Zazie count

So after re-reading carefully Zazie au pot de thèse, I have counted 74 references to mathematical terminology, including names of actual mathematicians (a few of which are actually hidden in puns which can be considered as Joycean or atrocious, depending on the point of view), and words which are used for their mathematical meaning in the text; this seems fair enough since, after all, the story is supposed to happen during (or mostly after) a mathematical PhD defence.

The best-hidden name (the construction being utterly untranslatable) is in the following sentence:

Il faut préserver les plus infimes de nos coutumes obsolètes, car nous, Gaulois irréductibles, sans us, perdrions notre esprit de corps, notre unité fondamentale.

(Litterally: We must preserve the most minute of our obsolete habits, since we, irreducible Gauls, without customs, would lose our esprit de corps, our fundamental unity.)

The mathematician here is Galois, seen as “Gaulois-without-us”; the surroundings of field and Galois-theoretic wordings (irreducible, fundamental unit, field – which is the translated “corps” in French) were supposed to make this noticeable…

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Kowalski

I am a professor of mathematics at ETH Zürich since 2008.