1+1 = A Mystery

I first posted this on the blog five years ago to celebrate my father's 80th birthday. Sadly, we lost him to cancer this past February, but I thought it might be a nice tribute to re-post this one more time in honor of a man who taught college math for 55 years, up until a year before his death. I don't know how many thousands of students he taught during that time, but many of them have gone on to teaching positions of their own, and so Papa's legacy continues on in each and every student down the line.

This is a look at the mysteries of math, i.e., crime fiction works that have used math or mathematicians as a central theme.

It might surprise some to realize how often math and mathematicians have been used throughout the history of the genre. The father of the modern mystery, Edgar Allan Poe, brought the subject into his 1845 short story "The Purloined Letter," in which C. Auguste Dupin solves the case and engages the Prefect of Paris in a discussion of mathematics and the nature of reasoning. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who once told a reporter that Poe's Dupin "is the best detective in fiction," made Professor Moriarty, the archenemy of Sherlock Holmes, a mathematician.

Other giants of the genre followed suit, with S.S. van Dine’s Philo Vance in 1929's The Bishop Murder Case, which deals with a series of killings in the house of a senior mathematics professor where most of the victims and suspects are mathematicians. Agatha Christie in The Bird with the Broken Wing 1930), has her protagonist Mr. Satterthwaite deal with "a most brilliant mathematician" who had authored a book "totally incomprehensible to ninety-nine hundredths of humanity." Even Rex Stout’s Nero Wolf crossed paths with a mathematician in two stories, And Be a Villain (1948) and The Zero Clue (1952) where a mathematician uses operations research to solve mysteries and may be usurping Wolfe's reputation in the process, until he's promptly murdered.

When it comes to series fiction, there have been fewer takers. A few novelists have taken on the task, the most prolific being John Rhode, one of the pen names of Cecil John Charles Street (1884-1964). His protagonist Dr. Lancelot Priestley, a British mathematician and former professor who was forced to resign after an argument with university authorities, was featured in fifty books, starting with The Paddington Mystery. His writing is fairly representative of the Golden Age of detective fiction, but the writing utilizes an understated sense of humor (two of his books included murder committed respectively with a squash and hedgehog). 

Patricia McElroy (P.M.) Carlson, who taught psychology and statistics at Cornell University before deciding that mystery writing was more fun, has published books with different protagonists, but her first featured a New York professor of statistics, Maggie Ryan. Carlson penned eight works in the series, starting with Audition for Murder in 1985 and ending with Bad Blood in 1991. 

Erik Rosenthal is another intrepid author who created a mathematical hero in Dan Brodsky, who obtained his Ph.D. from the mathematics department at U.C. Berkeley in 1976, teaching part-time and working part-time as a P.I.  Rosenthal’s two books featuring Brodsky, The Calculus of Murder (1986) and Advanced Calculus of Murder (1988) include an inside look at life on the Berkeley campus in the 60s and 70s. They also feature an unlikely pet, the guinea pig Hypatia (named after the female Greek mathematician), and a romantic interest for Brodsky in the form of Eileen St. Cloud, a mathematician on the faculty at Rice University.

Desmond Cory, the pseudonym used by British mystery and thriller writer Shaun Lloyd McCarthy, is best-known for his British secret agent, Johnny Fedora and the TV and movie screenplays.  But his last-published works are a series of four novels with protagonist John Dobie, Professor of Mathematics in Cardiff, Wales (known as "Columbo with a chair in mathematics"), starting with Strange Attractor in 1991.  Although some mathematicians might take exception with Cory's claim that mathematicians are terrible cooks the series manages to bring in a blend of chaos and set theories, logic, and probability, especially in The Catalyst. (1991)

There are many other stand-alone mysteries featuring mathematics, although not as many from an academic standpoint. One of the most unusual would have to be After Math (1997) by Miriam Webster, the non de plume of Amy Babich, a Ph.D. in mathematics. Her book features the ghost of math professor Ray Bellwether who tries to solve the mystery of his own murder. Along the way he crosses paths (so to speak) with other curious mathematicians, some living, some dead.

Another contemporary, and unconventional work, is the brainchild of Jeff Adams, a 2005 short story published in "Math Horizons." It's titled "Cardano and the Case of the Cubic" and is a parody of the stereotypical early 20th century hard-boiled PI, set within the framework of 16th century mathematician Gerolamo Cardano. ("That's what had me worried. Girls with quiet elbows can't be trusted. I deduce these things. I'm a mathematician. My name's Cardano.")

And you don't have to look much farther than your TV to see how mathemathics can be used in criminal detection—the CBS drama Numb3rs, which tried to make math sexy, was one of the network's most popular shows during its five seasons from 2005-2010.