serpentine smiles

My Life and Functions, Walter Hayman. Walter Hayman was a mathematician who worked in complex analysis, but I heard about him first because of his daughter Sheila Hayman, descendant of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, who made documentaries about her family history (I watched the one about her family and the Nazis, which was powerful, and have still not watched the one about Fanny, because I don't think I'm its target audience.) Walter Hayman had a life that was in some ways not that unusual for a mathematician of his time and place, but still had some interesting features: he was born in Germany, grandson of the distinguished mathematician Kurt Hensel. Kurt Hensel retired and then died early enough to be protected from the worst effects of the Nazis, but Walter was Kindertransported to an English boarding school as a child, and lived the rest of his life in England (excepting some brief stays in the US and other travel). He married three times, outliving his first two wives; his first wife became a math educator who founded the British Math Olympiad team (with his help); his second wife was his former grad student who had come to the UK from Iraq, and he converted to Islam for her (but still continued to be a practicing Quaker), and his third wife was a successful writer and businesswoman.

This all sounded interesting enough for me to track down his memoirs, though I found it a bit disappointing, in particular because it didn't go into detail about the things I was most curious about. The sections about his early years were the best, but after that it became rushed. The title is appropriate; he does sometimes switch abruptly from reminiscences to a mathematical discussion (which I could follow but is not my field). However, I did learn details I'm not sure I actually wanted to know about his relationship with his former grad student who he eventually married, which was even more problematic than that description makes it sound like. It's interesting that he spent his life around smart, influential women; in addition to his wives, his Ph.D. advisor was the groundbreaking Mary Cartwright, and he had four daughters who all went on to have successful careers. But he doesn't come off as particularly feminist or thoughtful about gender.

The Summer War, Naomi Novik. This is a fairy tale novella, using many of the classic tropes, and a well-constructed one, as one would expect from Novik. I enjoyed it.

Teresa, Edith Ayrton Zangwill. Like the last Ayrton Zangwill I read, this is a un-proofread OCR'd copy: the book has just entered Distributed Proofreaders and will be on Project Gutenberg when fully proofread (at which point I expect I'll post about it again!). As I've come to expect from Edith Ayrton Zangwill, the writing is great, the social commentary is excellent, and I gulped the whole thing down in a day. The book feels like a response to Middlemarch, specifically the prologue that talks about all the latter-day analogues of St. Teresa of Avila who didn't reach their full potential, and this book's Teresa could be one of them (some characters compare her in-book to her saintly analogue).

Teresa starts the book as an idealistic girl fresh out of boarding school with a strong and inflexible sense of morality learned from her mother, who is a relic of the Victorian era but also a committed socialist -- and the theme of socialism throughout the book really helps Teresa's morality not come across as mere priggishness. (Vicki, who I am very grateful to for scanning the book from the British Library, commented that Teresa reads as possibly on the spectrum, and I think she has a good point there.)

Like The First Mrs. Mollivar, this is a story about two people who never should have gotten married to each other, and how they navigate being married anyway. Also like it, there is lots of good parts in there that is not just about the miserable marriage; I particularly liked Teresa's badass lady doctor cousin, though I'm sad that her roommate got shuffled out of the way to make room for a heterosexual love interest (the book does not use its femslash potential).