The premise of Yoko Ogawa's The Housekeeper and the Professor drew me into its pages. The magic of math kept me in its pages. Ironically, I am not a fan of numbers. I'm an English teacher. I love a good story. This is a good story. It is lined in mathematical equations above my mental capacity, but understanding an equation is different than just understanding its importance to the characters in this novel, characters that statistically should not have formed the incredible beautiful caring bond they did - but they did and through numbers prime, amiable, etc. I believed in the impossible because of the certainty of numbers. A big thanks to the math genius who explained Euler's Identity and its significance at key moment in the plot of this story...
"The significance of Euler's Identity in the book is reasonably clear: It is the Professor’s way of expressing the synthesis of the worlds that he, his sister-in-law, his housekeeper, and her son are living in. Each is included without being denied, just as each mathematical family is included without being negated or changed in the Identity. A brilliant literary as well as mathematical insight therefore."
I listened to this book on audible, but I plan to purchase a copy for future ponderings.
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