“The Mathematician’s Daughter,” by Sonja Srinivasan (Fiction ’19)
“The Mathematician’s Daughter,” a short story by Sonja Srinivasan (Fiction ’19) was recently published by The Write Launch. Read an excerpt below:
The Mathematician’s Daughter (A Modern Victorian Tale)
The shortest distance between two points is a straight line. She jerks her head up with a start and sees the clock–9:40 a.m. There just might be time! There just might be time if Nancy runs fast enough, time to see John and confess her love for him. She has been working on a proof all night and has fallen asleep at her desk and is late, is late, for a very important date, and now she doesn’t know if she can catch him before he catches his plane. But how quickly can she descend that damn staircase that begins outside her door, the staircase that is an endless Fibonacci sequence that spirals and spirals down? Those old worn stones might cause her to trip over and chip a tooth, the fragment cleaving off in a perfect right triangle. She runs faster and faster, her hair trailing behind her, her footsteps echoing off the walls. These old Oxford colleges like Magdalen are more trouble than they are worth, though they are prestigious and date back from the 13th? 14th? 15th? Century, full of lore and history and funded by the coffers of kings and dukes and marquises, for they are damp and chilly and dark, unwelcome places to call one’s abode.
Read the rest of this story here: https://thewritelaunch.com/2020/05/the-mathematicians-daughter/
