 When he worked the phrase Randy rabbits into his description of the golden ratio, I started to clue in on what a playful and expressive writer he is and let's be honest that's not something you find in every mathematician or even every scholar that I work with on articles for the conversation. I should have just looked more closely at his profile to get a sense of his many talents though. Manil is a professor of mathematics at the University of Baltimore County Maryland. He has written three award winning and bestselling novels. And of course he's the author of the nonfiction book will be digging into today, the big bang of numbers, how to build the universe using only math. I'll direct you to his website, which is just his name Manil Suri calm. If you want to know more specifics about all of his claims to fame, but since our time today is not infinite math concept, I got in the book. Let's just jump right in. So thank you for accepting our invitation to join us today Manil. My pleasure Maggie thanks for having me. Of course so first I do need to issue a disclaimer that I am not a mathematician by any stretch of the imagination but I did read every word of the book and it definitely gave me a lot to think about so recognizing that some of our attendees today might not have had a chance yet to read the Manil. Can you give us just a quick synopsis of the project that you set for yourself like, what is the big bang of numbers and, and where do you go from there in the book. So, I think it started the story for me started way back when I was an undergraduate in Mumbai. It was Bombay and my algebra professor told us about this very famous saying by chronic or the famous mathematician, which said that God give us the integers, and the rest all is the work of man, or human beings. And what he meant was that you know once you have the whole numbers 1234 which are somehow coming from heaven. And then you can build up the rest of mathematics from it. And then he went on and said that hey, I can actually do better. I don't need God. I can actually as a mathematician create the numbers out of nothing. And he showed us this marvelous, almost like a magic trick where you start with something called the empty set and then you start building the numbers. And it was, it was the closest that being to a religious experience I think it was really like almost like the walls just dissolved and suddenly there were numbers everywhere so it was really a sort of primal creative act if you will. And once I started writing in earnest and you know I was writing my novels I was meeting a lot of people who were artists and writers. They would always say hey, you know we used to love math. When we were in school but afterwards we kind of never had a chance to really pursue it. And can you tell us something about your mathematics. I was kind of you know I was hoping to talk about my novels but they weren't so interested in that they wanted to hear about math so so I started building a kind of talk which started with this big bang as I call it, building the numbers out of nothing. And when I started, finally, I finally decided I should really maybe write a math book, and it would be aimed at a wide audience anyone who's interested in math. And that that image stayed with me. And I said well, can you go further. Okay, you can create the numbers but can you actually start building everything including the whole universe from that. So, that was a way to get into this project and try to lay out mathematics almost as a story where one thing follows from the other, and everything is embedded in one narrative. I definitely feel like in the hands of a novelist as you take us through a narrative, you know it's certainly not a tech a math textbook in any sense of it so who were you imagining to be your readers as you were writing the book. I think I think my readers were the people that I've been meeting at artist colonies and just regular friends who, you know, would would not really. Maybe would be interested in mathematics, but wouldn't have had the chance to pursue it. And there's just so much joy to be had out of mathematics so many things that you don't really see in normal courses where the emphasis is always on finding the right answer, you know doing the calculations finding the right answer. And that was another thrust which kind of got me to writing this book. Several years ago I wrote a piece for the New York Times, which was called how to fall in love with math. The central idea of that was that math isn't about calculation, as much as it is about ideas. So this book is written for people who want to really engage with mathematics on the level of ideas, rather than get into, you know, real computations and calculation so it's not going to help you do your arithmetic it's not going to help you. But you know, balance your bank account or anything like that. It's really about how math really deals with our lives how we engage with it every day. Yeah, you use numbers as characters in the book and you even give each of them their own personalities along the way. So obviously there's numbers in there and after you set off your big bang of numbers you build a arithmetic you go on through geometry algebra patterns, physics, infinity, that's the one that really started to blow my mind when I read your descriptions about all the different infinities that there that there are that you can prove mathematically. But you really dig into some of life's big questions so what do you, what do you see math's role as being in grappling with those big thoughts like where the universe came from. I mean why we even exist I mean I was getting very philosophical vibes at different points through your book. And that's, that's, that's what I was drawn into once I started you know once you start talking about the big bang, what comes into your mind is creation. And there is a doctrine called creation ex nihilo, which is basically creating everything out of nothing. And you know that's that's a cornerstone of many religions where God creates the universe out of nothing. And also, in some sense being explored by physicists, where you are, you have some sort of singularity and from that, you know everything emerges in the big bang. So, my, my thought was, both these, both these areas, religion and physics, you know they're they're really in the public's imagination, much more than mathematics is. Is there a way to posit math as the true creation, the creative force of everything. And this is a question that's being looked at by by many people and there's a famous saying by Eugene Wigner, who was a Nobel laureate. This was in 1960 or so and he talked about the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics describing everything in our physical universe you know it's so good at modeling physics and what have you. And that you can look at it and say, Well, why is math so effective, couldn't be that math is really the true driving force of the universe, rather than us just inventing it and using it to describe the universe. So the universe really be describing mathematics, you know, is that if you twist it around. Then mathematics becomes the true force behind the universe, and the universe is just a physical manifestation and approximation if you will, off those mathematical ideas. There's a nice way of looking at things because it gives you a completely different view of math, you know, then then all these, this question of unreasonable effectiveness. Well, it's very reasonable then right becomes perfectly what you would expect. So, so that's that's what I played with as well, I think. What you're describing gets at as a non mathematician I hear this come up from time to time the idea of whether math is something that people invented or whether it's something that exists independently of us and that we discover bits of from time to time. In the book, you, I want to quote this you talk about the duality between design and accident intentionality and purposelessness, and I found that idea really interesting that this might be the ultimate metaphor you say the deepest insight that math can offer us that it's, it's both of those things can you get into that a little bit for us. So the glib answer to to your question, is it invented or discovered, is that you have to create a new word instead of discovered invented it's it's disbanded. Yeah, but but what I mean by that is simply that there are some questions that we really can't get the to any kind of logical answer to our, our supportive answer to what one is the question of our own existence. You know, people might believe one thing or the other, but it always comes down to, are we here for a purpose, or do we just exist, you know, is there some real purpose to our lives to our creation to our existence, or is it just a something that happened randomly, you know molecules getting together and there's no particular purpose. It's very similar to that, in the sense that we can't really tell whether math is something that's always existed. And, or is it something that we invent. Now if we invented, and we're inventing it for a purpose. It generates by itself, starting with emptiness building the numbers you know in some strange realm that we don't know about. Then it's just wafting it's a it's a it's something that just happened by itself. And just like math has that duality that metaphor that can't be resolved. And also, we can't tell about our own existence so in that sense, math is the metaphor for something that you know it's telling us hey, math, you can decide for math, and you'll never be able to decide for yourself either for your own existence as well. I think it's a favorite concept or part that you worked on in the book something that either surprised you that you had so much fun working on it or it was just an interesting thought experiment for you. I think the part that I've always been very fascinated with is the one that you just mentioned about infinity which comes much later in the book. And on a practical level. We can't really tell whether the universe is infinite or not whether it's a finite universe whether it's expanding and will keep expanding into infinity. So, that question is never resolved, but mathematically, we can certainly talk about infinity and infinity is something that keeps keeps poking its head in our lives without ever showing itself so it's like an invisible hand that is often pulling the strings and in fact, at one point the book was called the Godfather of numbers, and this was infinity that is really doing everything in it. So, so the concept of infinity has always been fascinating and there was a mathematician George Cantor, who first looked at this whole idea and tried to set it on a firm footing and really went into the nitty gritty of infinity and he found that there's actually a whole bunch of infinity and they're not equivalent to each other so there's a higher infinity, there's a lower infinity. And this was something I've always wanted to talk about and try to make it much more tangible. And the higher and lower infinity actually you can think of in a very interesting way. The lower infinity is when you count numbers 12345678 and you know you'll keep counting them you'll get to infinity, but not think about a single time interval let's say a one second time interval. And if you think about that, and you think of time being a bunch of instance that are concatenated to each other. How many instance are there how many instance do you actually live in that one second. And if you think about it there you know there's an infinite number of instance almost as many instance as there would be points in a little interval of a straight line. And that infinity, you cannot actually, you can't say this is the first instance and this is the second instant this is the third instant, you can do that because they're too many of them. So that already starts giving you an inkling that hey, maybe there's another type of infinity. And what was really fun in the book was to pose this in the form of almost like a short story, and George Cantor became, you know, this this mathematician who's trying to save his planet because there are two planets at war and they each have infinite resources and infinite numbers of guns aimed at each other so so that I think was the most fun part. Maybe this is a moment to, well, first let me remind people that we do have the Q&A section where you can submit some questions we will take some audience questions. If we have time towards the end, people seem to have discovered that, but maybe we can turn the corner a tiny bit and talk about just your writing process I would imagine this book is a bit different than writing your novels but maybe not so how do how do you discriminate between the two kinds of writing. Well, initially, I didn't discriminate so this book has a kind of story history in the in the sense that I first, you know when I started I said okay, I need to do something about math for non mathematicians. Let me let me do it almost like a public service I'll do this quick book on explaining math and, you know, it'll take me a few months and I'll just get it out. And of course, of course it ended up taking more than 10 years but that's another story. My first attempt at it was to really go into, you know, it was a nonfiction book it didn't quite work. So then I said, I'm a novelist so why don't I write this as a novel. And that was this Godfather of numbers and the little bits of it have floated into this book so you talked about the characters, numbers being characters and that was the whole story with these characters. My editor, when I showed it to her, the finished version. She said it was charming, which is not a word you want to hear from your editor because it means that they aren't going to publish it. So, I'll have to remember that that's for. And you can you can tell it to people who send you articles to that's a charming article. So it was back to the drawing board at that point and then it became a nonfiction book. And I found that, you know, I think in both types of writing, especially since I should just preface this because my first three books were all on India. India is a vast country, a lot of people don't know enough about it. And so I always felt that I was explaining India to people. And that was actually very useful in terms of training to be able to come to this project and say okay I'm explaining something that might be even more alien to people in India and that's mathematics. And so that in that sense, you know, trying to figure out how people are going to interpret what you put on the page that's very important. In this case, of course, there are other things to worry about like equations and I know that that's one of the surest ways of driving people away so there's a famous saying for people who are working at museums that if you do a science exhibit, each equation that you put in will lose half your audience. So I was very careful about putting in very few of those. And also I was able to now, unlike novels, work with illustrations so there's about 300 illustrations in there, which I think really is almost essential for getting mathematical ideas across. So yeah, so there were different differences, I think the one thing that was the same was I was equally slow so I'm a very slow writer. I remember for my second novel, I did a calculation it took me like 78 years to write, and I found out that only 58 words a day made it to the printed version so I was writing at the rate of 58 words a day. So it was actually 58.7 so it was a little better than that. But I suspect that it's even, even smaller for this book, but it took longer. Well better than zero words a day as an encouraging editor. What kind of feedback have you gotten from readers at the beginning of the book you, you kind of imagine your audience to be anyone from high school students up to hardened math people and I'm just wondering, are different demographics getting different things out of the book what are you hearing from people. Yeah, so that's been very interesting. So certainly there have been many surprises where people who friends of mine who are not mathematicians have, you know, really said, Okay, they've been interested in mathematics and really put in like read the book, little by little, like maybe a section of it and got them through the whole thing. And they've managed to absorb, you know, basically the whole book, which has been very encouraging. They have. I think most of them have said that if something doesn't quite click right away, you can either give it a little more time or skip ahead and then come back later. So that's been one very encouraging set of people. People who like my friend of mine who used to be a German teacher. She went to the library, and she said she spent like half an hour looking at it, and quickly realize this is not something she would ever read. So, so that's, that's fine too. It comes down to two things. One is how interested you are. And this is not just for readers of my book is something that carries through society, like, if someone is really interested enough, motivated enough. That's going to be the driving force to be able to get through not only my book, but also mathematics course. That's something we keep forgetting I think in education with kids especially you really need to get them motivated you get really need to get them interested you need to have things that are fun. So that's the first thing and the second thing is just taking it at your own pace and having the stamina to go through these, which of course comes from interest. So, you know, again, mathematicians have reacted well to this. Better, I would say, than some did to the novel version remember my editor didn't like the novel version. Well, some people did. I showed it to some mathematicians. This is the old Godfather of numbers. And some mathematicians were very vehemently against having a novel about mathematics. I remember one very fairly famous mathematician who said, Well, there are two things I don't like about your book. And this is the old version, you know, the Godfather of numbers. He said, one is the title. And the other is the story. So, okay. Other than that, everything was fine. Yeah, not a lot left after that but okay. Picking up on the point you made about math education do you feel like there are bits of your book that teachers could take into the classroom. Yeah, absolutely. In fact, I think I think for that article that I wrote for the conversation, the one you were talking about. Or no, it was it was a different article that I wrote but one of these articles has a problem taken from the book which has been made into a math lesson, and it's about shelves. Where are the patterns on shelves? Where do they come from? It turns out you can explain them in quite simple terms using very simple mathematical rules. And there's a nice lesson that we've developed based on that, where kids can actually fill out little squares and come up with these patterns that look just like an actual shell would. I have been developing some of these things with a group at Stanford and we're excited about that work. But I think just about everything like the first part about numbers, how numbers are created. I have actually talked about that in middle schools and that's gone on pretty well I would think. These kids are, you know, it's their first glimpse of what is a number. It's very hard to define what a number is. So looking at it in this way can actually open minds that that is the kind of stuff you might need to supplement mathematical, you know, standard mathematical lessons. So yes. So, not to be too confrontational but why do you care if the rest of us know about math or sort of see what you see in the beauty of math? Why do you want to pull the rest of us into this mathematical world of yours? So I think the standard answer which I don't quite agree with is that okay math is useful and so it's going to be of use to you. That's not exactly true in the sense that I think, you know, in terms of how much math you actually end up using in your career. It's only certain people who actually use mathematics. That's not a satisfying enough answer. I think what I do think is necessary is that when we have kids, you want them to have as many options as possible. Well, when people are kids, they need to be interested in math. They need to have horizons that are far enough so that if they explore what career they want or what interests them, and if they need something that requires mathematical training, then they will have that foundation. So, if at the kids level, if at the primary school level or middle school level, somebody decides they don't like math and then hate it and never take math again, that really limits what they might be able to do later on. So I think we all agree that at a young age, we want everyone to at least know what mathematics is and perhaps develop an interest for that. And that's where things get a little tricky because kids are always listening to what's going on in society, what people are saying about mathematics. And when they hear the message, perhaps from their parents or perhaps from society in general that math is tough or math is useless or math is not fun, then that just gets embedded in them. So, in some sense, I'm also aiming this at parents just so that they can bring out that interest and show that they are interested and be interested themselves. Yeah, it drives me nuts when people say, oh, I, I stink at math or I hate math like no one would say I stink at reading or I hate words, you know, it just drives me bananas. Right. I'm wondering one thing that you and I had talked about back when we were working on our article was some frustration on your part that it seems sometimes that mathematics is not included in the, like the popular science media landscape, like lots of the books that get the most attention or, or articles and things tend to be about, I don't know, I just imagine like the immortal life of Henrietta sex or biographies of people from the past. I'm wondering if we could get into that a little bit where, where, what is your thinking these days about how math is or isn't included in that popular science realm and and does it need more of a place there. I suspect there's two issues over here. One is that mathematicians are, you know, while we are not always successful at making our subject engaging for an expanded audience. Certainly, we're very good with people who have an affinity for math who have grown up, you know, finding these questions interesting. But to make it more relatable. That becomes tough. And in fact, I start the book with a quote from a former New York Times editor who said that, you know, the problem with with math is, it's not relatable. Like physics will tell us answer questions about our own existence, but Matt doesn't do that. So that's something that that's a big challenge. How do you make math more, you know, more in tune with the human experience. Another way is to really talk about how it's embedded in what's around us. But again, that's a very intellectual way. So how do you get to the emotional core that you probably need for really engaging people. And that's, that's, you know, there are people who have managed to do that and that's only what I was trying to do with this story about creation and and infinity and so on that things that we all have have some idea about and would hopefully find engaging. I think the part that I was carping about, and maybe this is, you know, probably people in chemistry carp about that about their subject, but it's this problem with gatekeeping so if there is like a book festival for instance, the people who organize them. It depends on how open their minds are to mathematics. I was once I once applied for a residency, and I did manage to get in by the skin of my teeth this was for writing this book, this was an artist residency where you have to send in something and you know they decide whether they're going to give you this or not. And the organizer then told me that you know it was really touch and go because a lot of people will vary and these are all writers, they were very against having a math text you know be one of the, one of the subjects that they would be supporting. So, and this is neither here nor there, in the sense that people are either interested in it or aren't. And certainly, the problem that that we see is that with some other fields, like physics or biology is much easier to draw people in. It's really a challenge for mathematicians to think about how we can draw people in. And if you can draw enough people in you'll also draw in those gatekeepers for book festivals or whatever, and change attitudes change views math doesn't have that same cultural profile. That's, that's the key problem. It has a, you know, it comes up pops up when some some famous, some famous mathematical paradox is proven. And so then there'll be an article in the New York Times and. Okay, that happens maybe once every 10 years, you know the famous paradox. But isn't math woven into all the other sciences. It feels so integral to everything else. Yeah, it is absolutely integral, but in the popular arena. If you read about these other sciences, it won't be the mathematics that's being described through equations or anything. It'll be the science itself. And if you notice that's what I've done in my book to, I haven't used mathematical terminology to describe it. So, it becomes a question of, you know, drawing people in and talking about various subjects but somehow bringing out the math and it's a very subtle thing. As as as we discovered in that article that I was writing, you can't really start bombarding people with mathematical stuff, but you still want to intrigue them, and maybe draw them in and maybe they'll go ahead and learn some more. There's hoping right. Yeah, absolutely. One of the characters recurring characters in your book, who's not a number is an imaginary version of Pope Francis as kind of a foil as you're going through. And you say that you're going to send him the book. Did your publisher send him the book. Actually, my publisher didn't but I did. Was it received. Well, let me just say how he got in first of all I remember I said that I wrote that article in the New York Times how to fall in love with Matt. Well this article did very well it rose to the number one spot of most email for the day. And, and, you know, as the week progress they used to have a most email for the week list, and it started rising up that list. And by that Saturday, it was number three and then later that day became number two. And I was all set to, you know, just receive this accolade of being the most email for the week. And Pope Francis started making these very controversial statements about abortion and homosexuality and so on, and he literally came bounding behind me and jumped over me and got my number one spot. And I said, Okay, I need to, you know, that was almost like a message from God or something. So I actually ended up putting, as you said, the Pope as a character in my book. And the Pope is very interesting because he's actually had training as a chemist, he's even worked in a chemistry lab. So he has that background in science as well. And also religion, which is, you know, I'm constantly comparing the math and the religious side so he's the perfect foil to bring out some of these questions. So anyway, I said that I would, I promised that I would send him a book, and I did send him a book and a couple of months later, I, I received something in the mail and I have it somewhere here I should probably pull it out and show you. So it was, it was in them, it was an official looking thing, which said Vatican, and I was very nervous I said, My God, this is the Pope's lawyer they're going to sue me for having used him in the book, but was actually an assistant of some sort, who said that the Pope had received the book and was, you know, was acknowledging and said something like you will be in his thoughts and blessings so I took that as a good sign. I don't think the Pope has read it or anything but you know, maybe someday he will. Well, at least you're not being sued I guess. Yeah, exactly. Worst of the possibilities right. Right. I just want to put a plug in again for the, the Q&A there if people have questions. So one, maybe this is an easy one to start with someone asks, Do you have a favorite number or at least favorite number. Wow. Well, I actually don't it's one of those things you know you have to love your numbers equally well. And this is actually, actually that's very interesting because I remember I was telling you about the God father numbers when, when it was a so one of the things in the novel was that this, this God father was created the numbers was infinity actually loves the number zero and the number one those are his two favorites but he can't show it because he has to tell all the numbers that people equally love and you know it gets a little hard after 10 and 11 and 2003 million. He confesses that he really can't love them all equally because there's too many of them. So, so I was a zero and one there and I'm going to stick with a God father's choice. Okay, that sounds good. One of my colleagues reading the book told me her favorite was I. See now that's, that's an interesting choice. So I is the square root of minus one. And this is something that you know and most like when you're in school you probably don't start. Don't come across this but and I debated whether I should or not, but I did start talking about it in this book, and it plays a very central role. The point is that all numbers are created equal right so if you can take the square root of four, which is to why can't you take the swear to minus one. And of course, you know the standard thing that you learn in school is that such numbers are somehow disallowed, but mathematicians, you know if numbers are not strictly for counting. Then why shouldn't be able to take the square root of minus one. And that is the number I, and there's a little bit of personality in the book attached to I is called EMA because it's the imaginary number. So and there's a little, you know, I central to expanding like if we only had real numbers we would just have a line. But if you want to have a plane, then you need these imaginary numbers to so it's woven into the pattern into the fabric of the book. And here's another one from a participant today, there seem to be lots of real constants, are there any complex constants. Well, even, even the number of real constants is, you know, I think again in this article that was in the conversation, they were that we were trying to I was trying to find a constant for each month. So it turns out that it's easy to do for the first three or four months, like pi day is you know 3.14, and then we had these other constants that that worked up to April or so, then it becomes very hard. So there aren't that many numbers that we actually use, you know, constants that we actually use in terms of complex constants. The complex number consists of a real part and an imaginary part. So any constant that you have that's a real constant, then just add zero times I to it, the imaginary part is zero and you get a complex constant. That's a little bit of run around but any real number is also a complex number. So in that sense, yes. Okay, here's another one. How do you reconcile the idea of life, the universe, etc. coming about accidentally versus the order and logic of a mathematically constructed one. That's a great question. And the thing is that with mathematics, you also have to include patterns like randomness. So this is, this is the real reason why numbers like pi are so important. People have probably heard about irrational numbers. And these are numbers that cannot be expressed as one number over another, they can't be expressed as fractions. And the quintessential irrational number is pi which is 3.1415 you know it has a never ending decimal expansion. So if you look at that decimal expansion, you will find that it doesn't have, it doesn't have any repeating, you know it doesn't start repeating itself at any point. Now, if you look at pi. Well, why, why should we be interested in pi. And, and, and the usual answer is, well, it'll give you exactly the ratio of the circumference to the diameter of a circle so if you want the exact ratio, you would have you know you would have to find all these infinite variables in the expansion of pi. practically speaking we don't need that even NASA just uses pi to about 15 digits or something and that's enough for all their calculations. So we don't really need it for accuracy. What produces in our world this world that I'm creating this universe that I'm creating is the sense of randomness, because if you look at the digits in pi, you pick anyone at random, you'll find that you know you can really. It's not repeating so in that sense you can't predict it. Of course, this is, this is not a really random number it's something called pseudo randomness with after all you know, I and you could calculate it. But this idea of randomness is very important, and I think that's what is at the crux of mathematics describing something that happens accidentally. Once you have randomness, you can start simulating a lot of phenomena mathematically, and you will get different stages you will get different end stages, depending upon slight changes in the initial condition. So this idea of chaos of, you know, calculations that start with very simple formulas and lead to great complexity. All of these are ways of thinking about these accidents that create the universe, and mathematics can't really describe it all at this stage, where it can give you a kind of glimpse into how that might happen it can give you a model of some sort. One of our attendees has a follow up on that. He says, isn't that a paradox in an exact number like pi gives the definite ratio. Right, yes. And the interesting thing is that pi, first of all, is something that you can write down you can compute, but you can always write it as a, you know, an infinite series or whatever. But this idea of the definite ratio. It's very true. If the world is the universe that we live in is a flat universe in the sense that we don't quite know we suspect that our universe is flat. But it might be that there's a slight curvature to our universe, probably not but it's possible. What it means is that, and this is sort of you know what Einstein started looking into in terms of curvature of space time, well space itself might be a little curved. And if space is curved, let's say that. Let's say you look at a sphere, when you look at a sphere, and you draw a circle on it on the surface of a sphere. If you look at pi b, if you look at the circumference of that circle and measure it, you know, divided by the diameter, it'll no longer be 3.14. It'll actually be something that is less than 3.14. Because of the courage of the bulge. If you have a bulging circle, it's no longer true. So when you say that you know that's an exact value that also has some assumptions in it. So I'm just pointing that out as a way of answering that. Okay. Thank you. Here's a question that someone sent in ahead of time about how you balance the different roles that you have as writer as professor as whatever else you do in your life. How do your different roles inform the work that you do in each realm. Well, you know, people often ask me, well, how do you do both these things that I have to say poorly, because as you've seen it takes me so long to write a book. In terms of how they actually interact with each other. I think that when I first started writing, I was a new assistant professor, and I wanted something that would be different from what I was doing at work. In academia, especially in the sciences, you're really asked to just concentrate on one thing and one thing alone. And if you don't, you might not be taken as seriously. So I said, okay, I need something other than just mathematics in my life. So I started writing, and I used to keep it a big secret because I didn't want people to find out about it in my department and you know, maybe it wouldn't take me seriously maybe I wouldn't get tenure. So I would actually go all the way from Baltimore to Washington DC and go to a writing group there to share my work. So that became more and more serious and I think that's what finally led to my first novel being published. What that did was it really informed in turn by mathematics as well. So the mathematics informs the writing just because you're trained as a mathematician to be very succinct. And so I think that was something I always try in my writing. But the writing really taught me how even plain prose can be misinterpreted in so many different ways. And so how to fashion and refashion something so that you eliminate these possibilities of misunderstanding. I think that's what was very useful in terms of how I started approaching my work as a mathematician, especially in terms of teaching, like when you teach. How do you how do you do it in a way so that the maximum number of people understand what you're saying. So I think I think that's that's the you know flip side of the interaction between the two. I think that makes a lot of sense, and also why I as an editor liked working with you as a writer because you really had the future readers in mind that you want them to be able to grasp what you're dishing out you're not just assigning them something that you want them to struggle through on their own. You're kind of holding their hand on the on the way. I'll interrupt you there and just say that one of the things that math is that there's always a struggle in some sense to really get something, you know, internally. It's almost like each person has to struggle personally at least that's the way most of us are taught. And so that somehow rubs off. And I feel that that's why it's even harder to communicate in in mathematics just because people have in the back of their heads that you know especially for higher math people, everyone needs to have their own struggle and only that way will they succeed in making it their own. So, I wonder if that's, you know, one of the reasons we see why it's harder to perhaps make math, mathematics, mathematics more communicate mathematics more easily. Thank you. Here's another question sort of ripped from the headlines even the web telescope is helping us question assumptions about the age and extent of the universe, assuming mathematics existed before humanity. And we discovered it how come mathematics has never shown us the true age and size of the universe, just an easy one there for you. Easy one okay thank you. Well, the thing is that mathematics by itself is completely agnostic. It's, it's not going to be something that's going to speak to us in that sense. What physics does in the sense that you can apply mathematics. And, you know, you can you can apply to various things and you can say hey this this is a good match. But as far as things like the age of the universe goes. That's not the kind of thing that math is going to do. In mathematics we always start with assumptions so in math, you always start with axioms, which then allows you to build everything up. For example, in this book I started with emptiness which is the empty set and then there, you know that's how I build everything up. What I love about that is mathematicians know that you can't keep going backwards. You know you can't have those Russian dolls that keep fitting into each other and keep asking well who created that who created that who created that you have to start with some assumptions. So that's that's that's actually reassuring in some way and I think that's what I like so much about the fact that mathematics starts with those and then goes forward. Switch topics again not to give you whiplash but one participant is asking can you briefly tell us a bit about your previous books the Indian novels. Certainly. So the first one was called the death of Vishnu. And this is about a man who is living in this apartment building on the steps of this apartment building. And he's dying, and it was started because I went back to visit my parents in Mumbai in around 1995, and this man Vishnu who used to live in our building and do errands was in fact dying on our steps, and he actually died there. And I started writing this as a short story, and it started going into a more philosophical realm. When a writing teacher said, you know Vishnu is also the name of the caretaker of the universe in Hindu mythology. So if you name somebody Vishnu you need to somehow explore that so that's what opened up this whole new world for me. It was interesting because I approached it very much like a mathematician, in the sense that I saw this building, and I saw Vishnu's death. And this building became almost like a theorem for me, in the sense that in theorem when you apply it to different different areas gives you different truths. It's an abstraction and so this building was an abstraction what is this building represent. Well it's these people who are living in it and fighting with each other, but it's also a microcosm of Indian society. So that was another interpretation. And then Vishnu is dying you know I started looking into mythology and trans migration of souls and so on so it became a metaphor for that as well. So that was the first book. The second book was the age of Shiva, and that was more a journey of a woman, right after India's independence in 1947. And she's making her way in a very male dominated world, and she's not perfect, but how she actually, you know, how she actually succeeds in that world and was a story of her and her son basically. And then the third one I decided okay I need to put in some science slash math characters in it. So that actually has both a physicist and a statistician in it. So those are the two main characters and that's called the city of Davey. And that's again in Mumbai and that's in the future so there's a threat of a nuclear war with Pakistan and you know there's there's a love triangle unfolding in front of that. So the third book especially was was very interesting because I got completely stuck at it at one point and I just could not go any further. And, you know, I was making these trees I was approaching it like a mathematician was trying to advance the plot so I was making all these possibility trees. And after that I went, I always got stuck, or it was something some kind of plot contrivance which you know didn't really work. So I finally did this enough and I declared that I mathematically shown that this book could not be written that I just thought okay that's proven it. Luckily my agent who was not a mathematician didn't appreciate my proof and she said you better get back to it and you know finish this book which is finally I managed to finish it. So that's one of the three books and it's kind of interesting I thought that I was done with this philosophy this mythical kind of you know, where do we come from kind of philosophy that I had in the three books, but apparently not because now this one looks at it from a mathematical point of view. Well I think that is a great place for us to rest for now. We are planning the conversation is planning to post the video and the transcript of our discussion for the book club. Online will email everyone who RSVP once we have that up. We can continue to the discussion in the comments section there. We weren't able to get to your question whether you emailed it in ahead of time or typed it into the Q&A. I encourage you to hold on for another day or so and we'll try to get that up and running so we can continue there with Manil. But thank you so much for being our inaugural guest Manil. This was an excellent discussion and a really great book to kick everything off. Thank you. Well thank you. It was a real pleasure. Thanks. I just want to kick in on Beth Daley the executive editor and journal manager the conversation. If you didn't see me before. I also want to thank you, the people attending the webinar for making this possible. I would like to invite readers and donors for a nonprofit effort at the conversation and it made today possible so thank you so much.