A so-called “bilingual” Attic vase speaks two visual languages. One side is painted in the older “black-figure” style, the other side with the newer—and for us, more familiar—”red-figure” style.
Tetraktys mentions such a vase in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. It depicts the Homeric heroes Achilles and Ajax taking a break from slaughtering Trojans to [...]

Between the tracks was a row of metal tubes, like a suspended battery of organ pipes, with hammers in between. The whole apparatus swayed, the hammers knocking gently against the tubes, producing an eerily tempered music…
Tetraktys,  p. 186

Distinguishing authentic artifacts from forged or misattributed ones is an essential challenge for archaeologists and art historians. Scientific tests, though, often prove incomplete or inconclusive (or simply misleading). In such cases, the best line of defense against forged artifacts is an expert with a finely honed intuitive sense for authenticity—sometimes called a fakebuster. (In Tetraktys, [...]

When I hear the word “brainstorm,” my free-association is “tempest in a teapot.” To me, “brainstorming” is corporatespeak for a widely familiar, disheartening situation. A group of people gathers in a conference room to conjure uncharacteristic mental powers by magic. In a reckless sacrifice, they burn the meeting agenda. They wipe down the whiteboard. They [...]

Today is the nationwide U.S. release date for Tetraktys, bringing the long and exhilarating process of writing and publication to fruition.  I hardly imagined that any project could make my doctoral dissertation seem in retrospect like a cakewalk, as giving birth to this book did.  Yet whenever some element of Tetraktys came “right with a [...]

There are some who perceive a double Tetraktys in the thirteen stars of the Great Seal of the United States. Here it is, on the reverse side of the dollar bill. Each triangle (my overlay) frames the symbol’s ten points.

Cultural amnesia is a leitmotif of Tetraktys. Blog posts are usually too brief to breathe life into forgotten cities, religions, and heroes. But they seem the perfect place to spotlight bits of lost history under our noses–in the kitchen.

In the West today, most people know ginger as a substance vaguely commemorated in the names of [...]

Cryptography has had a long affiliation with magic and the occult, as in Tetraktys. But there’s a more natural affinity between magic and what’s called steganography. Cryptography is the science of hiding the meaning of a message; steganography is the science of hiding the existence of a message within a document.
Steganography’s operating principle is diversion [...]

RSA is a cryptographic system named after the inventors, Rivest, Shamir, and Adleman, who conceived it in 1977. It is the technical axis around which Tetraktys revolves. In the novel, a cult of Pythagoreans appears to have broken this cryptosystem, spreading alarm within the NSA (National Security Agency)—at least among those in the Agency who [...]

A nicely written article by Mark Baard on Tetraktys came out in the business section of the Globe today:
RSA Labs scientist pens a tale of cybervillains

Either Ari Juels is living an amazing double life or he really does have the imagination to make it as a novelist.

But in his first work of [...]

Ambrose (the main character in Tetraktys) is a chocoholic. Even antiquarian books with dark leather covers remind him of chocolate. Like this one:

The section headings of Tetraktys are ornamented with a silver coin.  The coin’s faces also compose the circles of the Tetraktys emblem illustrated at the beginning of the book.

This coin overlapped in time and place with Pythagoras himself. It’s intriguing for a few reasons, some historical, some mystical…

Shipping a pound of wood pulp across a continent is a wasteful way to send a few megabytes of data—data that can now fly through the ether in seconds. This downside of printed books is why I bought a Kindle a couple of months ago.  I’m happy to start bidding adieu to other print-book byproducts. [...]

Many authors wince at the stock-image covers that emerge after their books are handed off to their publishers. But I was lucky with Tetraktys.
The cover artist, Melissa Lucar, produced a graphic that I find beautiful. And I also enjoy it because its images are rooted in the story.