The Parrot's Theorem
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| Author | Denis Guedj |
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| Translator | Frank Wynne |
| Country | France |
| Language | French |
| Genre(s) | Novel |
| Publisher | Weidenfeld & Nicolson |
| Released | 1998 (translation 15 June 2000) |
| Media Type | Print (Hardback & Paperback) |
| Pages | 416 p. (hardback edition) |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-297-64578-1 (hardback edition) |
The Parrot's Theorem is the French 1998 novel written by Denis Guedj. It was successfully translated into English and published in 2000.
[edit] Plot summary
The ingenious plot revolves around a curious household in Paris: Mr Ruche, an elderly bookseller, wheelchair-bound, whose employee and housemate Perrette has an interesting family of '2 + 1', lively teenage twins and young Max who is deaf. Max liberates a talking parrot at the market and Mr Ruche receives a consignment of wonderful mathematical tomes from his old friend, who has lived in Brazil for decades without any contact between the two.
The unexplained takes hold, and continues, as the household sets up its own exploration of mathematics in order to crack the code of the last messages from Mr Ruche's old friend, now apparently dead by an unknown hand. His home and his work have gone up in flames. How can these people wade through the mysteries of equations and primes and factors and irrational and amicable numbers; the discoveries of Pythagoras and Archimedes and Euclid; and the puzzlements of squaring the circle, doubling the cube and the power of zero to find the embedded meanings?
The mathematics is real mathematics, woven into an historical sequence, from source, as a series of intriguing problems, bringing their own stories with them. To extend the imaginative student The Parrot's Theorem could hardly be bettered. As a tale in its own right it is problematic enough for readers to be carried along and do what readers always have done, skip the bits that are too much for them.
[edit] Literary significance & criticism
- Imaginary numbers, A review of The Parrot's Theorem by Simon Singh.
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