Monday, December 06, 2004

Poster Child

Saturday night was a time of exceptional comfort and graciousness.  Sha and Helena invited us over for a few bowls of their favorite risotto - mixed ‘shrooms cooked with rich beef broth.  Anybody who doesn’t like mushrooms out there?  Keep up the good work and stay the hell away from my risotto.  Sublime barely initimates how good it was.  Right down to the charming napkins festooned with scenes and specimens of autumnal mycology, everything hovered just a few sweet inches above perfection.  By the time we were ready for dessert I really didn’t feel like eating anymore, which was fine because instead of a traditional aftercourse they poured us a mug or two of the world’s richest hot chocolate, a complex spiced recipe that came out so thick and fullbodied that my mouth was outraged to have gone so long not knowing it existed.  (For the record, it pairs well with good cognac, too.  Hooda thunk.) In the meanwhile we viewed our hosts’ photos from their recent vacation in Europe.  The photos themselves were gorgeous: apart from the fact that it’s hard to take a bad picture of most of the places they went, both Sha and Helena have phenomenal aesthetics – and of course we got to see the photos projected onto their theater-sized screen, which made them that much more impressive.  (Then we checked out the ‘Hut’s photoblog, which was also fun to see made so big.  Maybe I’m just a guy but I like the big ones.) We got home late and I regret nothing. 

So now I’m well-rested, enjoying some lovely hot tea, and thinking about the world - what I know of it, and what I don’t.  And of course hanging with Sha reminds me of my halcyon days as an undergrad, many of which he shared with me as the coolest freshman I knew when I was a junior.  And thinking of my junior year, and of Sha in particular, reminds me of Brian; and when I think of Brian I often think of this story, so that’s the one you get today:

I’d put up the deposit, so I got my pick and took 3F.  Pete was the first to arrive and snagged 2F.  Bill and Jon split up the back rooms and Dave pulled short straw and bunked down in 3M. 

Well, it wasn’t quite the shortest straw of all.  I guess Brian was last in on the deal or something like that; somehow we took unpardonable advantage of him and put him in 2M.  That’s the room that, if you added in the area of the bathroom next door, would still have been the smallest room in the house.  And the most visited, since that was the house’s only bathroom for the six of us and our numerous barely-continent guests.  Brian’s room shared a wall with this tiny loo, and the space that was left to him barely fit his twin mattress on the floor - maybe 9 by 6 feet at most.  We hung out there all the time, of course, as we did in all the rooms, but we always wound up at some point on those occasions in Brian’s room apologizing somehow for shortsheeting him in the accommodations department.  Those apologies were, in turn, roundly rejected, because Brian is a man of tremendous grace and generosity.

Even though his room was small, it still had, by my minimum estimate, 30 linear feet of wallspace.  And Brain [sic] is so cool that he actually only needed one poster to fill it all: a 2 x 26-or-so pictorial history of mathematics.  It was math-fabulous: set up on a timeline axis, it wrapped nearly all the way around the room. At the far left edge there were very few listings, much drawing and negative visual space.  As the timeline progressed the material grew denser, till by the far right edge the poster was crammed with tiny text - tracking developments in different theoretical areas with drawings, portraits, diagrams, anecdotes, which were interesting, and of course the formulas themselves - which were, to me, utterly incomprehensible. 

But Brian could follow them to a fairly advanced point, and so could Jon, and x number of our various visitors (x being equal to the number of our visitors who were math wizs, which was an integer greater than three.  Show your work.).  The point is, it wasn’t gibberish to everybody - just to me and my other softheaded cohorts and colleagues. 

Late one bleary evening as we sprawled across the meager floor of Brian’s room, our host drew my attention to a thumbnail portrait about 3/4s of the way along his poster.  “This guy is David Hilbert,” I think I recall him saying.  (Honestly I don’t recall the specific name, just the gist of the conversation.) “He’s the last one to have known all the math there was to know. After him, things got too complicated and no single person could absorb it all.  He was the last complete mathematician.”

I rolled this information around in my head.  No one has known it all for more than a century?  And today, is there any field of academics, or any other realm of human endeavor, in which any one person has total knowledge?  I doubted it, and, brain-battered by my coursework and by the constant presence of genius everywhere I went, I basked in the truth of what Brian had called to my attention.  Nobody knew everything. Find the biggest authority on any subject and that person’s knowledge will be incomplete.  Get him off his field of expertise and he’s as likely to be a fool as the next fool in line. 

For me - the next fool in line - this has been a very comforting idea for quite a long time already, and I only like it better the older I get and the less I seem to know.  Today I will be out of the office on a site visit, exploring the genius of others and trying not to appear too ignorant.  Have fun with your Monday.