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There were lizards everywhere on the island. They came through the blinds at the open window, under the door, or through the vent in the bathroom. She liked having company that left her alone.
before she read the article in Popular Science she had never been intrigued by mathematics or even thought about the fact that the multiplication table was math. It was something she memorized one afternoon at school, and she never understood why the teacher kept going on about it for the whole year.
Dimensions in Mathematics was not strictly a textbook but rather a 1,200-page brick about the history of mathematics from the ancient Greeks to modern-day attempts to understand spherical astronomy. It was considered the bible of math, in a class with what the Arithmetica of Diophantus had meant (and still did mean) to serious mathematicians. When she opened Dimensions in Mathematics for the first time on the terrace of the hotel on Grand Anse Beach, she was enticed into an enchanted world of figures. This was a book written by an author who was both pedagogical and able to entertain the
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Pythagoras’ equation (x2 + y2 = z2), formulated five centuries before Christ, was an epiphany. At that moment Salander understood the significance of what she had memorized in secondary school from some of the few classes she had attended. In a right triangle, the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides. She was fascinated by Euclid’s discovery in about 300 BC that a perfect number is always a multiple of two numbers, in which one number is a power of 2 and the second consists of the difference between the next power of 2 and 1. This was a refinement
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Fermat, true to form, sorely tested his colleagues. In the margin of his copy of Arithmetica the genius penned the problem and concluded with the lines Cuius rei demonstrationem mirabilem sane detexi hanc marginis exiguitas non caperet. These lines became immortalized in the history of mathematics: I have a truly marvellous demonstration of this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain.
a local wastrel who could have used a good thrashing.
wanted to have a pleasant, sparsely furnished apartment that was easy to take care of.
When he was at his best he was brilliant, and when he was not at his best he was still far better than the average.
Salander was a genuinely moral person. The problem was that her notion of morality did not always coincide with that of the justice system.
Those pointless equations, to which no solution exists, are called absurdities. (a + b) (a − b) = a2 − b2 + 1
Blomkvist had learned that Svensson was an exacting journalist who left very few loose ends. He did not employ the heavy-handed rhetoric typical of so much other social reporting, which turned texts into pretentious trash. His book was more than an exposé—it was a declaration of war.
She had been lazy about her hours at the gym and felt stiff and out of shape.
The strange thing about the dog is that it did not bark, my dear Watson.
