“I’ve heard that,” I offered.
He thought for a moment. “Although I should also say that I’ve thought of it in other ways, too. As the language of the mind, for example. Or even”—here he turned to me more thoughtfully—“as the language of language. The underlier of grammar. The skeleton of cognition. The rails on which the train of human advance steams up and down, one hill after the next.”
At that moment, a mulberry twig fell onto the lawn before us.
“Squirrels,” I said, looking up.
He retrieved the bit of wood and turned it over in his hand. Once he was going, it was difficult to stop him. “Mathematics is like carving a wooden doll,” he said, “and then, one day, you watch as your wooden doll gives birth to another wooden doll.”
These words have stayed with me all my life.
We sat there for a time. By that age, I was accustomed to his drifting. I saw the squirrel now, trampolining in the branches. Now and then it shook loose a few leaves, which fell around us. I’ve often wondered if they aim at people.
“In fact,” he suddenly resumed, “this is exactly how you will know whether your wooden doll is alive. If it yields another wooden doll.”
Not so many years after that, during the summer when his disease finally became apparent, I remember noticing the altered shape of his belly, which had begun to protrude beyond his belt. He’d taken us to the public pool. By that point, I’d entered a premature adolescence and was already considering Caltech or MIT for my future (or, if for some reason neither saw my potential, perhaps Harvard or Princeton). My father had always been a slender man, practically gaunt. Now his belly resembled a smoothly linear Gaussian curve, slightly downsloped and radially distributed about the nidus of what I would later learn, when I came back from Manhattan to take care of him, was called the umbilical ligament. His gut hung over his swim shorts like a water balloon.
“My God,” I said to him as he sat down near the diving board, “what’s that?”
“Statistical noise,” he answered instantly.
“Fuck you, Dad.”
“Fuck you, Son.”
He smiled. That year, we’d somehow taken to saying this to each other. I was the one who’d started it, but to my surprise he’d kept it up, perhaps because he sensed that the joke of it deflected the serious battle between us that was already on the horizon.
That afternoon, I well remember how he didn’t look like the other middle-aged fathers who were gathered beneath the faded sun umbrellas, their polo shirts amiably protruding. There was nothing roly-poly about Dad’s new belly. Nothing that made him look approachable or paternal. Despite his clever answer, he looked sick. Tall and dashingly thin all the years I knew him, he seemed suddenly to be shedding another, boundaryless person from inside himself — a larger, jiggling, water-inflated homunculus, dusky gray in hue, that had begun pushing itself out of his skin. A wooden doll emerging from another wooden doll.
I was swimming that day with a boy I knew from school, and at one point, as I was crouching to dive, he looked up at me from the water and said, “Your dad’s eyes are yellow.”
“Everybody’s are that color,” I said, “if you look.” Then I dived.
—
I’M A TEACHER myself now — high-school geometry, trigonometry, and calculus — and in my job I come across plenty of kids in trouble. It’s not hard to notice the distracted quiet in the loudmouthed jock, the missed homework from the valedictorian, the escalating tardiness from the sleepy cheerleader who wears the same ash-stained blouse to class all week. I’ve made a point to be on the lookout for these kids, for the ones who are smart enough and adept enough to make it into my classes — and smart enough and adept enough, thus, to be ignored by the school’s counselors — but vulnerable enough, if that’s the way you want to think of it, to veer.
Teaching is a noble profession that way. You’re given the opportunity to intervene.
But just in case you think of me in any other way as noble, I should also say that before I became a teacher I first became rich. Moderately rich by the standards of my former field, perhaps, which was statistical arbitrage; but extravagantly rich by the standards of, say, a doctor or a lawyer (and obscenely rich by those of, say, a teacher). Certainly I was already an outlier’s outlier, considering the scant number of years I’d been alive at the time I retired from Physico Partners Capital Management, at an age when plenty of other young men are still carrying coffee upstairs to their bosses. Physico was a hedge fund. PPCM, LLC. For close to a decade, I’d been the mild-mannered wunderkind on their high-frequency trading desk, up there on the top floor of 40 Wall Street (once the tallest building in the world, I should add). I’d started in the days when high-frequency trading was still something of a secret, at least from the public. At Physico, I was set up in my own password-locked execution room, where, in return for a rigorously excised take of four-and-a-half points against the net — which, not including my generally staggering bonus, already gave me a payday of a little more than a hundred times what my father earned in a year — I sat at a brilliantly lit desk twelve hours a day, chasing the spread on just about every species of financial instrument then known to man. I chased it on the on-the-run bond issue across all the international exchanges; I chased it on deliverable corn on the CME; I chased it on three-point arbitrage in the Singapore currency markets. Or, to be more accurate, I chased the shadow of that spread. Didn’t matter what the underlier was, my specialty was the derivative, which fluttered around the thing itself like the wind around a truck, full of gusts and eddies. That’s what I did: I figured out which gusts and eddies were predictable. When I found one, we fed on it. That’s it. It was all just mathematics. As the great Fischer Black liked to say, the markets need noise. We weren’t taking positions in L’eggs stockings or GE for the long hold; it didn’t matter if we were trading on the open exchanges or in the dark pools; it didn’t even matter if we were shorting the very same securities that we had our clients long on; we were just plucking the data points from a proprietary set of statistical curves and taking them to the bank. And it was my set of statistical curves.
In those days, I wrote just about every algo that Physico ever used. I had put Fischer Black, Eugene Fama, and Robert Merton into a blender and made one big patent-green smoothie on which all of us were hungrily slurping. (During my years there, by the way, our Sharpe ratio never budged from the stratosphere: we were inching our way toward the microsecond-scaled, end-to-end market data processing that, by the end of my era, was supporting every Tom-Dick-and-Harry trader with a Ph.D. in mathematics. But when I started out, the whole thing was new, and we all felt like pioneers.) By the time I retired, the only moral principle to which I still hewed was to never stay on a trade for longer than it took the electron to make the single expository round-trip that gave us the clue we needed. In everything we ever did, we stayed a few milliseconds ahead of the tape.
I’d started at seventeen. Five days a week, while other kids were struggling with their trigonometry homework, I was under my row of broad-spectrum fluorescent lamps, following the sun around the globe, from New York to London to Moscow to Tokyo to Los Angeles. In front of me was a nine-panel, semi-hexagonal, superbright CRT display that winked the ask and offer in various accelerated colors of warning, like the dashboard on a space vehicle preparing for reentry. The computer would do the math for any of the traders, of course — although, in deference to my father, I should say it would do the computation—but it certainly helped that I was the one who’d programmed it. It also helped that I, when you took into account the moment the other traders required to glance from one screen to the next, could do the math faster than the computer.