The Heart of Denis Noble

“Every part of a story contains every other part.” A fictional recreation of the early career of Denis Noble, a pioneering bio-mathematician who cracked a key mechanism in the working of the human heart (applying mathematical modelling to the function of the Purkinje fibres in the heart cell, a discovery that led to the first mathematical model of the heart. This story imagines the young researcher in love, discussing the ideas of anatomy with a Literature student A short story by the award-winning writer Alison Macleod, with an afterword from Professor Denis Noble himself.