'Adam' says: 'Those complaining about the

Overall, We is a great work if you are at all interested inĪn AOL visitor named 'Lispeth' comments: ' We has its problems, but it isĪnother anonymous visitor to this site tells us: 'I am required to read This must have been realized by Orwell when he stole most of Zamyatin's It is a fantastic piece of literature, and If anything, not on how mathematical it is.'Īnother anonymous visitor said 'We is a far more complex novel than 1984 if One should judge this novel by its philosophical stance The whole point to the novel is that reason and math are not good foundations The following contribution from Craig Myers offers advice for appreciating these mathematical metaphors:Īn anonymous visitor to this site (known as 'D') had this to say: 'This novel is a great literary piece of writing and should notīe judged on its mathematical content, or you will fall into the satirical trap of the But the horror of it is that these invisible bodies exist. 1, we know of no corresponding bodies, we have never seen them. But for irrational formulas, for my square root of 'Every equation, every formula in the surface world has its corresponding curve or body. In other words, love and death - yes, exactly, exactly.' Love as 'L' and death as 'D,' then L = f(D). 'Of course, it's clear: in order to determine the true value of a function it is necessary to take it to its ultimate limit. Yesterday, at the very moment when I thought that everything was already disentangled, that all the X's wereįound, new unknown quantities appeared in my equation.' Here are some samples of the way math appears in the text: The main character of the book, a mathematician named D-503, must come to grips with his love for the intriguing I-330 (lovely name, don't you think?) who gets him thinking more about 'I' (the selfish self) than 'We' (the OneState). The entire novel is currently available for free online here.)

Some particularly mathematical sections were reprinted in the anthology sections reprinted in Imaginary Numbers.

( We was written in Russian in 1921, published in English in 1924, published in Russian in 1952 in New York, and only finally published in Russia in 1988.

In fact, it is acknowledged as a source which Orwell used when writing his more famous dystopian novel. Like 1984, We is a book about a utopia gone wrong. Note: This work of mathematical fiction is recommended by Alex for literati. A list compiled by Alex Kasman ( College of Charleston)