Simon by Alexander Masters

Author:Alexander Masters [Masters, Alexander]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-345-53221-3
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-02-27T16:00:00+00:00

must be, for reasons known otherwise only to God and magicians,

This man therefore believed—I lowered my arms at last, exhausted already by the algebra—that he could not ever be imaginative enough to call himself a proper mathematician.

Andrew tapped his fingers, beetled his brow—and made another mark on his pad of paper.

I’d read about how hypnotherapists work. Like biographers and mathematicians, they have to find the kinks in the surface of your problem before they can burrow into it. They pick on any catchy and summarizing phrases you tell them during the twenty-minute warm-up period, then repeat these over and over again in the sleepy bit to help drive you “under.”

“Simplicity,” I summarized. “What drives Simon is a search for simplicities. I asked him for a question to test whether somebody has mathematical talent. He proposed, ‘Why is 11 × 11 equal to 121, and 111 × 111 = 12321 and 1111 × 1111 = 1234321?’ Why, in other words, is that pretty rise and fall of the digits preserved?

“‘It’s not a question of why,’ I’d snapped, ‘they just do it.’”

But it is a question of why—and “why” is a question of discovering what is the simplest way to think about—visualize—sequences of 1s so that when you multiply them together you can see that obviously they must produce this charming answer with the bulge in the middle. I don’t know the reason. I can’t do it. 11 is just 11 to me, a pair of dumpy number 1s. I’d need to get out my pen and paper and devise ornate, well-trained formulas to parse 11 or 111 or 1111 into columns of units—tens, hundreds, etc.—then ram them together in a multiplicative frenzy that would leave x’s and y’s groaning all over the page. That would be my answer. But Simon does the opposite: he thonks down his pen; he sits back; he folds his hands behind his head; he makes one of his ghastly attempts at a whistling noise. The one thing all good mathematicians hate is honest labor. Instead of calculation, his mathematics requires an ability to see things in a different light, like those optical-illusion games in which you have to blur your eyes to turn a splatter of dots into a three-dimensional picture of an advancing stegosaurus.

“Right, Alexander! Feet flat on the floor. Relax and close your eyes. Ten…math is about finding simplicities…patterns…” Andrew begins in a church-crypt murmur. “…nine…don’t divide up rows of ones and ram them together…”

That’s when the trouble starts: I can’t close my eyes. They flicker like beetle wings. Every inch of me starts to itch; every object on the street bellows. That isn’t a van honking, it’s a barricade of French juggernauts. That’s not a scratch in my ear, it’s a weevil boring toward my eye. Instead of feeling sleepy, I’ve jumped in the opposite direction: I’m less hypnotized than ever.

“…eight…simplicities are everywhere and simple and you want to find them,” counts Andrew.

A jackhammer starts up. Ants are making a nest in my nose.

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