January 9, 2017 Kevin Kelly
John Edward Terrell
Please note: this commentary, recovered on 9-Jan-2017, was originally
published in Science Dialogues on 20-Feb-2015.
In his acclaimed novel The Oxford Murders, the Argentinean writer and
mathematician Guillermo Martínez engagingly shows how easy it is to hide the
truth from others by getting them to think that a series of similar events—in
this instance, a series of murders—is happening because, when taken in
sequence, they appear to add up to a coded message that we are being taunted to
decipher.