Peter Ross is an American radiologist who decides to spend a nice and relaxing holiday in Spain. But when he arrives, he is gently forced to perform an autopsy and place a secret package inside the body. After that his life is a bit hectic, he is beaten, shot, imprisoned, taken to Paris and back to Spain and finally betrayed by everyone… but alive. I really loved the tone of this book and laughed more than once. It is funny, a bit trashy and everything that can happen to Ross just happens to him. So cool.
“Well then, the next step in the problem is topological. Topology, as you doubtless know, is the mathematics of shapes. For example, topologists can show that a doughnut and a coffee cup are essentially the same. Both genus 1. You can bend a doughnut into the shape of a coffee cup, that sort of thing. But it can get more complicated”
“I’m sure.”
Indeed. Möbius strips, and Klein bottles, solids with only one surface. That sort of thing. Very tricky.”
“A solid with only one surface?”
The professor shrugged. “Why not?”
Ross nodded. Why not?
“However, we don’t deal with such abstruse matters. We are working with network theory, started by Euler almost two hundred years ago with the Königsberg bridges. There was a city with a river which divided the land into thirds. There was also an island in the river. The problem was whether you could cross all the bridges, and never recross any.”
“And what happened?”
“Euler proved, mathematically, that it was impossible.”
Listened to as an audiobook