Mathematics and numbers permeate every aspect of life in the One State. Characters are referred to not by conventional names, but by a letter-number sequence, such as O-90 or R-13. Romantic evenings are spent with “arithmetical problems” (14), and even the very means characters use for expressing themselves are couched in mathematical or geometric terms. For example, D-503 talks about how I-330 “had a disagreeable effect on me, like an irrational component of an equation, which you cannot eliminate” (3). The predominance of numbers and math symbolizes how, in the One State, impersonal logic and reason have replaced personality and feeling. Numbers also come to symbolize how individuals are interchangeable, replaceable parts of a greater numerical whole. Indeed, D-503 at one point talks approvingly about how the Integral’s production process moves on seamlessly after the death of a “Number.”

However, math and mathematical metaphors are also used to describe the disorientation of the neat mathematical world created by the One State. D-503 talks about how the square root of negative one disturbed him as a child. I-330 represents this irrational number, which “could not be thought out” (15) or reduced to any rational schema.