1. Preliminaries. The game considered has pay-off
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The remainder he perused in silence. When he’d finished, he rose, walked to the cabinet, and poured two scotches, neat. “Thank you, Andret,” he said. “You did it.”
“Looks like I might have.”
“You look good, too, by the way. I haven’t seen you look this good in a while. Tired, naturally — but happy. You look like you’ve enjoyed something finally. Am I right?”
“Consider it a favor,” Andret replied.
Walking home that afternoon, though, he repeated Hay’s words in his mind. You’ve enjoyed something finally. He had, hadn’t he? For the first time in years, he’d enjoyed something in mathematics again.
—
IN THE SPRING, during a trip to Palo Alto, a reporter from The New York Times was sent his way. He was appearing in the Distinguished Lecture Series at Stanford, and she approached him after his talk. The Times, he noticed, liked to cover mathematics the way it covered state fairs or stock-car racing — as a wink to its readership. And it usually sent human-interest correspondents on the stories. But this reporter, a severe-looking young woman in a gray-striped pants suit, appeared to have been genuinely intrigued by what he’d said. She requested an interview.
Her name was Thelma Nastrum, and when she walked into the hotel bar that evening to ask him her questions, she didn’t look nearly as severe as she had at the lecture, nor quite as young. She’d changed out of the pants suit.
“A beautiful name,” he said as soon as the waiter had left. “Like a flower. A subtle, midwestern flower.”
“A fast-moving Scandinavian weed,” she answered. Out came her pad and pen, and she took a long swallow of her martini. “So,” she said. “What do mathematicians do all day?”
“Evidently that’s a popular query,” he answered. “What we do is think.”
She stirred her cocktail, then picked out the olive and sucked it into her mouth.
“And drink,” he added.
She made a note. “Imbibing,” she said. “While deriving.”
He liked her.
After a few minutes of questions, she asked if he thought he might possibly win the Nobel Prize for his work on the Malosz conjecture. She picked up her pad, smiled, and said, “I interviewed your colleague last fall. Yevgeny Detmeyer.”
Andret composed his face.
“When he won the Nobel,” she added.
“Yes, yes, I know. I’m well aware.” He signaled to the waiter again, pointing at their glasses. “There is no Nobel in mathematics,” he said, as tersely as Hans Borland might have uttered the words. He was irritated to realize he was already drunk. But he also wanted to salvage the evening.
“Oh, I didn’t know,” she answered. “Why not?”
“Some say because the lover of Alfred Nobel’s wife was a mathematician.”
“Ahh, yes — well, that would be a good enough explanation, wouldn’t it?” She made a note on her pad. “But certainly there’s an equivalent. What’s the most coveted prize in mathematics?”
“The Fields Medal.”
“Well, okay then — I’d imagine you’d have a good shot at the Fields Medal for your proof of the Malosz theorem. Do you think you’ll win it?”
“It’s not an unlikely proposition.”
“Ah,” she said, “a double negative.” The waiter arrived, and she launched impressively into another martini. When she raised the tetrahedral glass, it divided her smile into three.
“Indeed,” he said. “From a mathematician, however, a double negative is an acceptable proposition.”
“Two negatives make a positive, am I correct?”
Andret smiled. “You are indeed correct. At least for operations in which the identity element is one.”
In her reporter’s pad she noted this as well. Then she excused herself to use the restroom. When she returned, her sweater was draped over her arm. He watched her hang it over the chairback. She was a few years older than he’d thought, but she was still in excellent shape.
Later, in the hotel room, she told him that she’d already been to bed with two Pulitzer Prize winners. “But never a Fields Medal,” she said.
He rose to freshen his glass. “I haven’t won it yet.”
“Well,” she said, “neither had they.”
—
THE PROBLEM STARTED, blinkingly, that fall. Walking to work one morning, he passed near a streetlamp whose cover had come unlatched. When he looked up, its bulb suddenly exploded into a halo of brightly flaming stars. He blinked. When he looked again, it was back to normal.
Later that day, he glanced out his office window and saw the fender of a bike do the same sort of thing. It transformed for a moment into a burning, multipointed polygon that flared and retracted. Then it was normal again.
—
“SIT DOWN, ANDRET.”
“No telephone again?”
“I’m afraid not,” said Hay. “Not for what I need to speak with you about this time, my friend.”
My friend. Andret took a seat across from the desk and accepted a scotch. Again Hay skipped the ice.
“I’ve forgiven you for your behavior with Mrs. Petrinova, by the way,” Hay began, twisting the cap back onto the bottle and returning it to the drawer. “Well, not with Mrs. Petrinova, of course, but for your behavior with me when I spoke to you about her. That’s behind us.” He pursed his lips tersely and picked a bit of lint from his sleeve. “Last year, Milo — when we spoke in my office.”
“What do you need, Knudson?”
“I’m a practical man. I don’t stew. I do what’s best for the department.”
“Yes, I know.”
“I did you a favor with Mrs. Petrinova.”
“And I did the Pentagon work for you in return. That makes us even.”
“Indeed you did, Milo. Indeed you did.” He picked at another spot of lint, then folded his hands. “The reason I’ve asked you here is to tell you that the department’s been given an endowment. A very nice one.” He leaned forward. “You might even say an obscenely nice one. For a newly named chair. The Hyun Chair in Experimental Mathematics. It would be an entirely new subdepartment — still under my direction, of course, but new. Man-Sik Hyun runs the Hyun Electrics Company, in Seoul, South Korea. And now in Camden, New Jersey, as well. Geometer, himself.” He smiled efficiently. “He wanted to call it the Hyun Electrics Chair, actually. But someone from endowment explained the problem.”
Andret chuckled.
Hay gestured to the glasses. “Refill?”
“Please.”
“And you’re one of those up for consideration, Milo.”
“I don’t have tenure.”
“You’d get it.”
“I’ve solved one problem in my career, Knudson.”
Hay raised his glass. “But what a problem it was, Milo.”
“Well, thank you.”
“In any case, it’s a circumstance I can take care of. They give me that kind of latitude here. I’m talking about early tenure and promotion, you realize. The chair of a subdepartment and a major new endowment.”