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Saturday, July 12, 2014

Today's #flashfiction #TheMathematicianAndHisDream

“Drink responsibly.”
Dionysus* #quote

Today I went to my card game thing, tomorrow there shall be another. Anyway onto the flash fiction!


The Mathematician And His Dream

         Professor Mentine wanted to be a writer but his only skill was math. He could be called the very best at math. He grabbed a degree quickly and managed to teach while easily making equations on the side for whatever sciencey, mathmaticy thing that needed to be done. People hired him to work out an equation for making their processors run faster, or guiding missiles, or running their nuclear reactors, or optimizing their accounting. Any problem he could solve. Except for the fact he couldn't write for the life of him. Yet he wanted to make a story of some sort. He wanted to be creative. Make a book.
        His grandfather read him stories when he was young and made him love the written word. And eventually Mentine read on his own and even read the works his grandfather created and wanted to follow in his footsteps. Create stories to entertain and make people happy.
        But Mentine had little talent for coming up with ideas in a strong flow. He couldn't even copy ideas into a narrative that well, ripping off someone still required him to write some form of original flow of description and thought.
        But he tried and tried and worked on coming up with some form of solution. During one depressed evening of working on writing he just fiddled with his calculator. At that point an epiphany occurred worthy of him shouting “Eureka!” He decided he would use the talent he knew he had.
He would use mathematics to solve fiction.
        So he began studying movies, novels, comic books and every form of story he could get his hands on. He even filled his house with the sounds of old radio broadcasts. He scrawled numbers, words and notes on page after page of paper.
        It took him three years to reach his conclusion. He wrote a book and it got published with moderately good sales. He would sell again, but he certainly wouldn't be famous.
       “Doctor Mentine,” his editor said to him over the phone. “I must say your work is very mass appeal, though probably the most formulaic thing I have ever seen. Most of its originality is from a mix of a whole bunch of different formulas. You might need to add something, more...you if you want your book to make it big.”
       Formulaic? Mentine thought about the editors words. Formula did fit a mathematician though. Mentine scrawled a few numbers on paper after call. But there is more to math than formulas, and maybe more to books and stories than the patterns he found.

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