Monday, August 22, 2011
Seldom comes the better
I have just been reading The Oxford Murders by Guillermo Martinez, an Argentinean professor of mathematics.
It ought to be right up my street – Gödel, Pythagoras, Fermat’s last theorem, the relation between the truths of mathematical logic & the messy real world, even Assyrian friezes. Seasoned with a little magical realism.
It was well written enough to persuade me to keep going to the end, but I wasn’t convinced; my reaction is I suppose only too typically English – too clever by half.
But I am left with one question: why is the expert logician called Professor Seldom?
It was very irritating to keep reading this as an adverb & then having to start the sentence again. An anagram which points to the messiness of real world models? Or is it just meant to be a joke? If so, what is it that he seldom does?
