A humorous semi-autobiographical novel by this famous, French, surrealistic author.
| Contributed by
Larry D'Antonio, Ramapo College
Queneau seems to have had some training as a mathematician and was friends
with several leading French mathematicians. This book is generally
considered a satire of the Surrealist movement (of which Queneau was an
early member). But one of the main characters is a mathematics student and
has a long discussion with one of his friends about mathematics.
(Not a work of fiction, but worth mentioning: Queneau wrote a poetry work
entitled 100,000,000,000,000 Poems. It consists of 10 sonnets with the
property that any line of any sonnet may be substituted for any other,
similarly numbered, line to create a new sonnet. Hence there are 10^14
different possible poems.)
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Queneau's writing is also featured in Mathematical Magpie where there is reproduced three humorous excerpts:
- In Excercices de Style, a scene on a bus is redescribed in 99 different ways. One of the ways is mathematical (e.g. "In a rectangular parallelepiped moving along a line representing an integral solution of the second-order differential equation...").
- In Cahiers du College de Pataphysique No 1, Queneau notes that "All attempts, from earliest times to the present day, to demonstrate that 2+2=4 have failed to take into account the velocity of the wind"...and proceeds to fill that gap.
- And in "At the Edge of the Forest" he uses limits to make a talking dog disappear.
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