Shylock is My Name – Howard Jacobson

The setting for this modern day retelling of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice is the money belt south of Manchester around Alderley Edge. Here live, in conspicuous affluence, the main protagonists: Strulovitch, a well-heeled Jew; Plurabelle, a wealthy heiress with a celebrity lifestyle; and D’Anton, friend and factotum to Plurabelle and implacable enemy to Strulovitch, based purely on a disagreement over the latter’s planned development of a local gallery to exhibit Jewish art.

Plurabelle and D’Anton are casually anti-Semitic; Strulovitch while not religiously devout is culturally mired in his faith, content to field prejudice and return it with interest. Not anti-Semitic (despite his Nazi salute style goal celebration) is Plurabelle’s and D’Anton’s friend Gratan, a big footballing fish in the small pool that is Stockport County. In fact he has a hankering for Jewish-looking girls, currently centred on Beatrice, Strulovitch’s sixteen (but going on twenty-five) year old daughter.

The scene set, enter Shylock.

Strulovitch meets him in the cemetery and, unfazed by the presence of a fictional character from a four hundred year old play, invites him back to the house for a meal and to stay a few days. For Strulovitch it is an opportunity to quiz his guest on his ‘recent’ experience and to seek advice on his own predicament. For Shylock it is a chance to reflect on and explain a point of view the bard omitted from his play.

The plot in Cheshire’s ‘Golden Triangle’ develops along Venetian lines. Barnaby (Plurabelle’s lover) wants something Strulovitch has; D’Anton seeks to get it and makes a risky bargain that includes Gratan, Beatrice and an unwise forfeit. Will it end familiarly or will there be a twist this time?

There are some wordy bits around the Jewish condition but Jacobson uses words very well, and there are plenty of mannered comedic episodes too. A familiarity with Shakespeare’s play will help to appreciate the sense of unfolding fate (I refreshed my schoolboy memory with a quick browse of Lamb’s Tales) but the story can stand alone to give a modern and more balanced, though not anodyne, picture of Jewishness in contemporary western society.

The Simpsons and their Mathematical Secrets – Simon Singh

From its opening episode in 1990 “The Simpsons” animated series has implanted mathematical nuggets into episodes, sometimes as part of the story but more often slyly into a background graphic or throwaway line. Mainly unnoticed by the viewer these are the private jokes of the some of the scriptwriters (who include a preponderance of maths graduates), shared with some fans who use freeze frames to capture the figures and decipher the message. In this book Simon Singh combines his love of maths and The Simpsons to bring those mathematical titbits out of the background and in entertaining fashion explain their history and significance.

Thus we are treated to mini-treatises on universal constants such as pi and e; theorems such as those of Pythagoras and Fermat (his last one that provided enough material for an earlier book from Singh); and the maths behind ideas such as six degrees of separation. He also covers some social issues such as the under-representation of women in maths (taking his cue from the “Girls Just Want to Have Sums” episode).

To give an example of how it works, one episode briefly displays three answers to a multiple choice question to fans at a baseball game, inviting them to guess the attendance. The options are 8191, 8128, 8208 and in the context of the show are meaningless. But to mathematicians they are highly distinctive: 8191 is not only a prime number but a ‘Mersenne’ prime formed by raising 2 to the power of a prime number (13 in this case) and deducting 1; 8128 is a ‘perfect number’ (the fourth) as its divisors (other than itself) also add up to the number (easier to check the second one, 28 = 1+2+4+7+14); 8208 is even more arcane as a ‘narcissistic number’ equal to the sum of its digits each raised to the power of the number of digits (again easier to see it in the smaller 153 = 1 cubed + 5 cubed + 3 cubed).

Game theory also gets an airing, explaining the strategies for winning rock-paper-scissors, as well as the superior (less prone to ties) version of rock-paper-scissors-lizard-Spock. Fun is had with infinity (apparently there is more than one) and multi dimensions; and classic example of the pitfalls of statistics are recounted.

It is light hearted but not dumbed down, and the periodic inclusion of joke maths test papers provide such gems as: Why did 5 eat 6 (because 789); what is the volume of a pizza of radius z and thickness a (pi.z.z.a); and what are the 10 kinds of people in the world (those who understand binary numbers and those who don’t).

For anyone with an interest in maths it is a very good read, explaining the sometimes complex concepts clearly and concisely. A liking for the Simpsons (and Futurama which is also covered) is less essential but aficionados probably won’t be that surprised by the care and attention lavished on the details, inconsequential to the plotlines, included in the programmes.