Welcome back!

I think it's fitting to start the school year with an entry about a novel with serious academic credentials. Not just plain old academic credentials, but serious math credentials. An Abundance of Katherines, by John Green (the Printz Award-winning author of Looking for Alaska), tells the story of prodigy Colin Singleton, who has been dumped nineteen times by girls named Katherine. So after Katherine XIX is through with him, he sets out to describe the phenomenon in mathematical terms. The Theorem of Underlying Katherine Predictability is based on Colin's belief that "the world contains precisely two kinds of people: Dumpers and Dumpees. Everyone is predisposed to being either one or the other, but of course not all people are COMPLETE Dumpers or Dumpees. Hence the bell curve." And a single formula that predicts the rise and fall of romances. He finally works it out by page 186. Here's what it looks like:



Colin does a lot of other things in the book too (like go on a road trip with his friend Hassan, anagram the names of practically everyone he meets, and Find Meaning near the gravesite of a famous Archduke).