Math lesson

I was telling Tom about a story that began with too many characters. “This needs to get pared back,” I said. “Yeah, yeah, there can be twenty people milling around the Loblaws when the axe-wielding clowns storm in, but only two or three get names. All the others have to fade into the background or it’s overload.”

“Yeah,” he agreed. “It’s like this paper I read the other day. It began with 18 cohomology classes, introduced one after the other. It was like….” Then he rolled his eyes and made a frustrated pffft noise, because who can keep eighteen cohomology classes straight?

Theoretical math is fiction writing with better funding. Sometimes Tom reads a proof and declares it “elegant” in the same way I might read a short story by Alexander MacLeod or a passage from Richard Wagamese and call it sublime. And other times he shoves a page of hieroglyphics at me and says “Look at this!” Then he makes a barfing noise and complains “Okay, maybe this guy understands what all this blah-blah means but that’s no way to write for a reader.”

What makes for strong writing in math? I asked. Everything serves a purpose. It ties together. There’s not a lot of extraneous stuff. Importantly: there is clarity.