing Paul's five. A good deal. Although the mashed peas had been the tasty kind with the picture of sweet-pea flowers, they'd cost only $3.89, and were a week old, on the point of tasting metallic. I walked over to my desk by the window and put my worn spiral notebook into my knapsack.
 
"I get lichees," said Paul, still at the fridge. He tipped some of my jellied lichees from their tub into his mashed-pea container, using his relatively clean thumb to coax them along. Although Paul was orderly with his possessions, he was a like a wild animal when it came to food.
 
"Help yourself," I said, pulling back from being stingy. "What's mine is yours."
 
Paul drifted back to the kitchen table, his attention once again on the screen of his laptop. His hair was lank and medium length, of no particular color. He wore flesh-colored plastic glasses; he had the notion that a pinkish frame color made glasses less visible. When he was uneasy, he always adjusted his glasses, pushing the bridge higher on his nose. He had a firm, handsome mouth, although there was a slight gap between his front teeth. His short-sleeved white shirt was translucent, with his loop undershirt showing through. His neck usually had red razor rash. He was from Saint Matthews, Kentucky, and talked with a hint of a country accent. I'd heard another student say that Paul looked like a Bible salesman who rents a room in a house trailer from a retired school teacher and she catches him screwing her poodle dog. But that was going too far. Paul was a good guy. He wasn't obese; he didn't smell bad; he had a sense of humor.
 
Paul was my friend, and hip or not, he was a great person to hang out with, perhaps the most interesting person I'd met in my life. He was smart, well organized, and intellectually generous. Paul liked to hold forth to me on this work, showing me his latest pages and going over the details, but after a bit, his spaceship of thought would always lift off and leave me stranded on my own dark and lonely planet.
 
We each had our own take on how the big Morphic Classification Theorem should go: Paul's thesis was symbolic and analytic; mine was to be visual and geometric. We had radically different styles of doing math. I'd try to explain my drawings, he'd try to explain his tidy rows of symbols, but for all the communication we achieved it was like we were showing each other scratches and dings and barnacle clusters on rocks and seashells.
 
Paul had recently given a well-received math colloquium at Stanford on his preliminary results--even though I'd tried to talk him out of it, fearful as I was of being scooped. There was a big universal dynamicist at Stanford named Cal Kweskin; he and his student Maria Reyes were closing in on the Morphic Classification Theorem, too. I was kind of disorganized about attending conferences and seminars, so I hadn't actually met those two even though I'd read, or had tried to read, their papers. Paul was a lot better at networking than I was.
 
It would have been hard for me to put together a good talk on my work thus far, although I did have some nice drawings scattered through my hundred or so penciled pages. Neither Paul nor Haut fully appreciated my pictures; Haut's style of math was more like Paul's than like mine. Haut kept asking me to prove a theorem. After six month's work, I still didn't have that one solid result to hang my Ph.D. thesis upon. Although I'd found some interesting conjectures, they remained stubbornly undecidable, in limbo,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Tor Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2006
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 076531584X
• ISBN 13: 9780765315847
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 364
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: PILOT CORPORATION OF EUROPE; https://www.pilotpen.de/; ; PAE DE LA CAILLE; ALLONZIER LA CAILLE; Frankreich