Math class usually feels like a sterile room with fluorescent lighting. You remember the smell of graphite and the sound of someone frantically erasing a mistake on a calculus quiz. It’s all formulas. It's all "solve for x." But James Harcourt’s book, Once Upon a Prime: The Wondrous Connections Between Mathematics and Literature, basically argues that we’ve been looking at the whole thing upside down.
Sarah Hart—who is actually the Gresham Professor of Geometry and the first woman to hold that post since it started in 1597—wrote this thing to prove a point. She thinks the "two cultures" divide between the arts and the sciences is a total myth.
It’s a big claim. Honestly, most people think you’re either a "numbers person" or a "words person." Hart says nope. She spends a few hundred pages showing how Moby Dick is structured around mathematical patterns and why poets are obsessed with the geometry of a sonnet.
The Mathematical Skeleton of Great Novels
You’ve probably read Alice in Wonderland. It’s a trip. But did you know Lewis Carroll—whose real name was Charles Dodgson—was a math lecturer at Oxford? When the Caterpillar is talking nonsense or the Queen is yelling about impossible things, there’s actually a layer of Euclidean geometry and symbolic logic underneath the tea parties.
In Once Upon a Prime, Hart points out that the madness isn't just random. It’s a satire of the "new" math of the 19th century.
Then you’ve got Herman Melville. In Moby Dick, he spends an entire chapter talking about the "cycloid" curve of the blubber-boiling pots. It sounds like a weird flex, but Melville was obsessed with the precision of the universe. Hart digs into these specific moments where authors use math not just as a metaphor, but as the actual scaffolding for the story.
It’s not just the classics, either.
Think about the structure of a book. Why do some stories feel "balanced" while others feel chaotic? Often, it’s because the author is subconsciously (or very consciously) using a mathematical progression.
Pringle Cans and Poetry: Why Structure Matters
Poetry is math with feelings. That's basically the vibe Hart gives off when she talks about sestinas. A sestina is a type of poem that doesn't rhyme. Instead, it uses a complex mathematical permutation to rotate six end-words through six stanzas.
It’s incredibly hard to write.
If you mess up the order, the whole thing collapses. Hart explains that this isn't just a gimmick. The constraint—the mathematical "rule"—actually forces the poet to be more creative. When you have to fit your thoughts into a specific geometric box, you find words you never would have used otherwise.
The Oulipo Movement
Ever heard of Georges Perec? He was part of a group called Oulipo. They loved "constrained writing." Perec once wrote a 300-page novel called A Void (La Disparition) without using the letter 'e'.
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That is insane.
But it’s also purely mathematical. It’s a logic puzzle in narrative form. Once Upon a Prime dives into how these writers used algorithms to generate plots. It’s the precursor to AI writing, but done with a fountain pen and a lot of caffeine.
Why We Get Math Education Wrong
The book makes a subtle but stinging critique of how we teach. Usually, we separate the "how" from the "why." You learn how to do long division, but nobody tells you that the Greeks thought prime numbers were the literal atoms of the universe.
Hart argues that if we taught math through stories, people wouldn't hate it so much.
She brings up Leo Tolstoy. In War and Peace, Tolstoy actually uses calculus—specifically the idea of integration—to explain how history works. He argues that you can't understand a war by looking at "great men" like Napoleon. Instead, you have to "integrate" the tiny, infinitesimal movements of every single soldier to see the big picture.
That is a heavy concept.
But it makes the math feel alive. It’s not a variable on a page; it’s a way of seeing a battlefield.
Flatland and the Fourth Dimension
One of the most famous crossovers in Once Upon a Prime is Edwin Abbott’s Flatland. It’s a book about a square living in a two-dimensional world who gets visited by a sphere.
It’s a satire of Victorian class structure.
But it’s also a perfect explanation of why we struggle to visualize higher dimensions. If a 3D object passes through a 2D world, the 2D people only see a line that grows and shrinks. Hart uses this to show how literature can help us grasp "un-visualizable" concepts.
Practical Takeaways for Your Next Read
If you’re going to pick up Once Upon a Prime, or even if you just want to see the world a bit differently, here is how you should actually apply this stuff:
- Look for the count. Next time you read a poem, count the syllables. Is it a prime number? Authors like Eleanor Catton (who wrote The Luminaries) use astrological and mathematical cycles to determine chapter lengths.
- Embrace constraints. If you’re a writer or a creator, try setting a "math rule." Only use sentences with a prime number of words for a paragraph. It sounds silly, but it breaks your brain out of its usual patterns.
- Stop saying "I'm not a math person." Hart’s whole point is that math is a human language. It’s just as much a part of our culture as Shakespeare or Star Wars.
The real magic of Once Upon a Prime isn't that it teaches you math equations. It’s that it stops the math from being scary. It turns a cold, hard subject into something that feels like a fairy tale.
Go look at your bookshelf. Pick a random novel. Check the chapter count. Check the page numbers. There is probably a pattern hiding in there that you never noticed because you were too busy looking at the words.
Start looking at the shapes instead. Read Once Upon a Prime by Sarah Hart if you want the full roadmap, but even without it, you can start seeing the geometry in the prose. Next time you're stuck on a problem, try writing it out as a story. If you're stuck on a story, try mapping it out as a graph. The two worlds are the same world.