The Parrot's Theorem

The Parrot's Theorem is a French novel written by Denis Guedj and published in 1998. An English translation was published in 2000.

The Parrot's Theorem

First edition
Author	Denis Guedj
Original title	Le Théorème du Perroquet
Translator	Frank Wynne
Language	French
Genre	Mathematical fiction
Publisher	Weidenfeld & Nicolson
Publication date	1998
Publication place	France
Published in English	15 June 2000
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	416 pp (hardback edition)
ISBN	0-297-64578-1 (hardback edition)
OCLC	47023367
Dewey Decimal	843/.914 21
LC Class	PQ2667.U3555 T4813 2001

Plot summary

The plot revolves around a household in Paris: Mr Ruche, an elderly wheelchair-using bookseller, his employee and housemate Perrette, and Perrette's three children – teenage twins and young Max, who is deaf. Max liberates a talking parrot at the market and Mr Ruche receives a consignment of mathematical books from an old friend, who has lived in Brazil for decades without any contact between the two.

The household sets up its own exploration of mathematics in order to crack the code of the last messages from Mr Ruche's old friend, now apparently murdered. Mathematical topics covered in the book include primes and factors; irrational and amicable numbers; the discoveries of Pythagoras, Archimedes and Euclid; and the problems of squaring the circle and doubling the cube.

The mathematics is real mathematics, woven into an historical sequence as a series of intriguing problems, bringing their own stories with them.

See also

• Novels portal

• Forrest Library
• Numbers: The Universal Language

References

• Imaginary numbers, A review of The Parrot's Theorem by Simon Singh.