David Leavitt Does the Math

Were you interested in math before you started this book?
I'm good at math, but I didn't have a great interest in it. I completely avoided it in college. And then when I was researching the Turing book, I started to get really interested in it. Because I think higher mathematics is actually fascinating. And I think part of the reason that most people are afraid of it is because it's generally very badly taught.

For Hardy, it seemed as if proving the Riemann hypothesis was going to be his artistic legacy.
I was actually at a party here at the university, and I was talking to the man who was at that point the dean of the college of liberal arts and sciences, who was a physicist. And I said I was writing this novel, I wanted to write a novel about Hardy and Ramanujan. And he really liked the idea, and he said-he was from New Zealand so he had a wonderful accent-"The thing about mathematicians is they're different from the rest of us. They're ah-tists, they're ah-tists."

© 2007