ALL GOOD THINGS

Emmy Noether, dismissed from her teaching position at Göttingen University by the Nazis, and Maria Mayer, a Nobel-prize-winning physicist with whom Katherine has a feminist tussle over supper. These are the women Katherine claims, tracing an intellectual heritage for herself where her own parentage draws a blank. Katherine’s encounters with them also illuminate the ways in which women are forced to box themselves into categories. She wonders whether Emmy

Noether’s choice to be unfeminine was a calculated “deficiency in one sense that let them accept her as a genius in another”.

Meanwhile, Maria Mayer’s response to Katherine’s outrage at the older woman accepting a sexist status quo is, “I could have spent my time fighting the unfairness of it all, or I could dedicate my time to science. There wasn’t time for both.”

A wry remark made early on – “I suppose I should warn you that I tell a story like a woman: looping into myself, interrupting” – is a sly reminder of the gendering of logic and maths as male, fluidity and emotionality as female.

It should be said that the narrative has very little looping in it at all – and indeed much of the joy of The Tenth Muse derives from Chung’s writing, which is unadorned but expressive, shot through with moments of sparse lyricism. Katherine is an endearing narrator, whose descriptions of maths give even the most numerically illiterate reader (me) a sense of the exhilaration found in engaging with it. The power of mathematics, she explains, lies in “the ability to see the same thing from a different perspective, the ability to see it transformed”. In the same way that true and false can overlap, and black-and-white thinking falls short, Katherine learns to defy categorisation. After all, in maths and in mystery novels, the most satisfying puzzles are usually solved by reframing the question.

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