BTW, while interesting on its own, the article provides us with this little tidbit about the novel's author, Ethel Voynich, which is sure to be of interest to HN-ers (my emphasis added):

The melodrama of Voynich’s novel is matched by the extraordinary story of her own life. Ethel was born in Cork to parents George Boole, an eminent mathematician and the philosopher Mary Everest, whose uncle gave his name to the world’s highest mountain.

(And, yes, it really is that George Boole:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Boole#Family )

Ethel Voynich also inherited the misterious Voynich manuscript[1] which is one of the most studied texts in the history of cryptography: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript

[1] "In 1930, the manuscript was inherited after Wilfrid's death by his widow Ethel Voynich, author of the novel The Gadfly and daughter of mathematician George Boole. She died in 1960 and left the manuscript to her close friend Anne Nill" - from the Wikipedia page linked above.

Oh great, I've never heard of the Voynich manuscript now I've spent the last hour reading Wikipedia and watching this doc https://youtu.be/awGN5NApDy4

This is why I try avoid HN. But none the less, very interesting! ;)

I just wanted to follow up on this, last night I watched that doco and I found it very enjoyable, thanks for the link!

And she married the man who gave his name to the Voynich manuscript! What a strange, small world history can be.

The Irish are a small hyperconnected, global community. Having lived in Ireland for a while, the statement above does make me smile, but does not surprise me anymore.

So true. As an Irishman living in Canada, it does not surprise me in the least when I bump into a fellow Irishman and we know some of the same people.

My Canadian friends always think this is strange.

Kind of ironic, since I'm a Canadian living in the US and and every time it comes up, people tell me about who they know that lives in Canada. I realize they are just being polite, they don't expect me to know these people, but I can't help but feel that it's a little ridiculous. How the hell would I know Frank?

My girlfriend always does this to people when she finds out they went to x university. "Oh do you know this or that person". A university with 100k students.

Some people's brains don't consider scale/space when hearing a familiar connection. :p

It happens. I was once in SF talking to a total stranger from LA (pop ~4m) and when I mentioned I grew up in Dallas (pop ~1.3m), she said "oh, do you know [X]?" And I did.

How is this relevant? It seems she was born in Cork to non-Irish parents and returned to England when she was a child. Did she keep a connection to the Irish community? Had her husband any other connection to Ireland?

It's spurious to attribute it to Irishness. More to do with Eminent Victorians than any fantasy of Ireland as a distributed global village.

Of importance to my son, it was Ethel's nephew (Sebastian) that invented the Junglegym.

One of their great-great-grandsons is Geof Hinton.

What a family! George Boole, Herself (Ethel?), then Geoff Hinton. I wouldn't be surprised if history remembers Hinton more than his illustrious ancestors.

That's "Ovod" in Russian.

It was a part of the mandatory school cirriculum at some point, and a gadfly is one nasty insect, so the name sticks really well. Even if not everyone is Soviet Union read the book, pretty much everyone know about it. But it'd be pushing it to say it was a genuienly popular book. It was just a mandatory reading material, because ... you know ... it's about revolutionaries.

It's on Gutenberg: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3431.

I think that articles like this really should include a link to a copy.

For any one interested in reading, the kindle version is free on amazon as of now. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0082RG1LU/ref=docs-os-doi_0

I read the book in Russian. Great story