" My colleague Michael Harris, a distinguished number theorist at the Institut de Mathematiques de Jussieu in Paris, has a theory that three of Thomas Pynchon's major novels are governed by the three conic sections: Gravity's Rainbow is about paraboloas (all those rockets, launching, dropping!), Mason & Dixon about ellipses, and Against the Day about hyperbolas. This seems as good to me as any other organizing theory of these novels I've encountered; certainly Pynchon, a former physics major who likes to drop references to Mobius strips and the quaternions in his novels, knows very well what the conic sections are. "

― Jordan Ellenberg , How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking