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Alexander "Sasha" Karnokovitch and his family would like to mourn the passing of his mother, Rachela, with modesty and dignity. But Rachela, a famous Polish émigré mathematician and professor at the University of Wisconsin, is rumored to have solved the million-dollar, Navier-Stokes Millennium Prize problem. Rumor also has it that she spitefully took the solution to her grave.
To Sasha's chagrin, a ragtag group of socially challenged mathematicians arrives in Madison and crashes the shiva, vowing to do whatever it takes to find the solution - even if it means prying up the floorboards for Rachela's notes.
Written by a Ph.D. geophysicist, this hilarious and multi-layered debut novel brims with colorful characters and brilliantly captures humanity's drive not just to survive, but to solve the impossible.
Paperback Original
"It's bad enough that Alexander "Sasha" Karnokovitch has lost his mother, Rachela, but he can't even mourn in peace. After all, Rachela was one of the most brilliant minds in mathematics and her fellow professionals descend on Madison to pay their respects. Convinced that Rachela has privately solved one of the most complex problems in the field, the mathematicians have an ulterior agenda: to unearth the proof that they are convinced she has left behind.
This lighthearted core is interspersed with Sasha's childhood memories as well as excerpts from Rachela's "memoir" providing glimpses of her surviving the horrors of Nazism. The narrative lurches forward as it moves between these different perspectives and tones. The novel's bulk is taken up by the machinations of the mathematicians at Rachela's Shiva. This part feels occasionally stilted especially since the scholars are often painted as caricatures, brilliant minds who are lacking in social skills. Rojstaczer shows plenty of promise while exploring Sasha's relationship with his mother -- her domineering presence and outsized intellect leave him flailing for much of his childhood -- but unfortunately these angles of the story remain underexplored. Despite these shortcomings, there's plenty in here to showcase this debut author's talent." - BookBrowse
"High math, Eastern European history, and American culture converge in this hugely entertaining debut from geophysicist Rojstaczer." - Publishers Weekly
This information about The Mathematician's Shiva was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Stuart Rojstaczer was raised in Milwaukee and has degrees from the University of Wisconsin, the University of Illinois, and Stanford. For many years, he was a professor of geophysics at Duke University. He lives in Northern California.
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