Logical Seduction and Historical Delusion

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.