Spoiler Alert for Numb3rs season premiere
It’s September and I’m looking at four letters written by four of the greatest minds of the 20th century: Hightower, Knox, Newberry, Beiderman.
Each one had this office before me, and each one wrote a letter to the professor who would come after. Now, it’s my turn. I’m writing a letter, to the faceless, nameless professor, who will take this office after me.
Who are you? What questions are you wrestling with? Where are you looking for your answers? Do you take this office at the end of a long and distinguished career? Or are you on the ascent, your greatest work waiting for you amid an infinity of possibilities? Do you hover above the chaos, looking for your answers in patterns and trends? Or do you need to be on ground level, walking through the problem?
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My mother had this photo of the Parthenon from a trip she’d taken with my father before I was born, and one day, I scribbled all over it with a crayon. She was understandably upset until my dad pointed out that I had covered it with rectangles within rectangles, retracing the Greeks’ use of the Golden Ratio. Does that speak to the mathematician’s need to understand beauty or to the child’s need to tear it apart?
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John Von Newman once said that in mathematics, you don’t understand things, you just get used to them. I wish I could have debated that point with him because it seems to me that in mathematics, we find the power to refuse fate, in understanding the way things are, we give ourselves the means to change them.
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Hightower. Knox. Newberry. Biederman. Each of their signatures is a self-swallowing set, a name that shorthands a body of thought, a life’s work. The question isn’t who you are. The question is who did I turn out to be?
Who am I to you? Are faded chalkmarks and scratches on the floor the only evidence that I was here? Or did some scribbled note, some fragment of a proof invert your perception of the world, even confirm it, cementing what you knew in your heart to be true, with the balance of left column to right? What footprints have I left behind? Do they endure? Or has the ocean of discovery washed them away already? How many lives have I touched? Have I touched yours?