Review: Enchantress of Numbers

Enchantress of Numbers by Jennifer Chiaverini
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I received an Advance Reader Copy of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I was excited to have the chance to read a novelization of the life of Ada Lovelace, daughter of the great English romantic poet Lord Byron, who is often credited with writing the first computer algorithm. That algorithm, described in Lovelace's Note G, was to generate the sequence of Bernoulli numbers (numbers commonly found in some Taylor series expansions, power series like the Euler-Maclaurin series and the Riemann zeta function). Lovelace's accomplishment, as a mathematician and hypothetical programmer of Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, has long been shadowed by the tragedy of her death at age 36. (You can read Lovelace's treatise about the Babbage Analytical Engine here) Lovelace, while perhaps not the most pleasant person, led a fascinating though challenging life. She was clearly a brilliant mind. She believed that imagination was crucial to developing mathematics and eschewed her mother's rejection of all things fanciful. The strained relationship she developed with her mother was balanced with the counterpoint of her fascination with her famous (infamous?) father, who she never knew and who died on the Continent when she was only eight years old.

While this book was by no means bad, I was left feeling that it lacked luster and life. Early on, I was bothered by the awkward narrative choice in the first part of the book, in which Annabella, Lady Byron, appears to tell the story of her marriage to George Gordon, Lord Byron, only for us to be told after some 40 pages of third-person narration that it is Ada herself who is telling the story of her parents marriage and then switching to first-person narration and explaining/justifying how a seven-week-old infant can know all these many things. The first person perspective and the narrative pace became tedious at times. The best I can say is that the book may spur readers to read a biography of Lovelace.

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