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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