When Princeton University decides to publish your book, it usually sends you an author response form.
Gaurav Suri, Hartosh Bal impress Princeton with unique tale.
WASHINGTON: When Princeton University decides to publish your book, it usually sends you an author response form. Like any other form, it has the usual zzzz questions about your name, address, and background. But Q22 is interesting. It asks you to list the prizes and awards your book will qualify for.
San Francisco-based management consultant and Stanford University alumnus Gaurav Suri answered that question in one word: Pulitzer. He then added a smiley for good measure.
Did he mean that in jest? Maybe he did, maybe not. There is, like the title of his groundbreaking mathematical novel, a certain ambiguity to it. Or, as Suri puts it, “Perhaps the search for absolute certainty is destined to remain just a search.”
Written by Suri and his childhood friend and New York University graduate Hartosh Singh Bal, A Certain Ambiguity, a mathematical novel, will be published by Princeton in 2007. It tells the story of an Indian mathematician, who comes to the US in 1919 and gets caught in the web of a little-known blasphemy law, and how his grandson — a Stanford student — discovers his story.
The book is the result of long instant messenger chats between Suri and Bal. The latter, a former mathematics teacher, is a freelance journalist and wildlife photographer based in New Delhi. “We often talked late into the night,” says Suri. “First about the mathematics and then about the plot-lines.”
They did that for over five years, and got down to sending the finished book to publishers only late last year.
Their love for maths, however, is older. “We were 17 when we fell in love with mathematics. The book that did that was George Gamow’s One, Two, Three… Infinity.”
Suri hopes his readers will learn to love mathematics, because “life and mathematics are closely related”.
Suri told Princeton: “As the two main characters in the book struggle to determine how certain they are about what they believe, they come to find that the dilemmas of mathematics and ordinary life cannot be separated.”
Therein, perhaps, lies an ambiguous certainty.
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