A mathematician, his wife, and their baby who suffers from a skin sensitivity condition uproot their lives and move to a new city:
(quoted from The Argentine Ant)
This was an adventure, pure and simple. Or more than an adventure; an escape. We took the train and then a succession of buses, the last of which deposited us in front of Signora Mauro's rambling house in the village, and all the time the baby was well-behaved and my wife, Anina, and I stared out the jolting windows and dreamed of a long period of respite in our lives, she no longer trapped in a minimum-wage job as a temporary secretary and I free to work on solving the projective algebraic problem known as the Hodge Conjecture and thereby winning the one-million-dollar Millennium Prize, a sum that would set us up handily for some time to come. Did I have unrealistic expectations? Perhaps. But I was twenty-eight years old and terminally exhausted with the classroom and academic life, and it is a truism that mathematicians, like poets, do their best work before thirty.
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However, they had not counted on the horrific ant infestations that plague the residents of their new home town. Will the ants thwart their plans or inspire the young mathematician to come up with a proof?
Clearly inspired by a very similar story with the same title by Italo Calvino, Boyle's version was published in his collection "The Relive Box and Other Stories". (Click on Amazon link for more details.)
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