What if the numbers don’t add up?

Mathematics and mystery make an appealing match in a puzzle of a novel, says Francesca Carington

CTHE TENTH MUSE by Catherine Chung 304pp, Little, Brown, £16.99, ebook £8.99

atherine Chung’s second novel begins with a domestic bombshell. It’s the mid-20th century, and the first-person narrator, maths prodigy Katherine, is abandoned by her mother; then Katherine discovers that the woman who raised her isn’t her real mother at all. It’s an epistemological sucker punch that, reasons our levelheaded heroine, has a mathematical precedent: “Mathematicians used to believe that all statements that exist within mathematics could be categorised as true or false, and that we could use those statements to construct an accurate description of the world.” That was until, she explains, a mathematician called Gödel proved this neat classification a fallacy.

The Tenth Muse is an elegantly constructed puzzle of a novel, in which two intertwined mysteries force Katherine to question constantly what is true and what is false – and whether those categories of knowledge are even adequate. The first is mathematical: ever since childhood, she’s been obsessed with cracking the Riemann hypothesis, one of the great unsolved maths problems, “which predicts a meaningful pattern hidden deep within the seemingly chaotic distribution of prime numbers”. Equally chaotic after the disorienting revelation about her parenthood is her home life, which brings us to Katherine’s second mission – unlocking the secrets of her family’s past.

But first, university. As a half-Chinese woman, Katherine always feels like an outsider, shunted aside on the basis of her race and sex. She’s the only female mathematician in her undergraduate class, battling plagiarism by her less talented male peers and constant refrains of “if you were a man…”

She’s a “skirt in a sea of pants” once more at grad school at MIT, but soon starts dating her charismatic professor Peter Hall, which only complicates her battle to be taken seriously, especially when she sets aside her own work to prove another theory with him. And just as the imbalance of power in their relationship gets harder to ignore, along comes another familial revelation – and what had seemed to be a Hidden Figuresstyle female-genius-in-a-maleworld narrative turns into a thrilling back-to-my-roots mystery. Or, as Katherine puts it: “There is the story you think you are living in, and then there is the invisible, secret, unguessed-at core of that story, around which everything else revolves.”

However, Katherine’s search for answers about her family is not at all divorced from her mathematical work. Images of locks and keys and closed doors are woven throughout the novel in relation to both. The Riemann hypothesis is “a locked door”; Katherine’s romance with Peter is framed by a maths puzzle involving two lovers and two locked chests; and it’s Katherine’s (fake) mother who gets her into maths in the first place. She learns, as a child, “that numbers underlay the mysteries of nature. That if you could unlock their secrets, you could catch a glimpse of the order within”. To Katherine – rootless, unsure of where she comes from – maths is an absolute, representing order and beauty in the midst of chaos.

Most of all, Katherine’s search for her family – which for an engaging chunk of the novel takes her to the postwar rubble of Bonn and Göttingen – is a question of belonging. As the only woman and the only mixed-race person in the room, she always feels a separateness.

She longs for “a history I could root myself to and claim – and more urgently, something or someone to claim me”.

Chung weaves into the novel the stories of famous mathematicians, like the Jewish

Social media is changing the way we engage with art, and few people better encapsulate those changes than picture researcher Stephen Ellcock. His Facebookbased “online museum”, which puts details of paintings by Old Masters alongside diagrams from obscure textbooks, medieval marginalia and photography, has 300,000 followers. His book All Good Things (September, £20) offers thoughts on his favourite images, including this illustration of sealife from German biologist Ernst Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur (1899-1904).

‘There is the story that you are living in, and then there is the invisible’