Simon

by Alexander Masters

  It pinged.

  Simon leaped back and scuttled out of sight.

  “I am a worrier. My mother was a worrier,” he agreed from the shadows.

  Next, he couldn’t find a can opener. A series of bangs, as of a tin being chivvied with a carving knife, exploded out of the kitchen into the living room.

  I sipped my wine, leaned back on the sofa and watched the sun sink toward the horizon.

  Does this, in part, also explain his “loss” of genius? He gets caught up in silly intellectual tangles, problems about socks, trivial corrections to errors in the Monster Group Table, questions concerning the way numbers fit together in the bus timetables of West Yorkshire, because, as Conway says, he has no more judgment about what’s important in math than he does about sweet corn? Technically and creatively, Simon is superb, world-class—even now, despite his errors. It’s his sense of direction that’s gone skewy.

  “Yes, that is possible,” Simon replied from the kitchen in an unconcerned voice. The banging noises had stopped. They’d been replaced by clinks and thumps. He’d found something on the wall that he thought might be an electric can opener, and was trying to get the sweet corn tin squashed into it.

  After Conway left for America, Simon couldn’t work for a year. He was shattered, appalled, rudderless. Simon had looked up to Conway “almost as a father”—although it’s not clear to me exactly what either of them means by that comment, since you’d be hard pressed to find two men with less sense of what fathers do. When Conway went to Princeton, he left Simon defenseless. He did not offer to take Simon to America with him. And with Conway abruptly gone, Group Theory work on the Atlas finished and packed away and no one to goad and tease him into attacking fresh problems, Simon was lost. The popular image of a brilliant mathematician is a man who looks like Simon, and spends twenty-three hours a day alone in his mother’s attic solving the most difficult problem in existence. But Simon is a different and much more common type of mathematician. For his genius to flourish, he needs liveliness and company. Isolation in a garret destroys his force. Untalkative, withdrawn, ham-fisted, a grunter when talking to his biographer, as a genius Simon needs comradeship, hilarity and someone who’ll make him dance all over mathematics in a salsa.

  With Conway gone, Simon had no champions and few mathematical friends. There was no one to work with, so he did not work. The Mathematics Department sacked…

  “No!” shouted Simon from the kitchen.

  …refused to renew his contract. The professional career of one of the great mathematical prodigies of the twentieth century was over.

  “Aaah, hnnnh…I think I’ve done something wrong”—scrape, scrape, scrape.

  Simon had managed at the same time to undercook and to burn the Chinese-flavor packet rice. It looked as though a moose had squatted on the plates. He gave me the spoon, with the blackened deposits still impacted onto it, as my cutlery.

  “I think the other thing you have not considered,” he said without sadness, investigating his first forkful of Mackerel Norton as though that, in the end, was all that mattered, “is that I was not a genius.”

  Fretful about the corn, he had left it in the tin. Now he spooned out a little pile of yellow blobs, took a nibble, and urgently stirred the rest into the steaming, carbonized mush on his plate. “It will get reasonably warm by the time it reaches the mouth,” he suggested, with hope. Then he upended a paprika jar he’d found in the kitchen cupboard. “Shall we add some spices?”

  What makes Simon doubt his genius is not modesty. Simon has no self-curiosity and therefore no desire to strut or underplay his talent: to Simon, Simon is a collection of disparate facts and no interpretative glue.

  But he is a purist about language.

  Einstein was a genius; the German mathematicians Carl Friedrich Gauss and Leonhard Euler were geniuses; Feynman was a genius. Not even Simon’s most fervent mathematical fans would put him in their league.

  But by the same argument, I point out, you could say that Ben Nevis is not a mountain, because Mount Everest is.

  However, just last week, I got a text from a friend who’s a secretary in the Cambridge Mathematics Department. She’d asked one of the lecturers to look up Simon’s degree result. The rumor that Simon ranked at the top of his year as an undergraduate, scoring fifty alphas, when all you need to get a First Class degree is twelve—it’s rubbish. I’ve got it wrong.

  (“That sounds in keeping. I have not had any ill effects from the sweet corn yet. Have you?”)

  Simon did not even do particularly well: a middle-rank First—maybe, thirteen alphas.

  (“It’s not surprising that I forgot about being the best ever if it never happened, is it?”)

  By no stretch of the imagination (going strictly by exam results) can it be said he was the most brilliant undergraduate mathematician Cambridge has had since Newton. Not even the best of his year.

  Is Simon therefore now correct about his lack of genius? Did he lose his ability fifteen years earlier than this biographer thought?

  No.

  At Cambridge, if you want to do research, you have to take a one-year postgraduate cramming course known as Part III. It’s a harsh test, designed to ruin relationships with girlfriends, crush illusions, destroy the green shoots of manly pride and lead to early-onset alcoholism. I took it, and the less said about that the better, yet this is the only occasion on which Simon and I have been mathematically comparable.

  (“I think that is an exaggeration!”)

  He also almost failed. Tracts of questions left unanswered.

  The lecturers shook their beards out of their sherry at the shock of it.

  Had Simon been an ordinary student, this would have been the end of his career in the faculty. It would have slowed down the research to have such a bumbler about.

  Fiercely, the lecturers bubbled at their tobacco pipes. It was inconceivable that he could have found the mathematics difficult. There was nothing for it but to amble up and down the Senior Common Rooms arguing violently in Latin and Greek, then to let the peculiar boy stay.

  The explanations for Simon’s average First and his awful Part III are the same: he was bored. It’s all very well saying that what you need is 10,000 hours of study to become a genius at a subject, but the genius is not in the hours, it’s in what makes you want to do such a foul amount of study: unless it’s delight, you won’t get a genius at the end of that time, you’ll need to get a shovel to scoop up a suicide.

  Eton was good for Simon, but they made one bad mistake: they encouraged him to start a university degree when he was fifteen. He did brilliantly. A top First. Extra prizes sprinkled on top. Name splashed in the national press.

  But when Simon went to Cambridge, the lecturers there—possibly out of sheer arrogance—encouraged him to take the second half of his undergraduate degree all over again. For a whole year, at a time when his brain was at its peak of receptiveness and joy, they tortured him with repetition. Looked at in this light, he’s lucky his genius didn’t collapse altogether.

  That’s what happened to his ex-Olympiad partner, Nick Wedd, last seen breaking into Simon’s rooms in Chapter 29.

  Like Simon, Nick had had a phenomenal intuitive gift. By the time he was twelve, he could write down answers in math lessons without any calculation at all (although he’d learned that “I had to provide workings, which was a string of gibberish that kept the teacher happy. If there was enough gibberish and then the right answer then you got a tick”). At the Mathematics Olympiad in 1969, in which Simon achieved 100 percent for the second time, he scored the second highest possible award. Many postgraduates couldn’t do nearly as well, and Nick was fifteen.

  The only thing that can explain what happened next is that his schoolteacher went mad. When Nick returned in triumph, instead of celebrating his talent and allowing him to indulge it, this absurd man forced him repeatedly, for two years, to sit in the schoolroom and solve trivial A-Level problems. PET studies measuring the brain act
ivity of calculating prodigies have found they recruit different regions of the brain from ordinary people. They don’t perform their sums in the same dull and schoolish way as the rest of us. But this teacher was determined, once and for all, to bring Nick down to a level of pedantry he could understand and for him to “provide workings.” The result: Nick’s ability ruined by boredom. One of the finest young minds in the country two years before, he got a C in his A-Level exam and was told by his school not to bother applying to study mathematics at university, nor ever to think again about being a mathematician.

  The insistence that Simon redo his final undergraduate year at Cambridge even after gaining a superb degree in London meant that he skipped his undergraduate lessons and wandered down the corridor to the more interesting postgraduate, Part III lectures. Then, after he had yawned through his finals for the second time, the university administrators insisted he do the Part III officially, even though he’d already unofficially taken all the courses that interested him—his second year, therefore, of tedious repetition. Simon went to sleep.

  It was only once he got past this silly administrative process and discovered Professor Conway that his genius again found its narrow but supreme strength.

  To prodigies, talent doesn’t come from hours of hard work, it comes from delight. As long as they find what they do delightful, they’ll keep at it. But over-ambitious parents, inflexible math teachers and humdrum university programs can destroy the delight in as little as six months; shortly after, the brilliance withers away too. Conway believes it is almost always a bad idea to send math prodigies to university at an early age. They rarely, when you do, come to anything as adults. It is too early to destroy a child’s social life and regiment his thought. Let the child roam. Give him an expert tutor, but for as long as possible let him stay free and guided by delight.

  “As I say,” said Simon, finishing off his plate of mush and the last speck of sweet corn with a sigh of satisfaction and leaning back to watch the sun disappear into the sea, “I call the time Conway left Cambridge my bereavement.”

  34

  Me: Looking back, if you could change one thing about your life, what would it be?

  Simon: I would have been more sensible. I would have taken more care over the routes I took.

  Me: You mean you’d have taken more care in the type of work you did for your mathematical career?

  Simon: No. I mean I would have taken more care planning my bus routes.

  Aside from a recent mugging on Jesus Green in Cambridge, when three men forced him onto his knees and made him beg for mercy because he looked like a homeless person, Simon’s life has not been troubled by excitement during these last months.

  He doesn’t look on time as most of the rest of us do, moving from incident to incident; he dwells either in satisfaction or out of it. You can bob along the west coast of Norway with Simon, staring for hours at surging mountains and fantastical contortions of rock face, without feeling that a single thought has passed through his head.

  His sole phrase for everything—from the vertiginous cliffs and crash of mountains to the langoustine, crevettes and lumpfish caviar that cruise boats lay out on platters like pearled swatches every lunchtime, is “It’s alright.”

  “On your right, you see the town of Standa!” shouted the polite ferry guide on our excursion down Geirangerfjord, after our day in the Bergen woods. “Standa has the only pizza-making factory in Norway, thank you.”

  Palisades of cliffs thundered against the sky; waterfalls—braided, crashing, bounced out from precipices, exploding diamond speckles high across our heads—plunged into a muffle of trees a thousand feet above, and re-emerged as bathtub bubbles next to the hull of our boat. Simon’s response? “It’s alright.”

  “And please don’t spell it ‘alright’. I have always insisted strongly on spelling it as two words, so please do the same.”

  He feels certain spellings are wrong in a “visceral” sort of way.

  “Ja,” continues Polite Ferry Guide, “and on those farms on the cliffs, livestock and children must be kept tethered to stop them falling over the edge—thank you.” Toppling crags and looming escarpments blocked out and released the heat of the sun. A sea eagle soared in predatory arcs among wisps of cloud. “Und the only way to get a cow there is to carry it up as a calf. Ja, in the nineteenth century, when the taxman is visiting, the farmers hide all the ladders which stop you falling off the mountain.”

  The water in the middle of the fjord, still as ice, reflected clouds. It seemed as though the mountains were flinging the sky itself back and forth between their peaks.

  “It’s all right,” asserted Simon.

  “Can’t you think of anything to say but ‘all right’?” I cried.

  “My mother used to complain of the same thing,” agreed Simon contentedly.

  As a matter of fact, I’m not unsympathetic. How do you describe the west coast of Norway? What words could possibly take on the job? At the end of this fjord is a tourist center, where another cruise ship was berthed next to the knitted-goods shop, its house-sized propellers murmuring; hundreds of tourists were on the dock, each carrying a shopping bag containing a squash-featured, pot-bellied, turnip-limbed doll with floor-length pink nylon hair.

  Mathematicians, in order to make progress with the notion of infinity, often talk about it in terms of division by zero: zero will go into seven (for example) a limitless (i.e., infinite) number of times. To rephrase infinity like this brings the idea closer to us, and a little further from mysticism. It hems the subject in a little. Everybody can relate to zero. Norwegians do the same thing with beauty: faced with the inexpressible splendor of their mountains and the glacial stillness of their fjords, they have invented trolls.

  The journey up the coast of Norway into twenty-four-hour daylight takes five days and is accomplished by the eleven liveried ships of the Hurtigruten line, which are in constant rotation, bringing supplies and vast parcels on pallets to the coastal villages. They greet each other among the islands with a clangor of sirens. Our ship was the 11,000-tonne Richard With, named after the man who set up the company around the turn of the last century.

  Each evening I pushed Simon’s unbending socks off the side table, set up my digital voice recorder and mic, and tried to conduct an interview. But it was hard to fix his attention. Every time a mountain passed by Simon’s nose rose furtively, drawing his head and body up after it—as if he really thought I might not notice—so that he could get his eyes over the porthole ledge and see what interesting coastal landmarks he had missed.

  Or he was afflicted by a sudden starvation, and had to lunge around his duffel looking for Bombay mix, then re-emerge, sucking grease and beige bits off his fingers.

  As I clipped the microphone to his T-shirt, he fidgeted and bounced and flicked through his Thomas Cook European Railway Timetable, wondering: “Where is Chernobyl? Is there a train going there that stops to pick up radioactive passengers?”

  “Simon, please! Concentrate.”

  “Sorry.”

  Sometimes I tried a long run-up. I retreated back half a century to the horizon of his existence—the most basic questions; the necessary conditions of life. Take a deep breath, clench fists and…“Right, ready? Good, right, go!”…zing forward:

  “When were you born?”

  “Twenty-eighth of February 1952.”

  “What was your mother’s name?”

  “Helene.”

  “What was your father’s name?”

  “Richard.”

  “What was he like?”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t understand such philosophical questions.”

  Simon’s mind can’t keep off public-transport campaigning. He insists that I take this “opportunity” to include “a mention of his conversation with fellow passengers who have been inconvenienced because the link between Lerwick [Shetland] and Bergen has been axed, so they cannot enjoy this trip of a lifetime with the same ease that we do. Links from
Scrabster and Newcastle have also gone.”

  “It is important for readers to learn at least some useful information in your book,” he remarks tartly. “You can also add that I was not looking up services for radioactive passengers, I was working out the bare bones of how a Hurtigruten-like service could usefully be introduced in the Western and Northern Isles of Scotland, stimulating our sustainable-tourism industry. Now that I have worked it out I am wondering how to promote the idea, and suggest anyone who is interested get in touch with me via the publishers or the author’s website.”

  “Right, good, returning to the biography…” I clicked on the record button. “Why do you think your genius vanished?”

  “Aaaaah, hhnn…Can we stop now? I think I’d like a banana.”

  As you go farther north, the houses become increasingly blockish and made with corrugated iron. The requirements of survival are evident: oil-storage tanks, fish-processing plants, mobile-phone masts, shipyards—instead of being set aside from the town, these sorts of municipal landmarks start to gather round the high street with the houses, as if cringing against the cold. By the time we reach the North Cape the battle to jolly things up is lost.

  On Meagre Island, 120 kilometers above the geographical treeline, the wind blasts away any vegetation above toe height.

  “Here they have two supermarkets,” announced the tour guide with a proud puff, “and, ja, a retirement home, thank you!”

  There is more life in the air and much more underwater than on the land of Meagre Island. In winter even the reindeer vamoose. The 7,000-strong herd that grazes this island, gnawing the specks of lichen from the rocks, belongs to six Sami families. Every spring they ship the reindeer over on military landing vessels, and at the end of every summer, before the weather turns absurd with nastiness, they herd them up again, goad them to the edge of the water, and make them swim across the strait to the mainland. After that, it’s a three-week trek through Norway, over Sweden, back to the Finnish–Russian border, where the Sami have their farms. On the few days of the year when the water reaches above 10°C the locals themselves nip out to a dire fifty-foot stretch of gray sand to have a swim. They call it Copacabana.