保罗・乔尔达诺(Paolo Giordano) 1982年出生于意大利的都灵，是一位粒子物理学博士。2008年，他发表了处女作《质数的孤独》(The Solitude of Prime Numbers)。这部小说旋即风靡整个意大利，赢得了意大利最高文学奖斯特雷加文学奖。目前，这部小说已经被译成三十多种文字，2010年被改编成同名电影。
Excerpts2)
Prime numbers are divisible3) only by 1 and by themselves. They hold their place in the infinite series of natural numbers, squashed4), like all numbers, between two others, but one step further than the rest. They are suspicious, solitary numbers, which is why Mattia thought they were wonderful. Sometimes he thought that they had ended up in that sequence by mistake, that they’d been trapped, like pearls strung on a necklace. Other times he suspected that they too would have preferred to be like all the others, just ordinary numbers, but for some reason they couldn’t do it. This second thought struck him mostly at night, in the chaotic interweaving of images that comes before sleep, when the mind is too weak to tell itself lies.
In his first year at university, Mattia had learned that, among prime numbers, there are some that are even more special. Mathematicians call them twin primes: pairs of prime numbers that are close to each other, almost neighbors, but between them there is always an even5) number that prevents them from truly touching. Numbers like 11 and 13, like 17 and 19, 41 and 43. If you have the patience to go on counting, you discover that these pairs gradually become rarer. You encounter increasingly isolated primes, lost in that silent, measured space made only of ciphers6), and you develop a distressing presentiment7) that the pairs encountered up until that point were accidental, that solitude is the true destiny. Then, just when you’re about to surrender, when you no longer have the desire to go on counting, you come across another pair of twins, clutching each other tightly. There is a common conviction among mathematicians that however far you go, there will always be another two, even if no one can say where exactly, until they are discovered.
Mattia thought that he and Alice were like that, twin primes, alone and lost, close but not close enough to really touch each other. He had never told her that. When he imagined confessing these things to her, the thin layer of sweat on his hands evaporated completely and for a good ten minutes he was no longer capable of touching anything.
He came home one winter day after having spent the afternoon at her house, where she’d done nothing the whole time but switch from one television channel to another. Mattia had paid no attention to the words or the images. Alice’s right foot, resting on the living room coffee table, invaded his field of vision, penetrating it from the left like the head of a snake. Alice flexed her toes with hypnotic8) regularity. That repeated movement made something solid and worrying grow in his stomach and he struggled to keep his gaze fixed for as long as possible, so that nothing in the frame would change.
At home he took a pile of blank pages from his ring binder9), thick enough so that the pen would run softly over them without scratching the stiff surface of the table. He leveled the edges with his hands, first above and below and then at the sides. He chose the fullest pen from the ones on the desk, removed the cap, and slipped it on the end so as not to lose it. Then he began to write in the exact center of the sheet, without needing to count the squares.
2760889966649. He put the lid back on the pen and set it down next to the paper. “Twothousandsevenhundredsixtybillioneighthundredeightyninemillionninehundredsixtysixthousandsixhundredandfortynine,” he read out loud. Then he repeated it under his breath, as if to take possession of that tongue twister. He decided that this number would be his. He was sure that no one else in the world, no one else in the whole history of the world, had ever stopped to consider that number. Probably, until then, no one had ever written it down on a piece of paper, let alone spoken it out loud.
After a moment’s hesitation he jumped two lines and wrote 2760889966651. This is hers, he thought. In his head the figures assumed the pale color of Alice’s foot, standing out against the bluish glare of the television.
They could also be twin primes, Mattia had thought. If they are …
That thought suddenly seized him and he began to search for divisors10) for both numbers. 3 was easy: it was enough to take the sum of the numbers and see if it was a multiple of 3. 5 was ruled out from the beginning. Perhaps there was a rule for 7 as well, but Mattia couldn’t remember it so he started doing the division longhand11). Then 11, 13, and so on, in increasingly complicated calculations. He became drowsy for the first time trying 37, the pen slipping down the page. When he got to 47 he stopped. The vortex12) that had filled his stomach at Alice’s house had dispersed13), diluted14) into his muscles like smells in the air, and he was no longer able to notice it. In the room there were only himself and a lot of disordered pages, full of pointless divisions. The clock showed a quarter past three in the morning.
Mattia picked up the first page, the one with the two numbers written in the middle, and felt like an idiot. He tore it in half and then in half again, until the edges were firm enough to pass like a blade beneath the nail of the ring finger of his left hand.
1. prime number：[数学]质数
2. 本文英文节选部分选自小说的第21章，此时小说的两位主人公马蒂亚(Mattia)和爱丽丝(Alice)已经上大学。数学天才马蒂亚由质数之间的关系想到了他与爱丽丝之间的关系。
3. divisible [dɪˈvɪzəb(ə)l] adj. [数学]可除(尽)的，除得尽的
4. squash [skwɒʃ] vt. 挤压
5. even [ˈiːv(ə)n] adj. 偶数的
6. cipher [ˈsaɪfə(r)] n. 阿拉伯数字；数字
7. presentiment [prɪˈzentɪmənt]
n. 预感
8. hypnotic [hɪpˈnɒtɪk] adj. 催眠的
9. ring binder：活页笔记本，活页夹
10. divisor [dɪˈvaɪzə(r)] n. 除数
11. longhand [ˈlɒŋˌhænd] n. 普通书写
12. vortex [ˈvɔː(r)teks] n. 旋涡，涡流
13. disperse [dɪˈspɜː(r)s] vi. (云雾等)消散；消失；驱散
14. dilute [daɪˈluːt] v. 淡化，稀释