The Three-Body Problem (Vanessa Duncan Book 1)

As a mathematician who also has grown up with the mathematics of the 3-body problem, this was a treasure to read. The book is written in an original form, in a sequence of letters (without replies). The reader can imagine stumbling over an old letter box in an attic telling the story. The story takes place at the time when King Oscar posed his prize problem (around 1889). That competition is a central part of the crime mystery in which three mathematicians were killed. The book is maybe not for everybody as things go rather slowly. (Not as slow than Robert Musil's "the man without qualities" a story about a mathematician in which on 1500 pages essentially nothing happens. This book can also be read by a modern impatient reader and something is happening: 3 mysterious murders. )

Same as the above review

As much as I tried to like and play along with the author, this book is slightly dissapointing. Maybe it has a lot to to do with the unfortunate form of letters that heroine send to her twin sister. Following the whole murder case through one persons letters is after a while realy boring. It is hard to draw believable characters in this form. One persons perceptions of the world around her are after all nothing but subjective outlook. A novel needs much more than that.

A fun book in an academic setting. The story contains a somewhat unusual mystery involving the mysterious deaths of mathematicians at Cambridge University. The narrative also includes puzzles, problems, and literary quotes that the school teacher-amateur sleuth-protagonist includes as part of her discussion of her teaching duties. I found these diverting by themselves, but they become important for the story as well.

Too long and rambling.

The first of the series of mysteries featuring a female protagonist with a mathematical bent.

Vanessa Duncan, a young schoolmistress away from home for the first time, is swept into the world of Cambridge University's math department just when three of its promising scholars are murdered. When her fellow lodger and budding love interest Arthur Weatherburn is accused of the deed, she becomes obsessed with proving his innocence. Central to the plot is the yearly historic math Birthday Competition (1846-1927) organized under the auspices of King Oscar II of Sweden. The solution to Isaac Newton's famous but yet unsolved "n-body problem" is this year's main problem. Given the scholars mutual snipping and need to produce creative work at a young age, there is thought that the scholars might have been eliminated because they were on their way to winning this prestigious prize.The story will interest readers who love puzzles and the workings of mathematical formulas. To Vanessa's surprise, women are beginning to breach the walls of Cambridge by attending two of its colleges. She also discovers that Germany and Sweden are ahead in allowing women to study, and hears about important personalities such as the inspired French mathematician Henri Poincaré and famous scholar Sonya Kovalevskaya. The puzzles created by Lewis Carroll for young people also are featured in the plot.The author uses the device of telling the story through a series of letters written from Vanessa to her twin sister. Sometimes this works; other times it fails as the best way to convey the minute details of Vanessa's day, her thoughts, and conversations. For example, the letters convey the complete transcripts of Weatherburn's trial, and her own fifteen page intricate court defense of him in which she sounds more like a highly professional lawyer than the shy, protected, unsophisticated woman the author has portrayed her to be. One's credulity is further strained when Vanessa takes a spur of the moment journey with two children in tow through three countries to reach Sweden, where she confronts Sweden's leading mathematician, Gosta Mittag-Leffler, and later the Swedish king.The is the first of the Vanessa Duncan series. The author, a mathematician, provides separated information about mathematical history.

Detective story and math puzzle all mixed in one wonderful novel with endearing characters. Set at a moment when the question of women's education was at an unprecedented high.

Catherine Shaw is the pen-name of an American mathematician working in France. She has written some books on mathematics for a general audience. Her first venture into detective fiction is set in Cambridge in the 1880s and is in the form of letters from a young woman who is trying to make her way as a teacher in a world where women have few options and find it almost impossible to follow an academic career. The title of the book is a pun. Three dead bodies duly appear, but the plot is also intimately connected with an international competition, sponsored by the King of Sweden, for a solution to the mathematical problem known as “the n-body problem” (the "3-body problem" is the simplest unsolved case). Both the problem and the competition are historically authentic, as one would expect. Amusingly, the deaths themselves are related to a modern mathematical paradox, that of non-transitive dice (and I don’t think that can possibly be a spoiler). I am a fan of historical detective novels and have a mathematics degree, so I thought I should investigate this. There are nice things, and in particular a double romantic climax in which the heroine first meets the King and then attempts to exonerate the man who is accused of the murders. However, in retrospect both of these scenes are too slick to be convincing. The middle part of the book involves lengthy reportage of the courtroom scenes in which the jury is persuaded that the accused is guilty, and I had to skip all this. The book emphasises the Victorian subjugation of women, and includes passing swipes at cruelty in boarding schools (what experience does Ms Shaw have of this, I wonder?) and excessive focus on Euclidean geometry in the university. At that time students had to reproduce from memory large chunks of the classic geometry textbook, and the (real, famous) mathematician Arthur Cayley is shown here as giving an obscurantist attack on those opposed to change. There was certainly much in late-nineteenth-century Cambridge mathematics that needed changing. Some of the themes here have been used by earlier writers. Dorothy L. Sayers discussed women’s education and prospects in Gaudy Night, and a whole sequence of her novels involve the problem of marrying someone who has saved you from the hangman (gratitude being seen as an impossible basis for a marriage). One of Edmund Crispin’s later novels (I won’t say which) uses the trick at the heart of the mystery here, in a way that is more intrinsically satisfying, although it employs symmetry rather than transitivity. I’m glad to have read this book but I don’t think I’d recommend it to others – probably not even mathematicians – without cautions, and I don’t think I’ll be trying Shaw’s other novels.

To be fair to the author, this isn't the book I thought I had bought. I had actually wanted another with the same title. Never mind. This, THIS piece of unutterably awful garbage is just that. Awful garbage. It's a thin plot, a diabolically thin plot, delivered in a frankly dire narrative with delusions of Jane Austen or similar without the merest whiff of the talent. Avoid.

This review is biased, unfair and based on chapter 1 & 2 only.I bought this book by accident. Reading it is my punishmnent.Very slow start, accumulation of Victorian clichés. The living proof that mastering the facts does not automatically enables you to write an engaging novel.

didn't like this at all