Fortunately it was not long after this that Liseiwicz did something truly unexpected, which completely put all my fears to rest.
[To be continued]
8
Jan Liseiwicz and Jinzhen finalized the rules for mathematical chess in the spring of 1949. Not long afterwards, which was also not long before the provincial capital, C City, was liberated, Liseiwicz received an invitation from the journal, the Annals of Mathematics, to attend an event to be held at UCLA. In order to facilitate the travel arrangements for attendees from Asia there was a contact address in Hong Kong. Everyone was to meet there and then fly to California on the final leg of their journey. Liseiwicz did not spend very long in the States, maybe a month and a half in total, and he was back at work at the university so quickly that people found it hard to believe that he could really have been to America and back in that time. However, he had plenty of proof: job offers from universities and research institutions in Poland, Austria and the US; photographs of himself in the company of John von Neumann, Lloyd Shapley, Irvin Cohen and other famous mathematicians. In addition, he had brought back the question paper for that year’s Putnam Mathematical Competition.
[Transcript of the interview with Master Rong]
Putnam is the name of a mathematician: his full name was William Lowell Putnam and he was an American — people called him ‘the second Gauss’. In 1921 the Society of American Mathematicians, in concert with a number of universities, established the annual Putnam Mathematical Competition — the focus of considerable interest in universities and mathematical societies and an important way to discover new talent at undergraduate level in mathematics departments and institutes. The competition is designed to test basic principles learned by university students, but the questions are so difficult that they require a very high level of mathematical ability. Although every year the students who take part in the competition are the very best from each university, due to the unbelievable difficulty of the questions set, the majority of people who take part will score around zero. The top thirty competitors in any one year will be picked up by the finest universities in America and indeed the world — for example Harvard offers the top three highest-scoring competitors the most generous scholarships available at the entire university. That year there were fifteen questions, whereby full marks in the competition would be 150, with forty-five minutes to complete the entire paper. The highest mark awarded was 76.5, and to get into the top ten you had to score over 37.55.
Liseiwicz had brought back the competition questions because he wanted to test Zhendi. The only person he wanted to test was Zhendi — everyone else (including the other professors at the university) would just be put to unnecessary trouble and distress by being made to sit these questions, so it was much better for all concerned if they were left in peace. Before he tested Zhendi, he shut himself up in his own office for forty-five minutes and tested himself. Afterwards he graded his own paper. He decided that his final mark should be less than the highest awarded that year, because he had only correctly answered the first eight questions — the ninth was unfinished. Of course, if he had had just a couple of minutes more he would have been able to answer this question correctly as welclass="underline" the time-constraints were ferocious. But then the purpose of the Putman Mathematical Competition was to emphasize two important points:
1. Mathematics is the most scientific of sciences.
2. Mathematics is the science of time.
Robert Oppenheimer, who is often called the father of the atom bomb, famously said: ‘In science, time is the real obstacle. Given unlimited time, everyone can learn all the secrets of the universe.’ Some people say that by building the world’s first atom bomb, he came up with the best way to solve the problem of how to put an end to the Second World War. But if you think about it, if it was Hitler who had succeeded in developing the atom bomb, wouldn’t the result be that mankind was facing an even worse problem?
Zhendi succeeded in answering six questions in the forty-five minutes allotted to him. In the solution that he offered for one of the questions, Liseiwicz decided that he had made the mistake of tampering with the original question and hence he received no marks. The last question was a logic problem and he had only had a minute and a half left to look at it. There was no time to even begin working out this problem, so he had written nothing, he had just thought about it and in the very last seconds of the examination, he had scribbled down the correct answer. It was a remarkable achievement and yet again demonstrated that Zhendi had a most unusual intelligence. Grading this kind of question is up to the individual examiner — one person might give him full marks, on the other hand someone else might deduct some points: it depended entirely on the examiner’s perspective of the student’s abilities. At worst, he would still have to be given 2.5 points for this answer, so after some thought, Liseiwicz decided to be harsh and give him this mark. Zhendi’s total was 42.5 points, in a year when to reach the top ten in the Putnam Mathematical Competition, you had to get over 37.55 points.
That would mean that if Zhendi had really been able to take part in the competition, he would have been ranked in the top ten, giving him the opportunity to study in an Ivy League university, with a full scholarship and all the fame accorded to a Putnam Fellow in the world of mathematics. But because Zhendi hadn’t formally taken part, if you took his papers and showed them to someone, they would just laugh in your face. No one would have believed that this little kid from somewhere in China that nobody had ever heard of could get such a high mark — they would have thought you were having them on. A stupid attempt to take them in. Even Liseiwicz, looking at the answer papers in front of him, felt that in some way he must be being deceived. It was only a feeling, of course. Because Liseiwicz knew that it was true — he knew that Zhendi had not cheated in any way — and so he turned something that started out as just a game into something very serious indeed.[To be continued]
The first thing that Liseiwicz did was to go and find Young Lillie, to explain the manner in which he had tested Jinzhen on the Putnam Mathematical Competition questions. Afterwards he gave his considered opinion on the matter: ‘I tell you that Jinzhen is the best student the university has ever had, and in the future he could likewise become the best student at Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford or any other world-class university. That is why I am telling you that he really ought to go abroad to study. Harvard, MIT, wherever.’Young Lillie was silent for a moment.
Liseiwicz pursued the matter: ‘You should believe in his abilities and give him this opportunity.’
Young Lillie shook his head, ‘I am afraid it is impossible.’
‘Why?’ Liseiwicz’s eyes were completely round.
‘We don’t have the money,’ Young Lillie said frankly.
‘You would only need to pay for one semester,’ Liseiwicz said. ‘I am sure that by the time the second semester started he would be on a scholarship.’
‘The problem isn’t the first semester,’ Young Lillie said with a bitter smile. ‘With the situation we are in right now we could not even pay for his fare.’
Liseiwicz left disappointed.
Part of Liseiwicz’s disappointment was due to a natural feeling of sadness that his dream for his student had not worked out, but the remainder was darkened by suspicion. He and Young Lillie had never agreed about Jinzhen’s academic future. Now he did not know whether Young Lillie was telling the truth, or whether it was simply an excuse because he did not want to go along with the plan. He thought that the latter possibility was very likely correct for he found it hard to believe that a family as wealthy as the Rongs could really be in financial trouble.