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Jordan Ellenberg Quote

My colleague Michael Harris, a distinguished number theorist at the Institut de Mathematiques de Jussieu in Paris, has a theory that three of Thomas Pynchon's major novels are governed by the three conic sections: Gravity's Rainbow is about paraboloas (all those rockets, launching, dropping!), Mason & Dixon about ellipses, and Against the Day about hyperbolas. This seems as good to me as any other organizing theory of these novels I've encountered; certainly Pynchon, a former physics major who likes to drop references to Mobius strips and the quaternions in his novels, knows very well what the conic sections are.

Jordan Ellenberg

My colleague Michael Harris, a distinguished number theorist at the Institut de Mathematiques de Jussieu in Paris, has a theory that three of Thomas Pynchon's major novels are governed by the three conic sections: Gravity's Rainbow is about paraboloas (all those rockets, launching, dropping!), Mason & Dixon about ellipses, and Against the Day about hyperbolas. This seems as good to me as any other organizing theory of these novels I've encountered; certainly Pynchon, a former physics major who likes to drop references to Mobius strips and the quaternions in his novels, knows very well what the conic sections are.

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About Jordan Ellenberg

Jordan Stuart Ellenberg (born October 30, 1971) is an American mathematician who is a professor of mathematics at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research involves arithmetic geometry. He is also an author of both fiction and non-fiction writing.