About
This website serves as a complement to the novel The Right Amount of Brilliance. The architecture of the novel uses Pascal’s triangle as a framework, as does this website. If you navigate the triangle, you’ll find illustrations created by the author, Nicole Wachell. These images were originally crafted in pen-and-ink and oil pastels, then digitized. The illustrations correspond with symbols and passages in the book.
About Pascal’s Triangle
Pascal’s triangle is an array of numbers that can be constructed through recursion (by adding up the two numbers above each number). While the Western world generally refers to the triangle as “Pascal’s” in honor of Blaise Pascal (a French mathematician), other mathematicians used the triangle centuries earlier in India, China, Persia, and other areas.
The triangle has many applications and properties. For instance, the second and third diagonals in the triangle reveal triangular and pyramidal numbers (respectively). The sum of the numbers in the shallow diagonals reveal Fibonacci’s sequence. The novel, The Right Amount of Brilliance, engages with these aspects of Pascal’s triangle in a way that this website does not.
Currently, the illustrations on the site are only coupled with passages in the novel that come from horizontal rows.
About the Author/Illustrator
When she’s not writing, Nicole Wachell is teaching high school English, raising her daughters, and exploring other forms of creative expression. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two children.