A mathematician by training and a writer by vocation, Hervé Le Tellier is president of the Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, a literary workshop founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and mathematician François Le Lionnais, and joined in 1967 by Georges Perec, a writer well known to readers of Tangente). He describes himself as "passionate about games and literary constraints". The author of countless works spanning every literary genre, he is convinced "that literature began with counting", through poetic meter, rhythms and rhymes (see our feature "Mathematics and poetry", Tangente 130, 2009). In 2002, he even co-wrote a short collection of humorous plays, Les Mathématiques en scène, which invites children into the world of arithmetic through theatre. At around the same time, the late Denis Guedj (see Tangente 135, 2010) produced the two plays One Zéro Show and Du point à la ligne (Le Seuil, 2001).
The talented Oulipian polymath packed his latest, prize-winning novel with characters, because, as he puts it, "I wanted my detective, my male mathematician [the probabilist Adrian Miller], my female mathematician [the topologist Meredith Harper], my lawyer…". With this formidable storyteller, who mixes genres with consummate skill, mathematics and the constrained writing it inspires are never far away.
