Ludo’s failure would seem to support the conclusion that the critics Caroline Marie and Christelle Reggiani reach about The Last Samurai. In a typology of how mathematics has been incorporated into contemporary literature, they suggest that DeWitt’s novel ultimately disavows Sibylla’s mathematicized way of seeing the world. “Becoming a samurai,” they argue, “implies giving up the illusory quest of a perfectly mathematized reality in favour of the pragmatics of action, by nature unforeseeable and irreducible to axioms.” DeWitt would be suggesting that Ludo must learn what Sibylla fails to see: that strict adherence to standards of rationality and mathematized reconstructions of life can create its own forms of dysfunction.