In 1869, Russia's most famous writer published his most famous work. War and Peace, Leo Tolstoy's magnum opus, is a perennial favourite for the title of "world's greatest novel". It is a reputation to daunt even the hardiest of readers; a tome so heavy as to make a librarian's knees sag. And yet, its size is inclusive: roomy enough for all manner of odd thoughts and fascinating digressions. Where else could you find a book fuelled equally by metaphors and maths?
I came rather late to the great Russian author (in my 30s – I could barely stand reading the usual fat novels at school). It is a long story, too long for here, involving high-functioning autism (which I've got) and fiction (which, for ages, I could not). Tolstoy's masterpiece, I finally discovered, had space even for the divagations of my mind. His curious mathematical asides left me hooked.
These are the controversial, or "boring" bits, resembling the tight and intense arguments of a pamphleteer: the pages that many readers tend to skip, and some editors to cut. They are wrong to do so.
"The movement of humanity, arising as it does from innumerable arbitrary human wills, is continuous," he writes. "To understand the laws of this continuous movement is the aim of history … only by taking infinitesimal units for observation … and attaining to the art of integrating them (that is, finding the sum of these infinitesimals) can we hope to arrive at the laws of history."
Calculus – which Tolstoy defined as "a modern branch of mathematics having achieved the art of dealing with the infinitely small" – lent the novelist a vocabulary in which to re-imagine the world. Even the biggest battles, the loudest leaders, the strangest stories, to believe him, arose from incremental change brought about by a multitude's infinitely small actions. If Napoleon fumbled while Moscow burned, it was not for any of the carefully thought-out reasons dreamed up by the historians. On the contrary, a commander's orders could only ever have effect if they coincided with the momentary, multitudinous conditions on the ground.
Mathematics, Tolstoy understood, is like literature: a way in which the world expresses itself. Words and numbers: both allow us to entertain pure possibilities, immune from prior experience or expectation. Perhaps that is why some of Count Leo's closest friends were mathematicians.
The novel's first publication in 1869 prompted much controversy. Historians howled at Tolstoy's "falsification" of their field. His fellow novelist, Turgenev, denounced the calculus-inspired speculations as "charlatanism" and "puppet comedy". But mathematicians, now as then, proved far more receptive. Stephen T Ahearn, writing in 2005 for the Mathematical Association of America, praised Tolstoy's ideas as being at once "rich" and "deep" and encouraged teachers to use them in their classrooms.
Why not? After all, calculus helped me to cherish the work of Tolstoy. A few pages of Tolstoy might well help learners fall in love with calculus.
Daniel Tammet was at the Edinburgh International Book Festival to discuss his book Thinking in Numbers
