Yannick Grannec - The Goddess of Small Victories

“A strong migraine can shut down the left hemisphere.”

“And sometimes both! It all depends on the dose of ethanol consumed. We conduct numerous tests in this department.”

“Could you give me a quick sketch of your results, unless the young lady has reached saturation?”

“Please. It’s so rare to hear Leonard talk about his work.”

She thought of Adele’s theorem. And here she had caught herself red-handed, putting it into practice. She batted her eyelashes. It was the nefarious influence of her red dress.

“Okay. For your sake, I’ll keep it simple.”

She took no offense. She had long ago concluded, though not without bitterness, that she didn’t play in the same league as her childhood friend. He hadn’t been trying to show her up. You don’t boast of an innate talent; you simply don’t suspect others of not possessing it.

“You choose two prime numbers , p and q , and you keep them secret. Their product gives you a variable, N . Do you know what a prime number is?”

“Primes are numbers divisible only by themselves and 1.”

“I’m going to explain it to you with very small primes. If p = 13 and q = 7, then p × q = 91. Your personal value for N is 91. If I want to send you a message, you have to give me this N , your public key . Which is 91. I’ll encrypt my information as a function of this value. Only you will be able to decrypt it.”

“Someone could guess where my N comes from!”

“Multiplying two primes is a one-way function, or almost so. If N is large enough, it’s very difficult to identify the prime factors. In other words, the source of the initial product. Only you will know the values of p and q that define N . That pair of numbers, 13 and 7, will be your private key .”

“How can you guarantee that some little nerd who is good at arithmetic isn’t going to factor my N ?”

“To increase the encryption security, you only need to choose an enormous value. If N is around 10 to the 308th power, it would take one hundred million people with their computers more than one thousand years to find that key.” 49

“Someone will eventually find a shortcut for identifying prime factors.”

“Mathematicians have been looking for a way to do it for centuries with no success. It’s a very elegant system.”

Leo was so pleased that he almost revealed his teeth.

“We announced a contest in the mathematical games section of Scientific American . We published an encrypted text with a succinct explanation of the encryption process using the key N . The value is on the order of 10 to the 129th power. We were being generous.”

“What does the message say?”

“Break the code! It has something to do with this turkey.” 50Pierre Sicozzi declined the challenge with a smile. He had plenty of other research topics on which he could spend his next thousand years, but he congratulated Leo again for his pioneering work. Anna for her part was concerned about the snake pit into which he was poking his nose. The NSA or some other combination of military initials was going to batten down on him. 51They had already preempted all of the developing networks. Big Brother would never authorize a level of privacy that couldn’t be decrypted in a few hours. When it came to security, History had already made its lesson plain: respect for the fundamental rights of man came a distant second to the national interest. Or, at least, to what certain people saw as the national interest. Turing, the father of computer encryption, had paid for it with his life. She wondered how Mr. Gödel would have reacted to these technological advances. Would he have enjoyed seeing the purity of his ink-based logic transformed in fewer than fifty years into a hidden guerrilla action of bits and bytes?

“From here on, we’re in the information age. It’s going to become the most precious commodity.”

“It always has been the nerve center of war. Speaking of battles, allow me to help you, demoiselle .”

Anna had been trying in vain to finish her turkey. She pushed her plate toward the Frenchman, who attacked it unabashedly. She had swallowed enough mathematics and poultry combined. She left the two men to their conversation. She had been granted a glimpse into Adele’s experience, a whole life on foreign territory. But the young woman realized she had an advantage: she had been trained since childhood to accept the erudition of others in silence. Leo wouldn’t even notice her absence. He had a playmate with abilities at the same high level as his own.

“Gracious! How beautiful the emperor’s new suit is!” Nobody wished to let others know he saw nothing, for then he would have been unfit for his office or too stupid. Never had the emperor’s clothes been more admired. “But he has nothing on at all!” said a little child at last. “Good heavens! listen to the voice of an innocent child,” said the father.

— Hans Christian Andersen, “The Emperor’s New Clothes”

I was rinsing the plates and handing them to Lili. Beate Hulbeck, wife of our former psychotherapist, was preparing after-lunch cocktails, and Kitty Oppenheimer was drinking one dreamily. Penny, our cocker spaniel, came begging for the nth time; I gently pushed her away. Dorothy Morgenstern, her eyes trained on the baby she had set down on the kitchen table, turned up the volume of the radio. It was very hot for a spring afternoon. The child lay in its basket playing with its bare toes. I had a mad urge to bend down and nibble them.

“Do you know Chuck Berry, ladies? They are calling this ‘rock and roll.’ ”

I had little enthusiasm for this new black music, but my feet had a will of their own, instinctively moving to the rhythm. The jazz of my youth suddenly seemed old. I no longer liked the sounds of my own era; it was time to hang up my dancing shoes. I also didn’t feel particularly caught up in the recent civil rights struggle. If black people wanted to sit next to me on the bus, why shouldn’t I let them? Listen to their blues, their rock and roll? Drink from the same water fountain? I could adapt to that. But whether I would accept a blood transfusion from a black donor I preferred not to ask myself. In our squeaky-clean and snobby enclave at Princeton, we had never encountered colored people, except the housekeeper I had felt more comfortable doing without. 52We knew no black mathematicians or physicists. Using a + b , Albert had tried to convince me of the insanity of the segregationist system. Reason played little part in it, to my way of thinking.

Beate, dancing, handed me a drink. The two of us shimmied out of sight of the men, who had stayed in the garden. The heat, drunkenness, and my cooking had gotten the better of their too-serious conversation. At the end of the song, we collapsed, flooded with joy. Age would make our legs give out before it would silence our laughter. I removed the apron that protected my dress. When I turned fifty, I had started gaining weight in earnest and had to let all my clothes out.

“That man, don’t you find him incredibly strange?”

Lili was asking about the surprise guest, the only person at the table we didn’t all know. Dorothy lifted her nose from the neck of her laughing little man.

“I adore him! He says such asinine things with such utter conviction.”

“His complexion is horrible. He looks like Tom Ewell.”

“Did you see him in The Seven Year Itch ? He isn’t a patch on Cary Grant.”

“It all depends on what you want him for, darling.”