ABSTRACT
The relationship between math and music has long been known and analyzed. We know that a well-structured musical composition is like a well-structured mathematical formula. The mathematician and violinist James Stewart argues that mathematics, like music, is concerned with structure, “the way mathematical objects fit together and relate to each other.” 1 The same can be said of art: from classical realist paintings and sculptures to the most abstract works of Picasso, Kandinsky, Malevich, Mondrian, and Pollock, each composition follows a carefully arranged structural order with colors, shapes, patterns, and empty space consciously complementing, supplementing, and juxtaposing one another. Like music and art, literature too has a long-standing relationship with mathematics. Drawing on the relationship between math, art, and music, in his 2012 New Yorker article Alexander Nazaryan attempts to trace implicit similarities between mathematicians and fiction writers. Like mathematicians, fiction writers create patterns that follow a well-defined structural order, from the meta levels (the sequence of chapters and paragraphs) to the sublevels of sentences, words, and syllables. Nazaryan quotes Ernest Hemingway, who is said to have written in 1945 to his colleague Maxwell Perkins: “The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics.” 2 From Hemingway to J. K. Rowling, fiction writers are known to draw elaborate diagrams for their novels, structuring the organization of their stories on the basis of mathematical formulas.
