Mathematician

THE UNKNOWN QUANTITY--Hermann Broch--Viking ($2.50).

Few U. S. readers, and not many critics, last year waded through a huge post-War German novel called The Sleep-Walkers. In Germany where it was widely read, its author, Hermann Broch, was known respectfully as a onetime businessman whose philosophic and scientific bent had led him to literature in middle age. Readers of The Unknown Quantity will echo that respect. The Unknown Quantity is brief (240 pages), carefully and clearly written, contrives a genuine atmosphere of intellectual excitement, but it lacks the human charm most readers demand.

Richard Hieck was a mathematics student at a German university. Poor, ungainly, shyly incoherent, he was a good mathematician and ambitious to be a great one. So intent was he on the higher nature of his beloved science that it seemed right to him to be contemptuous of the easy chatter around him. He felt "an amazement, tempered with hatred, at the volubility of the human race, the infamous readiness with which people strung words together into half-articulate speech without having the slightest inkling of the essential meaning of things." Richard's mother was just beginning to enjoy her widowhood: her husband had been a sinister "nighttime" character, who would not go for a walk on a spring day because "the world burns inside us, not outside us." The father's queerness had taken various forms in his children: Emilie had left home to pleasure, not better herself; Susanne was a quiet religious maniac; Otto wanted to be an artist but had to work for his living.

As Richard's career progressed from Ph.D. to assistant at the observatory and collaborator in research, he had moments when his equation felt the lack of some unknown quantity. When a pretty girl student made eyes and legs at him, he began to blunder toward a solution. But the answer he hit on wore spectacles. Meantime young Otto was struggling with the agonizing fractions of adolescence: he suspected his best friend and his mother of at least wanting to be lovers, and because none of them had the wit to stop him in time, ran off one night and drowned himself. Richard found he was less pure a mathematician than he had thought, doubted that he would ever solve man's microcosmic problem, but knew he would never give up trying.

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