I first heard of this book as referenced early on in Phillip Ball’s Critical Mass: How One Thing Leads to Another. Also in the throes of an unrequited crush on a mathematician, of course I sought this out. I still don’t understand my mathematician, but it deepened my appreciation of the Austro-Hungarian empire as it dwindled, and of its gifts to the world. It’s also a strange, strange book, one that is literally mind-altering in the Lars Paul Linden Eating Eight sense.

Pity it was never finished. But then, how Kafkaesque…