p-list backstory

[Michael Bailey]

i used to think "peruse" meant to skim, was tickled to find not so
very long ago that it meant the opposite

i've been "perusing" (in my erroneous way) the p-list archives and
found a reference to this post
http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0003&msg=45243

from Thomas Eckhardt:
>Just wishful thinking, I guess, but did Naumann say anything at all about
>Pynchon's current projects?  Anything about the next book?

>No wishful thinking: Michael Naumann said that Pynchon had told him that a
>new novel was in the works. In its center (if that is the term to use here)
>is supposed to stand a young female Russian mathematician, who at the
>beginning of the century belonged to the circle around David Hilbert, the
>famous mathematician then teaching in Goettingen. She then falls in love
>with a colleague...

from the Wikipedia article on Sofia Kovalevskaya

There seem to have been several roots to Sofia's mathematical bent.
Some came from her father, accidentally; he had studied calculus in
the army, and when they ran short of proper wallpaper for one house,
he used lithographed notes from lectures by Ostrogradsky instead.
Sofia spent many hours of childhood scrutinising the strange
scribbles. Something of it seems to have stuck for when she later took
calculus it came to her very quickly, as if it had always been there.

She adored her uncle Pyotr Vasilievich Krukovsky, a self-taught
eccentric with especial fondness for mathematics.

While reading a book on optics given to her by a family friend, she
came across trigonometric concepts unfamiliar to her at the time,
which she tried to explain on her own. She explained it in the same
manner it was explained historically, and the friend was so impressed
he implored Sophia's father to let her take private mathematical
study, calling her "a new Pascal" in the process.

Kovalevskaya had a crush on Fyodor Dostoevsky and practiced his
favourite piano work, Beethoven's Pathetique Sonata, to get his
attention, but he was focused on the older sister Anna and he very
probably proposed to her.

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i think it would be a treat to see a novelistic treatment of this