I’ve always loved books, and I can still remember how miraculous it felt when I was learning to read – as if I were slowly turning a magic key that unlocked the gateway to a marvellous universe of stories. Then, a decade later – and as if through some celestial revelation, although it was actually through school mathematics classes in Euclidean geometry and algebra – I first glimpsed the elegant beauty and rigour of mathematical proof. So, how to combine these two great loves, literature and mathematics? It wasn’t easy, because in those days, at school and university we had to choose between humanities and sciences.
It was a choice complicated by the received wisdom that girls weren’t as good as boys when it came to advanced maths and physics. This tipped the balance towards science – I’ll show ‘em, I thought, but really, I did internalize a secret sense of inadequacy and under-confidence that’s been hard to shake. Nonetheless – and after dropping out into counter-cultural, off-the-grid (pre-solar-cell) communities aiming to reconfigure society in a more socially and environmentally friendly mode – I rekindled my enchantment with mathematics and gained a PhD from Monash University. My thesis was on exact solutions of Einstein’s equations of gravity. I taught mathematics at Monash for many years, and I’ve also taught in programs for culturally and socially diverse students.
When I was “off the grid”, I cofounded the countercultural magazine Maggies Farm, and ultimately, I managed to unite my love of literature and maths by publishing what they call “literary” or “creative” non-fiction.
Today, you can do degrees in creative writing and science writing, but when I started writing my first book, I felt I was largely on my own in trying to find new ways to make mathematics exciting and accessible to the wider reading public. In fact, after I’d hit upon the device of blending history, biography, mathematics and science into a narrative storyline, my manuscript received many rejections, for genre-bending was uncommon then (although I soon found that others were also discovering a similar approach at around the same time). So, thank you Madonna Duffy, at University of Queensland University Press, for taking a chance on what became Einstein’s Heroes: Imagining the world through the language of mathematics. (The book turned out to be a modest “bestseller,” and was shortlisted for the Age Book of the Year and the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards. Editions were also published in the UK, US, Turkey, Japan, South Korea and France.)
And thank-you to the Australia Council and Nancy Keesing for a simply wonderful six-month residency in Paris, where I researched my next book, Seduced by Logic: Émilie du Châtelet, Mary Somerville and the Newtonian Revolution. Since then, I’ve published several more books – you can see more about all my books here – and I’ve written many articles and book reviews, a selection of which you can see here. I’m also an Affiliate in the School of Mathematics at Monash, and I’m still dabbling with what I call “slow science” (trying, initially with my colleague Tony Lun, to prove a tantalizing conjecture in general relativity).