Manil Suri, Mathematics, on BBC’s “The Forum”

Manil Suri, professor of mathematics, was recently a guest on the BBC World Service program “The Forum” to discuss “Obsessions, new and old, in literature and technology.”  Joining Suri on the show, which was hosted by Bridget Kendall, were internet analyst and cyber-sceptic Evgeny Morozo and Spanish novelist and translator Javier Marias.

Suri discussed his recent novel, “The City of Devi,” in which the main character is obsessed with bringing a pomegranate to her missing husband.

“She feels that having this symbol almost will somehow lead her to her husband. And in a way it does tell her something about her marriage, but in a very unexpected fashion,” he said.

The guests also spoke about our obsession with technology.  “There’s this belief in technology and computers – these are going to really save us from having to think,” Suri said.

Manil Suri, Mathematics, on the Marc Steiner Show

Manil Suri, professor of mathematics, was a guest on the Marc Steiner show on March 14 to discuss his new book “The City of Devi.”

Steiner asked Suri how he reconciles his background in mathematics with the spiritual themes that run through his books, which feature Hindu deities.

“There’s a lot of contrast. On the one hand, I’m very enamored by these ideas from spirituality and almost mysticism,” “But on the other hand, the logical part of me says, ‘hey, wait a minute, that’s not really what’s happening.’”

The full segment can be heard here.

Manil Suri, Mathematics, on “The Daily Beast”

Manil Suri was deep into writing his latest novel, “The City of Devi,” when he realized something alarming: the novel was impossible to finish. The mathematics professor even used a mathematical construct, a possibility tree, to arrive at his conclusion.  He described the process of creating this mathematical “proof” in an essay for “The Daily Beast.”

Of course, Suri did eventually finish the novel, which was published earlier this year. Despite the fact that he disproved his own proof, Suri feels that his mathematical conclusion was a worthwhile endeavor, because it allowed him to reach the insights he needed about the story.

“My possibility tree still communicated something essential: a warning that the story could not be satisfactorily completed under the conditions I was imposing. I had been too beholden to literary orthodoxy, too insistent that the narrative obey the strictures of reality. It was time to loosen these constraints, let the plot freely borrow from whatever genre it pleased: adventure, Bollywood, fantasy,” he writes.

The full piece, “A Mathematically Impossible Novel: Manil Suri Explains ‘The City of Devi’” appeared online on March 15.

Manil Suri, Mathematics, in the News

Mathematics Professor Manil Suri has been in the news recently, as his latest novel, “The City of Devi,” hits bookstore shelves.

On Wednesday, February 6, the Baltimore City Paper published a review of the book, saying that it “is “streamlined and cinematically purified… by narrowing his focus and heightening the emotional tenor of the city, he manages to give it a mythological quality.”

Suri also spoke with the Baltimore Sun for a February 3 interview entitled “UMBC mathematician Manil Suri publishes his third novel.”  This novel completes a trilogy about hindu dieties that Suri began with his 2001 book, “The Death of Vishnu.”  Speaking of this book, Suri said, “When I first started thinking about the trilogy, I always had an arc in my mind of the past, the present and the future… But my book about the future was an evolution. It took me 12 years to write. Even when I got to the midpoint, I didn’t know if it was going to be about Brahma or about Devi. Every story needs a creator. As the most well-known, Brahma was the most logical face to put there. But when you dig deeper, the true Hindu trinity really is Vishnu, Shiva and Devi, who represent the three different strands of Hinduism. Brahma was a later addition. He came in during the post-Vedic period, when people tried to tie those strands together. Because Devi has nine incarnations, she can be anything: the destroyer, the creator and the symbol of art. But, Brahma’s mythology is such that he doesn’t get activated until you’re at the end of a cycle. If I had been writing a post-apocalyptic novel, he might have been the right person.”

Suri also spoke to NPR’s Weekend Edition, where he talked about how leaving India has affected his writing about the country. “I grew up in like one room of a large apartment, and we were kind of the only Hindu family in an apartment that had three families of Muslims, so you know, that’s why I think the Hindu-Muslim thing keeps coming up in my novels. I don’t think I would have had the space or the quiet to actually concentrate on fiction. I do think that coming here I can sort of see the country much more — much more like a globe, like you would see the moon from the Earth or vice versa. And I think especially with this novel, I can see these relations like, OK, [India is] sitting there next to Pakistan and China, you know, all three of which are armed with nuclear weapons. So that’s one of the advantages,” he said.

Finally, on February 6, Suri spoke with WYPR’s “Maryland Morning” for a segment called “When a Mathematician Turns Novelist.”  Host Tom Hall pointed out that the theme of a trinity appears often throughout the book, and Suri admitted that even he didn’t pick up on the theme until late in his writing process. “I actually gave up this novel, and I started a new novel, and I told my agent ‘This is not going to work.’ I even had a mathematical proof that this novel could not be completed. .. and then when I saw the number three, I realized that these three characters have to somehow come together,” Suri said.

“The City of Devi” Reviewed in the Washington Post

On January 29, the Washington Post praised “The City of Devi” by Manil Suri, professor of mathematics, in a review by Ron Charles.

Proclaiming it “the best sex comedy of the year about nuclear war between India and Pakistan,” Charles commends the book for the fact that it “never dips toward cynicism, never loses its essential sweetness, no matter how cruel or kooky the action… the whole story manages to keep hurtling along toward a surprisingly tender ending.”

“Even amid the wondrous variety of contemporary Indian fiction, Suri’s work stands apart, mingling comedy and death, eroticism and politics, godhood and Bollywood like no one else,” he wrote.

The full review can be read here.

Book Presentation: “The City of Devi” (2/6)

On Wednesday, February 6, at 7 p.m. in the Allbin O. Kuhn Library Gallery, the Humanities Forum will present a reading and signing of The City of Devi, the new novel by Manil Suri, professor of mathematics.

This will be the inaugural reading from The City of Devi, a dazzling, multilayered novel that not only encompasses a searing love story but, with its epic reach from quarks to mythology to geopolitics, also encapsulates the fate of the entire world.

Suri will discuss the cultural, religious, and geopolitical issues touched upon in his book, particularly in the context of India’s future.

About The City of Devi:

As Mumbai empties under the threat of imminent nuclear annihilation, Sarita, a thirty-three-year-old statistician, can only think of one thing: being reunited with Karun, her physicist husband. Why has he vanished? Who is he running from? How will they form the family of three he’s always wanted? To find him, Sarita must journey across the surreal landscape of a near-abandoned city, braving gangs of competing Hindu and Muslim hoodlums. Joining her is Jaz—nominally a Muslim, but whose true religion has always been sex with other men. Danger lurks around every corner, but so does the incongruous and the absurd: the patron goddess Devi ma has even materialized on a beach to save her city from harm. Sarita’s search leads her to this beach, thrusting her into a trinity so mercurial, so consuming, that it will alter her life more fundamentally than any apocalypse to come. 

Fearlessly provocative, wickedly comedic, and propelled with rocket-fuel energy, The City of Devi exuberantly upends assumptions of politics, religion, sex, and India’s global emergence.

This event is sponsored by the Asian Studies Program with support from the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences and the Dresher Center for the Humanities

More information can be found here.

Two Professors Discuss Collaboration in The Chronicle of Higher Education

In fall 2011, Michele Osherow, associate professor of English, and Manil Suri, professor of mathematics, collaborated to jointly teach a freshman seminar, “Mathematics and What It Means to be Human,” in which they explored the connections between the two disciplines.

They are discussing their collaboration, and its challenges, in a three-part series on The Chronicle of Higher Education.

In the first part of the series, the two discuss what led them to teach the class, and their experiences in planning it.

“Ever since the word problems my father forced on us at dinner, I’ve always been terrified of math,” Osherow says. “Manil had made the math in the play [Arcadia] interesting and almost familiar; the complexities hypnotized me a bit… Might the allure of mathematics captivate the incoming freshmen? Hard to tell, but if it could, I was sure Manil was the person to supply it.”

“When Michele tantalized me with a whole semester’s worth of such highs with a class full of enthusiastic (OK, at least captive) students, the endorphin factory in my brain went into high alert,” writes Suri.

In the second installment of the series, the two discuss the challenges of teaching the course (including their own conflicts), and watching their students discover the connections between the disciplines.

“I think the students liked those days when Manil and I went at it. I liked those moments, too, because I not only had to confront another perspective head on but also had to challenge my own. I loved seeing the baffled expressions of the students while their instructors disagreed; the things we were asking them to consider were perplexing and appropriate,” writes Osherow.

“They’d now glimpsed the future: the digitalization of the humanities, the emphasis on statistical and quantified evidence, the interconnectedness of human experience,” says Suri.

In the third, and final, installment, the two professors write about the students’ final projects (“Mathematically deepest of all was an instrumental composition that musically interpreted what it means to be a sine (or cosine) function—by a humanities scholar inspired to take calculus this semester,” writes Suri) and the ultimate value of the class.

“Though there are a lot—I won’t say infinite, but an impressive batch of natural numbers’ worth—of moments I’d redo if I could, I would not have missed out on co-teaching this seminar, tricky as it was. There is a language to mathematics, and I’m devoted to seeing what language produces and provokes.,” Osherow concludes.

 

Can You Solve President Hrabowski’s Favorite Math Problem?

The Imaging Research Center (IRC) recently filmed several faculty as they attempted to solve President Hrabowski’s favorite math problem. As told to Nagaraj Neerchal and Manil Suri, mathematics and statistics, and Anne Spence, mechanical engineering, the problem is as follows:

29 children are in a class.

20 have dogs.

15 have cats.

How many have both a dog and a cat?

Watch the video below to see the various methods and strategies used by the professors to answer the problem.

UMBC Professors Solve F. Hrabowski’s Favorite Math Problem from ircumbc on Vimeo.