Although lovable (her signature tic, that absentminded way of blowing her hair out of her face couldn’t be surpassed in charm by Audrey Hepburn),
also blessed with the enviable properties of a mink coat—
graceful, unreasonable and impractical no matter what she was draped over, whether couches or people
(a quality that didn’t diminish even when she was marginally torn and tatty, as she was now)—
[she] was nevertheless one of those people whose personality proved to be the bane of modern mathematicians.
She was neither flat nor a solid shape.
She showed no symmetry at all.
Trigonometry, Calculus and Statistics all proved useless.
Her Pie Chart was a muddle of arbitrary wedges, her Line Graph, a silhouette of the Alps. And just when one listed her under Chaos Theory—
Butterfly Effects, Weather Predictions, Fractals, Bifurcation diagrams and whatnot—she showed up as an equilateral triangle, sometimes even a square.
Marisha Pessl
Special Topics in Calamity Physics
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