| Contributed by
Gregory Cherlin
Seth Dickinson's Exordia (Jan 2024) takes as one of its central conceits the notion that the physical universe is an expression of mathematical reality, and has as one of its central characters a Chinese mathematician Li Aixue trying to understand the structure of an artifact appearing in Kurdistan and apparently able to amplify that process.
As such the book invokes quite a bit of mathematics and mathematical practice, as well as cosmology and the physics of black holes, alluded to only in passing in the New York Times review.
There is more in the review at The Crimson, from which the following is quoted:
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While writing “Exordia,” Dickinson spoke with experts to implement physics and mathematics into the story, where concepts such as pink noise and Kolmogorov complexity feature prominently throughout.
“I had to talk to a mathematician. I would explain concepts I was trying to get at, and he would give me a sense, and I’d be like, this sounds beautiful. I don’t really know what it means,” Dickinson said. “But there’s a degree of reality to it that even a poet — I’m not a poet, but you know, a layperson — can understand.”
-Samantha H. Chung
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He wants the prime numbers to serve somehow as a template - someone should have told him about the relation between the zeros of the zeta function and eigenvalues of random unitary matrices, as it would fit in neatly.
There's also a great deal about the politics of Kurdistan which, in spite of his disclaimers in the acknowledgements, he clearly has gone into fairly deeply.
(One notices, as one particular joke in the book falls flat, that the author has probably not heard the term "Lie group" pronounced. But generally he pulls off what he's aiming at.)
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