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Prime Suspects: The Anatomy of Integers and Permutations
An outrageous graphic novel that investigates key concepts in mathematics
Integers and permutations—two of the most basic mathematical objects—are born of different fields and analyzed with separate techniques. Yet when the Mathematical Sciences Investigation team of crack forensic mathematicians, led by Professor Gauss, begins its autopsies of the victims of two seemingly unrelated homicides, Arnie Integer and Daisy Permutation, they discover the most extraordinary similarities between the structures of each body.
Prime Suspects is a graphic novel that takes you on a voyage of forensic discovery, exploring some of the most fundamental ideas in mathematics. Travel with Detective von Neumann as he leaves no clue unturned, from shepherds’ huts in the Pyrenees to secret societies in the cafés of Paris, from the hidden codes in the music of the stones to the grisly discoveries in Finite Fields. Tremble at the ferocity of the believers in deep and rigid abstraction. Feel the frustration—and the excitement—of our young heroine, Emmy Germain, as she blazes a trail for women in mathematical research and learns from Professor Gauss, the greatest forensic detective of them all.
Beautifully drawn and exquisitely detailed, Prime Suspects is unique, astonishing, and witty—a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to experience mathematics like never before.
232 pages, Kindle Edition
First published February 5, 2019
6 people are currently reading
135 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
January 19, 2023
Very clever and creative. A great way to teach difficult subjects. Aside from graphic section, the written material that follows, under the heading of Dramatis Personae, is pretty interesting, if I say so myself.
August 15, 2019
I'm not really a fan of graphic novels in general, but was "expanding my boundaries" with a library program and my mathematician husband recommended this one. The pictures are amazing - they are bright and so detailed. I am sure there were lots of little jokes and pieces of info I was missing by not really exploring them. The topic/premise is intriguing - the book is a way to teach about various math concepts (most notably relationship between permutations and integers). The story is folded into a detective story. As a result, even though I was not already familiar with these math concepts, the story (and math concepts) were easy to follow. Overall, it was an easy read. Besides the math concepts, there are some interesting themes related to advisor-advisee relationships and to competition among graduate students. Also the role of women in mathematics. So plenty of fodder for discussion. Gave this a low rating because it's not a great fit with my personal interests, but it's actually very well done and I think those who enjoy math and/or graphic novels would enjoy it.
June 12, 2025
It's hard to tell who this is supposed to be for. I can't imagine that anyone without at least a passing familiarity with number theory, combinatorics, and probability theory would be able to follow the math. The artwork is competent and each frame is filled with intricate background detail, but it's mostly just talking faces: nothing in the imagery actually works with the dialogue to illustrate any of the concepts introduced here. You'd think a team of forensic mathematicians would produce some nice graphs or something to put everything in context, but there's actually very little visual representation of any of the ideas under discussion in the text.
But even if you do understand the concepts, the plot itself is almost incomprehensible (although it's equally likely that I'm just not smart enough to understand it). Two seemingly unconnected "people" have been murdered, an integer and a permutation, but unexpected similarities between the number of an integer's prime factors and the number of cycles in a permutation suggest these "people" were actually twins all along!...or something. Several of the scenes where this is all being explained are illustrated not by graphs or charts or anything that could help to visualize what these supposed similarities even are, but by background characters who are literally falling asleep from boredom while this is all being presented to them. I can't think of a more apt metaphor for this book.
Also, the narrator is Orson Welles circa F Is for Fake for some reason.
But even if you do understand the concepts, the plot itself is almost incomprehensible (although it's equally likely that I'm just not smart enough to understand it). Two seemingly unconnected "people" have been murdered, an integer and a permutation, but unexpected similarities between the number of an integer's prime factors and the number of cycles in a permutation suggest these "people" were actually twins all along!...or something. Several of the scenes where this is all being explained are illustrated not by graphs or charts or anything that could help to visualize what these supposed similarities even are, but by background characters who are literally falling asleep from boredom while this is all being presented to them. I can't think of a more apt metaphor for this book.
Also, the narrator is Orson Welles circa F Is for Fake for some reason.
August 17, 2022
As a librarian, I am currently trying to find books that share various concepts in STEM with an audience that may not know very much about them. So, I was intrigued by this graphic format. As another reviewer mentioned, the illustrations are awesome, detailed, and allowed the reader to immerse themselves in visual literacy. The idea of solving a murder using forensic mathematics was fascinating and something I didn't know existed. While I can't say that I understood everything being discussed between the characters, I was able to follow the plot. I also liked that the authors took the time at the end of the text to provide additional information about how the characters were named (famous mathematicians and Greek philosophers), the mathematics used, and even how music figured into the plot. I found it to be engaging, unique, and overall, well done. There aren't many graphic tomes about math that actually have a storyline. I would say that this would be appropriate for high school and above due to the crime scene and autopsy illustrations as well as the math concepts discussed.
May 7, 2023
Being a fan of books for laymen which explain tough concepts in a easily digestible and understandable way, I picked up this book based on some reviews, hoping to understand some bit of the mathematics the authors "claim" they intend to address. What a total disappointment it was! The story telling is also very poor, and the flow is broken frequently and you are left wondering what the hell is going on. Mathematicians who know the stuff already can understand this but then what's the point? Lots of concepts just go over the head and the reader equally feels clueless like the cameraman and Reporter at the crime scene. Now my biggest problem is whom do I sell this book to!
PS: the 2 stars are especially for the beautiful graphic design alone!
PS: the 2 stars are especially for the beautiful graphic design alone!
December 30, 2023
4 stars for effort, but this is more of a 3 for me. It’s a labor of love, and it shows, but unfortunately the execution leaves much to be desired. It’s fantastical, but not quite - so it ends up leaving me in this kind of uncanny valley where I’m not sure how seriously I should take it. They make no attempt to hide the math behind a story, which is fine by me (I can decipher the parts of it that I don’t already know), and I appreciate the analogy of mathematical investigation with detective work - but that’s where the good stops. Could have been much better executed but I appreciate the effort. I did enjoy this, but I would only recommend it to mathematicians or people who otherwise have a lot of familiarity with math.
July 22, 2025
I still don’t understand logarithms LOL but learned a lot and cool metaphor for math topics/research/proofs. Some typos in the explanations at the back😭 loved the women in math highlight and that I was able to read more about the graphic novel math and inspirations at the end
June 21, 2022
How strange. The central metaphor doesn’t really work and it can come off as a series of inside jokes for mathematicians. A two-star book plus one star for sheer panache.
July 21, 2019
Every now and then someone comes up with the bright idea of doing popular science (or in this case, popular maths) using the graphic novel format. Although I'm not a great fan of the genre, because it so vastly reduces the number of words available, making it very difficult to put across complex or nuanced information, I can see why the concept appeals. But for me, this particular attempt, illustrated by Robert Lewis, falls down on addressing the audience appropriately.
More on that in a moment. What Andrew and Jennifer Granville attempt to do here is put across a fairly obscure bit of mathematics - the relationship between the distribution of the primes and the cycles of permutations - using a very abstracted story in the form of a murder mystery where each victim represents one of the mathematical examples. The authors also claim in their epilogue that their aims include drawing attention to how research is done, the role of women in mathematics today and the 'influence and conflict of deep and rigid abstraction' (no, I don't either).
What we get is a strange murder mystery story where a maths professor is called in to help a detective, making use of two of the professor's students. They are trying to link two similar cases with very different victims. All the characters are named after famous mathematicians and supposedly explain the mathematical ideas they put forward, but this is not done in a way that makes the maths particularly accessible, hindered as it is by the need to compress all the text into speech bubbles and to waste 95 per cent of the page on imagery.
Because the storyline is so abstracted from the mathematics, the images themselves contribute very little. It doesn't help that they vary hugely in quality - some are well drawn, others clearly hurriedly sketched, so that, for example, on page 15 Professor Gauss appears to have six foot long arms. The storyline itself is disjointed, jumping backwards and forwards in time and involving the main detective in a journey to Europe that seems primarily designed to give him something to do while the mathematicians get on with chipping away at the mathematics (and doing autopsies, because, of course, that's what mathematicians do).
If this really is supposed, as the authors say, to give insight into 'the role of student and adviser' it seems that one lesson we need to draw is that professors choose their research assistants by asking trivial questions of a class and then pretty much picking someone arbitrarily.
But I inevitably come back to the audience. Prime Suspects is far too abstruse to appeal to the general graphic novel reader, while the fan of popular maths titles will find the lack of opportunity to explain, explore and appreciate context extremely frustrating; meanwhile the mathematical message proves incredibly hard to follow. The illustrations are crammed with mathematical in-jokes, which makes me wonder if the authors' true audience was other mathematicians - not to inform, but to entertain. It's an interesting, but ultimately unsuccessful, attempt at the communication of maths and the world of academia to a wider audience.
More on that in a moment. What Andrew and Jennifer Granville attempt to do here is put across a fairly obscure bit of mathematics - the relationship between the distribution of the primes and the cycles of permutations - using a very abstracted story in the form of a murder mystery where each victim represents one of the mathematical examples. The authors also claim in their epilogue that their aims include drawing attention to how research is done, the role of women in mathematics today and the 'influence and conflict of deep and rigid abstraction' (no, I don't either).
What we get is a strange murder mystery story where a maths professor is called in to help a detective, making use of two of the professor's students. They are trying to link two similar cases with very different victims. All the characters are named after famous mathematicians and supposedly explain the mathematical ideas they put forward, but this is not done in a way that makes the maths particularly accessible, hindered as it is by the need to compress all the text into speech bubbles and to waste 95 per cent of the page on imagery.
Because the storyline is so abstracted from the mathematics, the images themselves contribute very little. It doesn't help that they vary hugely in quality - some are well drawn, others clearly hurriedly sketched, so that, for example, on page 15 Professor Gauss appears to have six foot long arms. The storyline itself is disjointed, jumping backwards and forwards in time and involving the main detective in a journey to Europe that seems primarily designed to give him something to do while the mathematicians get on with chipping away at the mathematics (and doing autopsies, because, of course, that's what mathematicians do).
If this really is supposed, as the authors say, to give insight into 'the role of student and adviser' it seems that one lesson we need to draw is that professors choose their research assistants by asking trivial questions of a class and then pretty much picking someone arbitrarily.
But I inevitably come back to the audience. Prime Suspects is far too abstruse to appeal to the general graphic novel reader, while the fan of popular maths titles will find the lack of opportunity to explain, explore and appreciate context extremely frustrating; meanwhile the mathematical message proves incredibly hard to follow. The illustrations are crammed with mathematical in-jokes, which makes me wonder if the authors' true audience was other mathematicians - not to inform, but to entertain. It's an interesting, but ultimately unsuccessful, attempt at the communication of maths and the world of academia to a wider audience.
November 26, 2020
Per matematici hardcore
Il giudizio su questa graphic novel non è facile. Diciamo che se non siete matematici probabilmente non riuscirete a capirci nulla; e onestamente parte della storia l'ho compresa solo leggendo la parte di testo finale che racconta in termini "classici" la storia. Un matematico invece si metterà a cercare all'interno della storia tutti i riferimenti, al limite arrabbiandosi scoprendo - sempre dalla parte finale del libro - di averne perso qualcuno. In definitiva, diciamo che lo consiglierei solo a chi non si spaventa per la matematica! Ah: in appendice c'è lo spartito di Reverie in Prime Time Signatures, opera musicale composta per la versione teatrale della storia. Sono andato a cercarla su YouTube, e nonostante il modo in cui è stata creata devo dire che non mi è dispiaciuta!
Il giudizio su questa graphic novel non è facile. Diciamo che se non siete matematici probabilmente non riuscirete a capirci nulla; e onestamente parte della storia l'ho compresa solo leggendo la parte di testo finale che racconta in termini "classici" la storia. Un matematico invece si metterà a cercare all'interno della storia tutti i riferimenti, al limite arrabbiandosi scoprendo - sempre dalla parte finale del libro - di averne perso qualcuno. In definitiva, diciamo che lo consiglierei solo a chi non si spaventa per la matematica! Ah: in appendice c'è lo spartito di Reverie in Prime Time Signatures, opera musicale composta per la versione teatrale della storia. Sono andato a cercarla su YouTube, e nonostante il modo in cui è stata creata devo dire che non mi è dispiaciuta!
January 8, 2021
As a PhD mathematician, I feel like I'm the intended target audience for this book; and still I did not like it.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews