The Gift of Numbers (2 page)

But by far the most curious thing about the Professor's appearance
was the fact that his suit was covered with innumerable
scraps of notepaper, each one attached to him by a tiny binder
clip. Every conceivable surface—the collar, cuffs, pockets, hems,
belt loops, and buttonholes—was covered with notes, and the
binder clips gathered the fabric of his clothing in awkward bunches.
The notes were simply scraps of torn paper, some yellowing or
crumbling. In order to read them, you had to get close and squint,
but it soon became clear that he was compensating for his lack of
memory by writing down the things he absolutely had to remember
and pinning them where he couldn't lose them—on his body.
His odd appearance was as distracting as his questions about my
shoe size.

"Come in then," he said. "I have to work, but you just do whatever
it is you have to do." And with that he disappeared into his
study. As he turned and walked away, the notes made a dry, rustling
sound.

From the bits and pieces of information I gleaned from the nine
housekeepers who had come before me, it seemed that the old
woman in the main house was a widow, and that her husband had
been the Professor's older brother. When their parents had died,
his brother had taken over the family textile business, had enlarged
it considerably, and willingly assumed the cost of educating
a brother who was a dozen years younger. In this way, the Professor
had been able to pursue his study of mathematics at Cambridge
University. But soon after he had received his doctorate
and had found a position at a research institute, his brother had
died suddenly of acute hepatitis. The widow, who had no children,
decided to close down the factory, put up an apartment
building on the land, and live off the rents she collected.

In the years that followed, the Professor and his sister-in-law
had settled peacefully into their respective lives—until the accident.
A truck driver had dozed off and struck the Professor's car
head-on. He had suffered irreversible brain damage and had eventually
lost his position at the university. He was forty-seven at the
time, and since then he'd had no income except the prize money
he earned from solving contest problems in the mathematics journals.
For seventeen years he had been completely dependent on
the widow's charity.

"You have to feel sorry for the old woman," one of the former
housekeepers had said. "Having that strange brother-in-law eat
through what her husband left her like some parasite." She'd been
sent packing after she complained about the Professor's incessant
jabbering about numbers.

The inside of the cottage was as cold and uninviting as the outside.
There were just two rooms, an eat-in kitchen and a study that
doubled as the Professor's bedroom. It was small, and the wretched
condition of the place was striking. The furniture was cheap, the
wallpaper was discolored, and the floor in the hall creaked miserably.
The doorbell wasn't the only thing that didn't work: just
about everything in the house was either broken or on its last legs.
The little window in the bathroom was cracked, the knob on the
kitchen door was falling off, and the radio that sat on top of the
dish cupboard made no sound when I tried to turn it on.

The first two weeks were exhausting, since I had no idea what I
was supposed to be doing. The work wasn't physically demanding,
and yet at the end of each day my muscles were stiff and my
whole body felt heavy. It was always a struggle at each new assignment
until I adapted to the rhythm of the work, but the adjustment
was especially difficult with the Professor. In most cases, I
figured out what sort of person I was dealing with from the things
they told me to do, or not to do. I determined where to focus my
efforts, how to avoid getting into trouble—how to read the demands
of the job. But the Professor never gave me instruction of
any kind, as though he did not mind what I did.

On that first day, it occurred to me that I should simply follow
what the old woman had said, and start by fixing the Professor's
lunch. I checked the refrigerator and the kitchen cupboards, but I
found nothing edible except for a box of damp oatmeal and some
macaroni and cheese that was four years past its expiration date.

I knocked at the study door. There was no answer, so I knocked
again. Still no answer. I knew I shouldn't, but I opened the door
and spoke to the Professor's back as he sat at his desk.

"I'm sorry to disturb you," I said.

He gave no sign of having heard me. Perhaps he's hard of hearing,
or wearing earplugs, I thought. "What would you like for
lunch?" I continued. "Are there ... things you like or dislike? Do
you have any food allergies?"

The study smelled of books. Half the windows were covered by
bookshelves, and piles of books drifted up the walls. A bed with a
worn-out mattress was pressed against one wall. There was a single
notebook lying open on the desk, but no computer, and the Professor
wasn't holding a pen or pencil. He simply stared at a fixed
point off in space.

"If there's nothing particular you want, I'll just make something.
But please don't hesitate if there's anything I can get for
you."

I happened to glance at some of the notes pinned to his suit:
"... the failure of the analytic method ... ," "... Hilbert's thirteenth
... ," "... the function of the elliptical curve...." Shuffled
in among the fragments of obscure numbers and symbols and
words was one scrap that even I could understand. From the stains
and bent corners of the paper and the rusted edges of the binder
clip, I could tell that this one had been attached to the Professor
for a long time: "My memory lasts only eighty minutes," it read.

"I have nothing to say," he said, turning suddenly and speaking
in a loud voice. "I'm thinking at the moment.
Thinking.
And to
have my thoughts interrupted is like being strangled. Don't you
know that barging in here when I'm with my numbers is as rude
as interrupting someone in the bathroom?"

I bowed and apologized repeatedly, but I doubt he heard a
word of what I said. He had already returned to his fixed point
somewhere off in space.

To be shouted at like that on the first day could be a serious
problem, and I worried that I might become the tenth star on his
file card before I'd even started. I promised myself that I would
never disturb him again while he was "thinking."

But the Professor was always thinking. When he came out of
the study and sat at the table, when he was gargling in the bathroom,
or even when he did his strange stretching exercises, he
continued thinking. He ate whatever was set in front of him, mechanically
shoveling the food in his mouth and swallowing almost
without chewing. He had a distracted, unsteady way of walking.
I managed to find the right moment to ask him about things I
needed to know—where he kept the wash bucket or how to use
the water heater. And I avoided making any unnecessary noise,
even breathing too loudly, as I moved about that unfamiliar house,
waiting for him to take even a short break from his thinking.

I made a cream stew for dinner, something with vegetables and
protein that he could eat with just a spoon—and that he could eat
without removing bones or shells. Perhaps it was because he'd lost
his parents at such a young age, but he had less than perfect table
manners. He never said a word of thanks before he started eating,
and he spilled food with almost every bite. I even caught him
cleaning his ears with his dirty napkin at the table. He did not
complain about my cooking, and he remained silent as he ate.
Each time he plunged the spoon into the stew, he looked as if he
might lose it in the bowl.

"Would you like some more? I've made plenty." It was careless
of me to speak up suddenly like that, to take such a familiar tone,
and all I got by way of an answer was a burp. Without so much as
a glance in my direction, he got up and disappeared into his study.
There was a small pile of carrots at the bottom of his bowl.

At the end of my first day, I noticed a new note on the cuff of
his jacket. "The new housekeeper," it said. The words were written
in tiny, delicate characters, and above them was a sketch of a
woman's face. It looked like the work of a small child—short hair,
round cheeks, and a mole next to the mouth—but I knew instantly
that it was a portrait of me. I imagined the Professor hurrying
to draw this likeness before the memory had vanished. The
note was proof of something, that he had interrupted his thinking
for my sake.

Over the next few days, I introduced myself by pointing to the
note on his cuff. The Professor would be silent for a moment,
comparing my face with the picture on his sleeve, trying to recall
what the note had meant. At last he would make a little huffing
sound and ask me my shoe size and telephone number. But I realized
that something dramatic had changed when, at the end of my
first week, he came to me with a bundle of papers covered with
formulas and numbers, and asked me to send it off to the
Journal
of Mathematics
.

"I'm terribly sorry to bother you, but ..."

His tone was polite, and completely unexpected after the way
he had scolded me in his study on my first day. It was the first request
he had made of me, and he was no longer "thinking," for the
moment.

"It's no trouble at all," I told him. I carefully copied the mysterious
foreign address onto the envelope and ran off happily to
the post office.

When I returned, the Professor wasn't thinking anymore. He
was stretched out in the easy chair by the kitchen window, and as
he rested I was finally able to clean the study. I opened the windows
and took his quilt and pillow out into the garden to air. And
then I ran the vacuum cleaner at full throttle. The room was cluttered
and chaotic, but comfortable.

I was not surprised to find balls of hair and moldy Popsicle
sticks behind the desk, or a chicken bone resting on top of one of
his bookshelves. And yet, the room was filled by a kind of stillness.
Not simply an absence of noise, but an accumulation of layers of
silence, untouched by fallen hair or mold, silence that the Professor
left behind as he wandered through the numbers, silence like a
clear lake hidden in the depths of the forest.

But despite its relative comfort, if you had asked me whether it
was an interesting room, I would have had to say no. There was
not a single object to spark the imagination, no trinkets from the
Professor's past, no mysterious photographs or decorations that
might have amused a housekeeper.

I attacked the bookshelves with the duster.
Group Theory. Algebraic
Number Theory. Studies in Number Theory
.... Chevalley,
Hamilton, Turing, Hardy, Baker.... So many books and not one
I wanted to read. Half of them were in foreign languages, and I
couldn't even make out the titles on the spines. A few notebooks
were stacked on the desk, along with a scattering of pencil stubs
and binder clips. How could he
think
at such a characterless
desk? The residue from an eraser was the only evidence of the
work that he had done here.

As I wiped away the dust, arranged the notebooks, and gathered
up the clips, it occurred to me that a mathematician ought to
have some sort of expensive compass you couldn't find in an ordinary
stationery shop, or an elaborate slide rule. The seat of the
chair was worn down where the Professor sat.

"When is your birthday?"

That evening after dinner, he did not disappear immediately
into his study. Though I was busy cleaning up, he seemed to be
looking for a topic of conversation.

"February twentieth."

"Is that so?"

The Professor had picked the carrots out of his potato salad
and had left them on the plate. I cleared and wiped the table,
noticing that he still seemed to spill a great deal, even when he
wasn't thinking. It was spring, but still chilly once the sun set, so
the oil heater was burning in the corner.

"Do you send a lot of articles to magazines?" I asked.

"I wouldn't call them 'articles.' They're just puzzles for amateur
mathematicians. Sometimes there's even a prize. Wealthy men
who love mathematics put up the money." He looked down, checking
his suit in various places, and his gaze fell on a note clipped to
his left pocket. "Oh, I see. I sent a proof to the
Journal of Mathematics
today."

It had been much more than eighty minutes since I'd made my
trip to the post office.

"Oh, dear!" I said. "If it's a contest, I should have sent it express
mail. If it doesn't get there first, I suppose you don't get the
prize."

"No, there was no need to send it express. Of course, it's important
to arrive at the correct answer before anyone else, but it's
just as important that the proof is elegant."

"I had no idea a proof could be beautiful ... or ugly."

"Of course it can," he said. Getting up from the table, he came
over to the sink where I was washing the dishes and peered at me as
he continued. "The truly correct proof is one that strikes a harmonious
balance between strength and flexibility. There are plenty of
proofs that are technically correct but are messy and inelegant or
counterintuitive. But it's not something you can put into words—explaining
why a formula is beautiful is like trying to explain why
the stars are beautiful."

I stopped washing and nodded, not wanting to interrupt the
Professor's first real attempt at conversation.

"Your birthday is February twentieth. Two twenty. Can I show
you something? This was a prize I won for my thesis on transcendent
number theory when I was at college." He took off his wristwatch
and held it up for me to see. It was a stylish foreign brand,
quite out of keeping with the Professor's rumpled appearance.