The Mathematics of Fiction

If there's a better public explainer of mathematics than Manil Suri, I don't know who it is. Your two bloggers were fortunate enough to meet Suri at the ScienceDebate2008 conference in Minneapolis last October, where the audience thrilled to his hilarious defenses of math and its importance to culture--after all, in addition to being a mathematician himself, Suri is also a highly accomplished novelist. Now, he has put up a YouTube clip explaining his approach to making math popular. "Mathematics really needs a good publicist," he explains. I think that publicist is Suri. I can't recommend his video enough: Original video here.