The Number "e

“Then he said the main message should always be the math. A hotel full of rational people. What could go wrong?””

— Unknown

“But this is math. It’s a hotel full of rational people. Nothing bad will happen.””

— Unknown

“Tyler opened the door. The room had just one bed, not four. Plus a wooden table, and a three-legged stool. There was no mathematicians’ club. No group of people. No waiting audience. Just one person. An elderly man, sitting on the bed, stooped, bent, long gray hair, seamed face, hooded eyes, a crackle of wild intelligence in his gaze. It was Arkady Suslov.””

— Unknown

“Kindansky was a leading number theorist in the nineteenth century. He proved there’s a category of numbers with unique properties. Not so much what they are, but what they can be used for. Those are the Kindansky numbers. They’re all prime numbers, but not all prime numbers are Kindanskys.””

— Unknown

“Who did it?” Tyler started over at the top. The beginning of the story. Once upon a time. Lit majors could tell Faulkner from Hemingway. Same for mathematicians. Math was abstract and eternal, unchanging, discovered not invented, but when human beings used it, they always left a fingerprint. Not exactly a voice, like literature. More like an X-ray, of the way someone’s mind worked. The cogs and the gears.””

— Unknown

“It will be a little island of common sense in a sea of bullshit.””

— Unknown

“The sordid pack of squalid gangsters we have today deserve none of it. So I’m taking away what I can.””

— Unknown

“Tyler breathed in. The president of the United States, the national security advisor, the NSA director, all watching him. Plus Oliver goddamn Bailey.””

— Unknown