Fill 2a/? - Zero Sum Game
anonymous
July 7 2011, 02:19:18 UTC
They insinuated to him once, when he was very young, that the duty of a professor was to teach. He was given a class, a horde of gaping simpletons in their first year at his small university, and he stood in front of them and surveyed them in silence.
Idiots, every one. He didn’t even need to lecture to know that.
“Tell me,” he said, “about the use of the conic section in determining the dynamics of the orbit of an asteroid.”
They stared.
“Tell me,” he said, making it easier, giving them questions he could answer in his childhood schoolroom, “about the generalization of the binomial theorem to powers of sums with n terms.”
They stared.
He slammed his hand down on the lectern. “Tell me,” he shouted, “why I should stand here and give you knowledge, just give it to you as if it were something you deserved, while every minute I spend in this room is one I don’t spend doing something interesting!”
He didn’t lecture again. It appeared for a brief while as though they might take away his appointment, but then he published the book.
The first paper had been impressive enough, the work of an undergraduate who should not have had the ability to consider the problem, much less solve it. On the power of that paper, he had been promoted through the ranks, through graduate school, to a professorship, to a comfortable lassitude where he could spend his days in thought and not worry about other people’s messy, human needs. But the book, the book changed everything.
It was a complex work, so multifaceted that it had held even his attention for the span of time needed to write it. And when it was finished, it was perfect, an elegant theory born of an elegant mind. It was read and discussed by every mathematician who considered himself worth the title, but there was one thing it never was - understood. Reviews praised it blankly. Old boys of the mathematical colleges at Cambridge discoursed on it in lofty tones, until he, sitting unnoticed in the dark corners of lecture halls, smirked and asked them questions that left them without a response. The book was enough, even, to stave off the whispered conversations that had begun whenever he was near.
They never raised the subject of his lecturing again after the book was published, but by then he’d lost his interest in acadaemia - everyone was so boring. He quit of his own accord, and mathematics became part of the game, part of his toolkit.
Mathematics became the language he used to try to get inside the mind of Sherlock Holmes.
* * *
‘Professor’ Moriarty has always sounded ridiculous to him. A mark of respect, they told him when it was bestowed, but he doesn’t need to hear the simpering tones of false deference in their words when they speak to him. No, he doesn’t need that at all.
He likes a very different kind of respect, the kind that shows itself in the tremor of a voice, inching out the words it wasn’t made to say. The kind that speaks to thick veins of adrenaline, running lightning-quick beneath the surface map of neurons. The kind that chokes and pleads and struggles, all those quintessentially human responses, all those things that are so messy and distasteful, and yet, at the same time, so delightful to control.
No, he knows what it is to be respected in the way he finds most thrilling. And so ‘Professor’ became Moriarty becomes Jim, and the more unpretentious his identity becomes, the wider his smile twists across his face when people make the wrong assumptions and, inevitably, pay the price.
Re: Fill 2a/? - Zero Sum Game
anonymous
July 8 2011, 14:22:54 UTC
He likes a very different kind of respect, the kind that shows itself in the tremor of a voice, inching out the words it wasn’t made to say. The kind that speaks to thick veins of adrenaline, running lightning-quick beneath the surface map of neurons. The kind that chokes and pleads and struggles, all those quintessentially human responses, all those things that are so messy and distasteful, and yet, at the same time, so delightful to control.
That is delightfully creepy, and spot-on in character, as well.
Idiots, every one. He didn’t even need to lecture to know that.
“Tell me,” he said, “about the use of the conic section in determining the dynamics of the orbit of an asteroid.”
They stared.
“Tell me,” he said, making it easier, giving them questions he could answer in his childhood schoolroom, “about the generalization of the binomial theorem to powers of sums with n terms.”
They stared.
He slammed his hand down on the lectern. “Tell me,” he shouted, “why I should stand here and give you knowledge, just give it to you as if it were something you deserved, while every minute I spend in this room is one I don’t spend doing something interesting!”
He didn’t lecture again. It appeared for a brief while as though they might take away his appointment, but then he published the book.
The first paper had been impressive enough, the work of an undergraduate who should not have had the ability to consider the problem, much less solve it. On the power of that paper, he had been promoted through the ranks, through graduate school, to a professorship, to a comfortable lassitude where he could spend his days in thought and not worry about other people’s messy, human needs. But the book, the book changed everything.
It was a complex work, so multifaceted that it had held even his attention for the span of time needed to write it. And when it was finished, it was perfect, an elegant theory born of an elegant mind. It was read and discussed by every mathematician who considered himself worth the title, but there was one thing it never was - understood. Reviews praised it blankly. Old boys of the mathematical colleges at Cambridge discoursed on it in lofty tones, until he, sitting unnoticed in the dark corners of lecture halls, smirked and asked them questions that left them without a response. The book was enough, even, to stave off the whispered conversations that had begun whenever he was near.
They never raised the subject of his lecturing again after the book was published, but by then he’d lost his interest in acadaemia - everyone was so boring. He quit of his own accord, and mathematics became part of the game, part of his toolkit.
Mathematics became the language he used to try to get inside the mind of Sherlock Holmes.
* * *
‘Professor’ Moriarty has always sounded ridiculous to him. A mark of respect, they told him when it was bestowed, but he doesn’t need to hear the simpering tones of false deference in their words when they speak to him. No, he doesn’t need that at all.
He likes a very different kind of respect, the kind that shows itself in the tremor of a voice, inching out the words it wasn’t made to say. The kind that speaks to thick veins of adrenaline, running lightning-quick beneath the surface map of neurons. The kind that chokes and pleads and struggles, all those quintessentially human responses, all those things that are so messy and distasteful, and yet, at the same time, so delightful to control.
No, he knows what it is to be respected in the way he finds most thrilling. And so ‘Professor’ became Moriarty becomes Jim, and the more unpretentious his identity becomes, the wider his smile twists across his face when people make the wrong assumptions and, inevitably, pay the price.
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That is delightfully creepy, and spot-on in character, as well.
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