ABSTRACT
In the American novelist Don DeLillo’s Ratner’s Star (1976), fourteenyear-old genius Billy Twillig, who has just been awarded the Nobel Prize for mathematics, is flown out to a research center somewhere in the desert to join an international effort to decode a numerical message that has come in from the outer darkness of the cosmos. The enigmatic code, which might even contain the mathematical key to the universe itself, has so far baffled all attempts at solving it and has apparently driven the famous mathematician Endor over the edge and into the desert, where he has dug a hole for himself and spends his days meditating, eating worms, and solemnly saying mysterious things to those who visit him.
