It’s not often that I encounter an entertaining, provocative novel that also happens to have a strong mathematical component or even mathematicians as characters. That’s what I found in the case of PopCo, written by Scarlett Thomas.
Thomas ably weaves mathematics into her narrative, making it seem quite natural for sophisticated topics such as the Riemann hypothesis, cellular automata, prime factorization, small-world networks, and more to come up in practically everyday conversation.
But the focus is really on code breaking. This is, after all, a mystery story, and the heroine, Alice Butler, has several secret messages to unravel. So, there are inevitable lessons in Caesar shifts, Vigenère ciphers, trapdoor codes, and the famous Enigma machine of World War II. The book even has a table of the frequency of occurrence of letters in English and a list of the first 1,000 prime numbers.