| Irish mathematician Tom Petrie is called in as an expert to analyze a mysterious stream of particles that appears to be a message from aliens. The math never gets very deep. Petrie is supposed to be an expert on chaos theory, but here that means little more than "making sense out of a mess". (Really, chaos theory is the study of dynamical systems that are sensitive to initial conditions and transitive.) However, a brief passage at the beginning where Petrie reads through his e-mail (printing out an article on a symplectic approach to chaos and deleting a message claiming to have a proof of Goldbach's conjecture) and a page near the end about how he developed an interest in mathematics in the first place are possibly interesting to fans of mathematical fiction.
Forgetting about the math for a moment, The Lure is an SF adventure that combines viruses, aliens, the Manhattan Project and the apparent "fine tuning" of the laws of physics to support life together with a bunch of stereotypes (of mathematicians, Russians, Scandanavian women, evil government conspiracies, etc.) into an uneven but sufficiently entertaining tale.
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