Am I on the right track? Why else would Niels Henrik Abel, as played by Normann Vaage, walk around Paris made up to look like a Negro? Jonas Wergeland’s story about Abel was a tale of intellectual racism, of the degradation of a small nation, of the world’s doubts that anything good could really come out of Norway. There was a personal reason for the underlying rage in the programme, but that is not the whole explanation. Jonas Wergeland was on safe ground here — for who could help but feel outraged at the thought of how Abel was treated in Paris?
Jonas Wergeland could, of course, have centred his programme on Abel around the discovery of elliptical functions and the heart-stopping race to pip Gustav Jacobi to the post, but from the very start he knew how to angle this programme in his series on heroic Norwegians, Thinking Big: he would focus on Abel’s waiting. Niels Henrik Abel was, in short, a brilliant scholar, a man who, in the words of one mathematician, was in the process of ‘discovering Magellian passages to huge areas of that same, vast analytical ocean’. An individual who, in his short life, would establish a legacy ‘which will keep mathematicians occupied for five hundred years’, as another put it. The programme captured this unique person at the point on his grand tour when he arrived in Paris, the mathematical capital of the day, to present what has since become known as the great Abelian theorem, his masterpiece, to the French Scientific Society, in hopes of seeing it published in their Mémoires des savants étrangers’ and thereby winning international recognition and a university lectureship, as well as the chance to develop all of the other ideas proliferating inside his head to an extent unseen in any other mathematician at that time. Abel is in Paris. This is his moment of truth. The only problem is that he comes from Norway.
Jonas had focused particularly on the moment when a bowing Abel hands over his paper on algebraic functions and their integrals — a theorem of such enormously far-reaching importance, regarded by some as the most significant mathematical work of the nineteenth century — at a meeting of the French Scientific Society at the Institut de France, in October 1826, where Augustin Louis Cauchy and Adrien Marie Legendre, the two men who would decide his fate — all shame on their names — were appointed to assess his paper: a scene in which Jonas made much of the Institut building, the solemn atmosphere of that room steeped in centuries of scholarship and the blasé faces of the assembled company, their sceptical glances at Abel, as he stood there, made up like a Negro. From this Jonas cut to a close-up of the front page of his manuscript, showing what was for him, Jonas, the obvious key to Abel’s failure. After his name Abel had added: Norvégien. From Norway. Norwegian. Could those grand gentlemen have been in any doubt? This addition was their guarantee that they were looking at a manuscript they did not have to take seriously, which they could, therefore, treat with the greatest indifference.
Abel’s hopes, on the other hand, were high; he expected to receive an answer within two weeks. The programme dwelt on Abel during this period of waiting as it dragged out, stretched to three weeks, then to four weeks; the camera followed Abel as he roamed the streets of Paris, waiting, lonely, hungry, waiting desperately, on tenterhooks, for the judges’ verdict. From time to time one was given a peek into Cauchy’s study and saw how Abel’s brilliant work on transcendental functions sank further and further down into a heap of papers, a situation almost as reprehensible, not to say stupid, as an Egyptologist having the Rosetta Stone fall into his hands right at the start, then forgetting where he’s put it. Cauchy — all shame on his name — was too taken up with his own works to look at the jottings of a young mathematician from Norway, a country where, by definition, scholarship was still languishing in the Stone Age.
In the meantime Abel, this Norwegian, was seen sitting in the cafés around St Germain des Prés, lodging as he did with a poor family who lived not far from there, in a street which no longer exists, as if the French, consumed by guilt, wished to erase all memory of Abel. He sits in cafés, writes letters that, typically, he dates with a mathematical problem. We see Abel, a Norwegian, walking the streets of a Paris that grows colder and colder; in the background we hear the sound of bells — a sound that dominates the whole programme — church bells ringing; we see how cold Abel is, shivering with cold, we hear him coughing, a cough that gets worse and worse; we see him circling, trembling with cold, around the Institut de France, stronghold of arrogance, where Jonas showed men walking out of the main door and shaking their heads dismissively, Cauchy among them — all shame on his name — at Abel who stands there waiting, humble, head bowed, made up like a Negro. The camera stuck with Abel, following him on his walks through the Jardin du Luxembourg amid the chiming of church bells, and from there back to the Institut de France, always back to that spot, around that building, coughing and coughing, then into the Café Procope, just round the back in the rue Mazarine, the haunt of all manner of individuals: Diderot and Rousseau to name but two; and here Abel, their equal, algebra’s answer to Rimbaud, scribbles on a sheet of paper, mulling over difficult mathematical questions. So here walked, here sat, a genius, an unacknowledged genius, a supposed nothing who was, in fact, a number one. And what was it they overlooked, these pompous Frenchmen, these budding Napoleons blinded by their own excellence? They overlooked a man with a unique gift for spotting profound connections between mathematical groups, how they affected one another; for turning tricky questions on their heads, seeing things from new angles, as when — instead of solving the problem of fifth-degree equations, he showed that generally these could not be expressed in terms of radicals. Similarly, with elliptic integrals: instead of studying the integrals themselves, he looked at the opposite, or inverse, functions, the elliptical functions. Suddenly, thanks to this magnificent device, everything looked different. Abel is brooding on a whole host of projects. There is just one catch: he has the misfortune to have been born on the periphery. Abel, a Norwegian, wanders around Paris, waiting and coughing, he waits one month, he waits two months, on a visit to a doctor he is found to be suffering from tuberculosis, but still Abel hangs on patiently in Paris for as long as his money lasts. Then he has to leave, travelling home by way of Berlin.
Not until word of Abel’s death reached Paris, a good two years later, was his paper unearthed by Cauchy — all shame on his memory — and dealt with post-haste, although it was not published until 1841, fifteen years after its submission. To crown it all, the publishers then added to the catalogue of crimes by losing the manuscript immediately thereafter.