THE SOLITUDE OF PRIME NUMBERS

In 2008, Paolo Giordano, an Italian physi­cist in his mid-20s, published his first novel. Called “The Solitude of Prime Numbers,” it won Italy’s most coveted book prize, the Premio Strega. Because Italy does not have a robust reading culture, the fact that this literary debut has sold more than a million copies there hints both at the extraordinary magnetism of Giordano’s voice and at the human interest lurking behind the left-brain mathi­ness of his ­title. Already, the book has been translated into more than 30 languages.

 

 

 

Giordano took his title from mathematics, which is the passion of one of his two main characters, a brainy, emotionally detached boy 

named Mattia Balossino. Mattia finds magical potency in the tantalizing distance between numeric prime pairs — numbers like 11 and 13, which cannot be divided except by 1 or themselves, and that seem connected because of their proximity, but are not. “Between them there is always an even number that prevents them from truly touching.” The existence of such pairs, which appear with greater and greater rarity as numbers climb into the millions and beyond, leads Mattia to suspect that “solitude is the true destiny.” He has a friend named Alice Della Rocca, a girl (and later, woman) who’s as damaged and sociophobic as he is. Mattia sees the two of them as “twin primes, alone and lost, close but not close enough to really touch each other.”

Writing in The New Yorker last fall, the doctor-writer Jerome Groopman spoke with a scientist from M.I.T., Sherry Turkle, who warned that patients often develop feelings about the robot automatons that work with them. The patients “start to relate to the object as a person,” she told him. “They begin to love it and nurture it, and feel they have to attend to the robot’s inner state.” Groopman expanded on her observation: “People begin to seek reciprocity, wanting the robot to care for them,” he wrote. The biological roots of this impulse go deep, Turkle added: “We were wired through evolution to feel that when something looks us in the eye, then someone is at home in it.” So is it a surprise if, when friends and relatives look into the eyes of Mattia or Alice (who are, after all, human beings, not robots), they imagine an emotional connection where none exists? Any love invested in them produces no yield. Nurture at your own risk.