Around the same time, this article came out in theSmithsonianmagazine about five famous women in mathematics.
Id never heard of any of them, she says.
In the histories of math and science, women are often excluded.
Credit: David Noles; Ecco Press
Herself a recipient of a mathematics degree from UChicago, Chung spent years researching for the novel.
The book is nowavailable for purchase.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: So its been seven years since your first novel.
Around the same time, this article came out in theSmithsonianMagazine about five famous women in mathematics.
Even though Id studied mathematics in college, Id never heard of any of them.
I thought, Oh, I think this is my way in.
I did research for a couple of years.
The more I read about these women, the more inspired I became.
I started writing this woman, Katherine.
To overcome obstacles, you have to silence the critics that youve internalized.
Weirdly when I started, my narrator was a failed mathematician she was a math historian.
This was one of the ways that I tried to challenge myself.
I think 50 pages in, I thought, Why is she a failed mathematician?
Whats going on in my mind where Im not allowing her to have this career?
I had this immense realization that propelled basically the entire book.
I had to go back to start over…. You do interweave real-life historical figures into this fictional narrative.
Shes always aware of them.
Women or people who havent seen themselves in certain kinds of stories.
In the histories of mathematics and science, women are often excluded.
Shes constantly trying to draw links between herself and the stories that shes telling us.
This is how she navigates her life.
So this twist of Katherines parentage is a running thread in the book.
The other side of that is, Katherine has never felt entirely secure in her own family.
She doesnt feel necessarily grounded in her community or her family.
I was also struck by the way you employ mathematics as a novelistic tool and a dramatic tool.
For me, thats how I look at narrative.
When Im interested in stories, Im often interested in what they show about the structures of life.
How somebodys life gets organized into a story.
In mathematics, its how the physical world gets organized into these structures that are mathematical.
Its something that I struggled with.
A memoiristic vision limits your vision in certain ways, but I was free from that because shes older.
She does have a sense of perspective.
Its something that I was conscious of, particularly when shes narrating her younger years.
I didnt want it to read like she was 21, when shes in her 70s narrating.
That was the challenge of having it in first-person.
I wanted her voice.
She thinks in a very particular way.
She has opinions that come from the life that shes lived.
I fell in love with that.
She sees so differently.
I see things in terms of stories, maybe, but she sees things in terms of mathematical structures.
I really like Katherine.
The more time I spent with her, the more I admired her.
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