A palimpsest arrives at auction with traces of a third century BCE mathematical opus beneath a medieval prayer book. A solitary twenty-first century Jesuit initiate seeking transcendence in numbers finds his own work stalled by his obsession with an intractable mathematical problem. A native Egyptian academician at the Library of Alexandria navigates race and politics at the court of the Greek successors of Alexander the Great to develop an encoding device powerful enough to shift the balance of power in a world increasingly under the shadow of rising Roman ambitions. A mathematics graduate...