by Miriam Sved
Sydney, 2007
The nerd quotient is very high in the room where Josh waits with his grandmother and forty or fifty others for the first glimpse of his real grandfather.
It is a surprisingly small room and crowd for such an illustrious guest, but the people who have turned out on this Saturday afternoon are giving off a compensatory hum of eagerness. The room feels poised, alert, as if everyone around Josh knows the momentousness of this day for him and his grandmother. From the back corner where Nagymama had insisted they sit – Josh wonders if she can see anything at all of the empty, miked table at the front – the audience seems to be expressing its excitement as a unitary organism, in bursts of fidgeting and coughing that ripple through its nervous system. The nerd factor is one notable characteristic of the organism – old nerds; comb-overs and sandals worn with socks – and there is also a Hungarian factor, which has a sharp poking effect on some intimate region of Josh’s lizard brain. At first it was just a slight kink in the frequency of conversational buzz in the room, and then Josh picked up one of his few Hungarian phrases, someone behind him saying, Hol van a vécé? – Where is the toilet? – and he started to pay closer attention to the chatter. Mostly accented English, an elongating and muddying of the vowels, melding together all those o’s and a’s and e’s, but also a few actual Hungarian speakers on the loose. His grandmother would usually be excited by this Hungarian factor, but she has been unnaturally quiet, and when he looks at her there is a diffuseness, a lack of focus about her, as if all her features have slackened and drooped. It makes Josh feel watery and strangely helpless, so he turns away and keeps looking around the room, assessing the crowd while trying not to catch Max’s eye. His friend, who arrived after Josh and Nagymama, is sitting in the opposite row of seats and is also scanning the room.
It is mostly men here, of course; a higher-than-usual proportion of thick-rimmed glasses and a certain jowly intensity to the whole scene, and Josh is troubled by a slippery sense of identification with the particular variables of nerd and Hungarian: a cellular familiarity that makes him feel exposed in Max’s presence. He would like Max to have no part of this meeting between the fundamental elements of Josh’s existence, and is strained almost to resentment. What is Max even doing here, at a retrospective about and by an ancient mathematician he had never heard of a week ago? When Max mentioned, late yesterday at his apartment, that he might come along for the event and to meet the horny genius granddad, he had implied that his presence could be taken as a personal favour: an act of supportive bro-hood for which Josh didn’t need to thank him. But Josh had been accosted by the disloyal thought that his friend, based on nothing more than a politician’s instinct for sensationalist journalism, might be looking for his own angle on the story.
Pali Kalmar is more than ten minutes late now, and Josh can feel the European air in the room begin to overheat with anticipation. The toilet-seeker behind him has shuffled out and back twice, and beside him Nagymama’s breathing is audible. He leans towards her ear. ‘Are you okay, Nagymama?’ Not the first time the question has been asked today. Josh is still rattled by that conversation with Bethany, the one in which it became clear that his response to the situation with Nagymama and Pali Kalmar had been somewhat self-centred. He has coached himself today to be aware of his grandmother as a person in her own right, with her own history that is probably no less absorbing for the fact that she is now unthinkably old. She is about to be reunited with an important person from her past, maybe even the love of her life. She is bound to be a little shaken up.
The only way Josh has found to put his new sensitivity into action is by asking his grandmother if she is okay, and by not contriving to sit with his friend and make fun of all the Hungarian nerds in the room. Nagymama does not seem to appreciate this new improved version of Josh: she has deflected all his questions about her okayness with shrugs and hand-wavings. Now, without moving her eyes from the front of the room, she says, ‘I am not a kisbaba, darling. You don’t have to ask me this always.’
Josh slumps down in his seat and sneaks a glance at Max, who looks poised and focused, for all the world as though he belongs here. He is no longer scanning the room but stares intently towards the front, and when Josh follows Max’s line of sight he sees that something is happening: there is a door behind the speakers’ table and two people in the front row, attuned to some vibration, have leaped forward to hold it open. A stooped figure comes through it in an unseasonable, Soviet-style overcoat. A communal exhalation rises from the room as Pali Kalmar, looking every inch the old homeless guy, shuffles to the table. He is followed by Josh’s lecturer Sol Milos, who appears substantial and ruddy next to the old man, although significantly balder.
They both sit down and Sol Milos does an awkward sound check into one of the standing microphones and proffers it to Pali Kalmar, who says Hulloooo into it at such a jarring volume that there is a ripple of laughter. From where Josh sits, his main impression is of Kalmar’s wild hair, and the engulfing depth of his coat, but when he focuses on the face he can make out the largely intact architecture of strong features, wrinkles surrounding his nose, mouth and spectacles like a whirling current. Nagymama, next to Josh, is tight-lipped and very still. He doesn’t ask if she is okay but, on an unusual impulse, puts a hand on her arm. Nagymama shifts her eyes from the front of the room to Josh’s hand, then up to his face, and she gives him a small smile that for a moment makes her look almost young.
Sol Milos clears his throat directly into his microphone and says, ‘Thank you all for coming today to this very special event. I’m sure you’re all familiar with the work and achievements of Pali Kalmar, a mathematician who really needs no introduction.’
And then of course he proceeds to introduce Pali Kalmar with a catalogue of work and achievements. Winner of the Wolf Prize, developer and champion of Ramsey theory, the probabilistic method and extremal combinatorics, the first person to solve the prime number theorem through elementary means, joint author of over fifteen hundred published articles.
‘Significantly,’ Sol says, ‘Kalmar has pioneered the modern method of mathematical work, which I would say is defined by collaboration. No doubt most of you know of the Kalmar Number, which began as a joke but has become a symbol of our interconnectedness, spanning the vast planes of mathematical research through the power of Kalmar’s fertile mind, prolific output and ceaseless travel. I’m proud to say that my own number was recently upgraded from 3 to 2 when I collaborated with Alexander Petrov, who has published extensively with Kalmar.’
Sol has addressed these opening remarks to the audience with Pali Kalmar next to him sitting low in his seat and looking into the middle distance. Now Josh’s lecturer repositions himself to speak directly to the old man. ‘The international community of mathematics has benefited enormously from your unusual living arrangements. I must say that I myself would be honoured to open my home and my mind to you at any time, as, I’m sure, would anyone in the audience here today.’ An affirming scatter of applause. The one-sidedness of this suck-fest feels a little awkward – creepy even – as Kalmar, with an expression that doesn’t imply any loftiness or disdain but only complete preoccupation with other matters, appears not to notice the massive brown-nosing job being performed on him. Josh feels a twitchy embarrassment related to Max witnessing his lecturer’s abjection: an almost painful compulsion to snark about it with his friend and thereby distance himself. There is probably no way to discreetly change seats at this point. He is here for Nagymama, he reminds himself, but he looks over to see how Max is taking the whole thing. His friend looks completely absorbed, leaning forward and focusing all his attention on Sol Milos.
‘There are many familiar faces in the audience today,’ Sol goes on. ‘Many respected colleagues from the mathematics community. I also know that your public appearances are of great interest to the expatriate Hungarian community. Of course, the one thing that any diaspora most needs to flourish is co
nnection.’
Water? Josh thinks. Shelter? Food?
‘Connection,’ Sol says, ‘with each other, with the homeland they have left and the new culture in which they land.’
A dramatic pause.
‘So it is no small thing for all of us’ – a sweep of his hand – ‘that you have dedicated both your life and your work to the quest for connections. I wonder if we might start there.’ Turning to Kalmar. ‘Do you see it as your role to bring people and topics from disparate mathematical areas together, as you have done throughout your career?’
A few beats of silence that the audience leans into, waiting to see if Kalmar will snap out of whatever daze he is in and answer the question or if he will leave Sol Milos dangling. His eyes stray from the upper region of the room and wander south, coming to rest closer to Sol, although not quite on him. Eventually he leans in towards his microphone.
‘I am very old,’ he says, in an accent thicker than Josh was prepared for. ‘It is a little joke I like to tell to people that I am now changing from mathematics to palaeontology, where they keep the fossils.’
An over-eager laugh from Sol and the audience. Josh would like to hear him say palaeontology again.
‘I think that humans are like the bees in the hive,’ Kalmar goes on. ‘We are very busy together and very organised, but when the bee can no longer work, you know, she does not have a place in the hive and goes outside and dies. So I hope I can go on working a little while longer.’
The audience seems to swell towards him, claiming and sustaining him in the hive, and Sol Milos says, ‘No, yes.’
‘I am very lucky,’ Kalmar says, ‘because I have friends all around the world who will still do mathematics with me.’
Something about this simple statement and the slight forlornness it implies hits Josh right in the guts with the idea that this man – this remarkable hobo of a genius – might be his grandfather. Before this it has only been a matter of abstract intellectual ambition: his talent being reified by the connection with Kalmar. Now, for the first time, he thinks of how it might be to actually get to know Kalmar. Converse with him. They might even travel together, once Josh gets his place at MIT. He looks down at Nagymama, wishing he could take her aside here and now and get the whole story, what happened between her and Pali. He is ready to listen.
Unlike before Kalmar arrived, when she had been somehow out of focus, Nagymama’s elements now seem to have come together. She is frowning slightly and focusing her attention on the front of the room as though concentrating on a difficult problem, a vertical seam deepening between her eyes so that it stands out against the other crevices of her face. Josh looks again at the old mathematician and tries to see him as his grandmother might. As a man, a lover. The source of them all.
Meanwhile Sol Milos has got Kalmar talking about maths. The old man’s gaze has become an inverse quality of its previously wandering diffuseness, now beamed with a high level of intensity onto Sol while Kalmar talks about random configurations. ‘Often if you make only a small modification you will find the configuration can change in unexpected ways,’ he is saying, pinning Sol with the intense eye contact and going into a description of random colour sets and deletions. Josh pulls out his phone while he listens and surreptitiously checks his emails. Nothing from Bethany in response to his last.
With Bethany’s interest in his revelations about his grandmother they seem to have entered a new phase with a flurry of communication. So far it is platonic, but it feels related to the heady, rushing intimacy of sex in some way that Josh would like to analyse and understand, if he could get clear of the confusing mass of interaction for long enough. He has found himself telling Bethany details about himself and his family that he has never told anyone, that he never even thought about that much until Bethany’s interest gave them substance. Things about Nagypapa: how everyone used to suck up to him and talk about him as if he’d had this great mind before he lost it. But once, before he went mad, only once, the old man had asked Josh something about maths; it was after one of the Olympiads at which Josh had medalled, although not the gold, and Josh had been happy to talk about it and was describing one of the problems – a knotty trick of a question about equality in an arithmetic progression – when Nagypapa abruptly whacked the side table between them, bringing his palm down onto it with a bone-jolting violence that stopped Josh in his tracks. Nagypapa was glaring at him. When he spoke it was to shout towards the kitchen, telling Nagymama to hurry up with dinner, but Josh knew, with a rare burst of insight into the human unspoken, that Nagypapa hadn’t understood the arithmetic progression and it was this that angered him. He never shared any of his successes with his grandfather again.
Josh has also told Bethany about his mother. About how she is so devoted to the entity he has come to think of as Old Josh, and that New Josh – who seems to Josh like a much more interesting and promising kind of person – sends her into such a spiral of disappointment and unhappiness that Josh has started to wonder who it is that his mother actually loves. (Feeling here a slinking resistance that he recognised was related to talking about his feelings and that he pushed through with only one portion of his mind focused on Bethany’s strangely affecting body and the proximity to it that his willingness to talk like this seems to buy.) What articulation of her son is she so attached to? Because what she seems to want him for more than anything, more than himself, are his good grades and scholarship offers, and it is a bit galling to feel loved not as a person but as a vessel for academic success.
These intimate conversations started at Max’s apartment and were then carried on in a nearby bar with the lubricatory assistance of beer, but they have continued over email, which increases the magnetism of Josh’s wonderful phone. He keeps it clutched in his lap as Pali Kalmar talks about problems of randomness and Josh listens with half his attention and with the other half wills Bethany’s name to appear on the screen with that blood-jolting little buzz.
‘This is why the probabilistic method was so surprising,’ Kalmar is saying, his hands and arms forming shapes in the air before his face (large hands, Josh notices, the fingers long and articulate, and he thinks of his mother’s insistence on Josh’s octaval finger span and the piano lessons). ‘You know, when we find that randomness gives a good answer for many problems, as good as trying to go through all the possibilities. Now it is an established thing: you throw edges onto the graph at random in a certain probability model and you come out with some wonderful structures. But this area of combinatorics once was only like chaos.’
‘It has echoes of your earliest breakthroughs in Ramsey theory,’ Sol Milos says. ‘I’m seeing a theme across the course of your career of a search for structure, for meaningful order in what at first appears to be random chaos. I wonder …’ And here he breaks eye contact with the old mathematician to scan the crowd and – is Josh imagining it? – his eyes seem to linger on Josh for a few seconds. ‘I wonder if you have considered applying this quest for meaningful connections to the way the internet works, particularly in the last few years with the rise of what I believe is called social media.’
Josh feels himself go blaringly hot, as though a spotlight has been turned on him. Sol Milos is asking the great Pali Kalmar about his, Josh’s, research. There is a flushing thrill here but also something outrageous, his lecturer raiding the contents of Josh’s mind and exposing them to the world. It is all happening too fast.
Kalmar’s head wobbles from side to side. ‘It is a field that people are very excited about,’ he says, ‘but you know most of this problems about the internet come from the earlier field of percolation theory. Physical scientists look at it, you know, for how fast the substances can travel through something. For me it is quite interesting sometimes in the abstract how these connected clusters behave, but I am not so much interested in the applications about computers or percolations.’
The thickness of Kalmar’s accent and
the feeling of some coarse joke being played on him by Sol Milos make Josh’s comprehension grindingly slow, although his body is already reacting to this new information before his conscious mind has grappled with it. He breaks into a sweat.
‘So you’re not planning to turn your significant powers towards the mathematical challenges of the internet?’ Sol Milos says.
‘Eh.’ Kalmar waves one of his long-fingered hands, a languorous swirl in the air. ‘I am not so good with people, but still I like it this way, what I can do with my friends who will let me go into their brain directly, not so much with this talking on computers.’
Some of the assembled ageing nerds give this a little clap, as Josh feels suddenly ricocheted into a real-time understanding of what is happening, and also as though he has left the house without wearing pants. Percolation theory.
His hands are clumsy and slow as he switches on the phone in his lap, opens the browser app and googles it.
The behaviour of connected clusters in a random graph. He scrolls down the Wiki page. Running liquid, porous material, mathematical modelling in a three-dimensional network. The edges or ‘bonds’ between each two neighbors may be open (allowing the liquid through) with probability p, or closed with probability 1 – p. Some details about lattice dimension and infinite networks and then a crushing weight comes down as he reads the worst paragraph on the whole internet. In some cases pc may be calculated explicitly. For example, for the square lattice Z2 in two dimensions, pc = 1/2 for bond percolation, a fact which was an open question for more than 20 years and was finally resolved by Harry Kesten in the early 1980s, see Kesten (1982).
Josh makes a small noise, basically a whimper. It is his work, his big result, there in black and white with blue hyperlinks: his result was proved by someone called Harry Kesten twenty-five years ago. The beautiful evocation of Josh’s future that he had drawn so lovingly in all those graphs, the patterns he’d thought would make sense of everything. Bond percolation. He’d even fucking coloured them in. He’d been drawing bond percolation.
