Mai Jia - Decoded

— when he was on the boat sailing across the ocean, he had accidentally fallen in, swallowing so much briny water that he very nearly died. The horror of this event had etched itself into the very marrow of his bones. After that he had kept a tea leaf in his mouth at all times when on the boat, otherwise he simply would not have been able to endure it. Of course, explaining what had happened was one thing, getting people to accept the news was something else entirely. If he could not stand the smell of salt, how on earth was he supposed to work in the family business? You can’t have the boss going round with a mouth full of tea leaves all the time.

This was a very thorny problem.

Fortunately, before he left for foreign parts, Grandmother Rong had put it in writing that when he came back from his studies he was to have all the silver behind the sliding panel in her room as a reward for his filial piety. Later on, he used that money well, for it paid for him to open a school in the provincial capital, C City, which he called Lillie’s Academy of Mathematics.

That was the predecessor of the famous N University.

N University started to become famous when it was still just Lillie’s Academy of Mathematics.

The first person to make the academy famous was John Lillie himself. In spite of all opposition, he shocked everyone by insisting that the academy should be opened to women students. For the first few years of its existence, the academy was treated somewhat like a peepshow. Anyone who had business taking them to the provincial capital would make time to visit the academy and have a look, to enjoy the spectacle. They behaved just as if they were talking a walk through a red-light district. With the feudal attitudes that people had in those days, the mere fact that the academy took women students ought to have been enough to get it closed by the authorities. There were a lot of explanations offered for why it was able to survive — of which that given in the official genealogy of the Rong family is perhaps the most reliable. According to the genealogy, all the early women students at the academy were members of the principal branch of the Rong family. They might as well have come right out and said: if we want to ruin our own daughters what is that to do with you? Keeping it all in the family turned out to be a very good idea. It was the only reason that gossip was never able to bring about the closure of Lillie’s Academy of Mathematics. In somewhat the same way as the growth of children is accompanied by a lot of howling, the furore surrounding Lillie’s Academy of Mathematics simply helped it to become more famous.

The second person to bring the academy to public recognition was also a member of the Rong family — the child born when John Lillie’s older brother (then already past sixty years of age) took a concubine. The child was a daughter and she was John Lillie’s niece. She was born with a large, round head, but there was absolutely nothing else wrong with her; in fact, she was a remarkably intelligent girl. At a very early age it became apparent that she was unusually clever, particularly at anything involving mathematics or calculation. She first attended the academy at the age of eleven, and when she was twelve she took part in a competition with an expert abacist. No one could believe their eyes when they saw how fast she was; she could multiply two four-figure numbers in the time it took a man to spit. The kind of mathematical problem that other people had to wrack their brains over unravelled at her touch, but this seemed to disappoint the people who challenged her to answer and they wondered out loud whether she might not have cheated by finding out the question in advance.

A blind man who made his living by telling people’s fortunes from the shape of their heads once told her that she was the kind of genius that only came along once every thousand years.

The year that she turned seventeen, she set off halfway around the world with her cousin who was going to study at Cambridge University. As the boat plunged into the thick fog that hung over the London docks, her cousin (who enjoyed composing little poems) was inspired by the scene to write something –

Thanks to the power of the ocean wave,

I have come to Great Britain.

Great Britain,

Great Britain,

The fogs cannot conceal your magnificence. .

Having been woken up by her cousin reciting this ditty aloud, she turned bleary-eyed to look at her golden watch. She said, ‘We have been travelling for thirty-nine days and seven hours.’

Immediately the pair of them went into a well-practiced question and answer routine:

‘Thirty-nine days and seven hours is. .?’

‘Nine hundred and forty-three hours.’

‘Nine hundred and forty-three hours is. .?’

‘Fifty-six thousand, five hundred and eighty minutes.’

‘Fifty-six thousand, five hundred and eighty minutes is. .?’

‘Three million, three hundred and ninety-four thousand and eight hundred seconds.’

This kind of game had become part of her life — people treated her like a human abacus, expecting her to perform calculations like that at the drop of a hat. The constant exercise of her unusual abilities resulted in them becoming even more pronounced. It got to the stage where people changed her name: everyone called her ‘Abacus’. Because her head was unusually large, some people even called her ‘Abacus Head’. The fact is that she was better than any abacist. It seemed as though all the mathematical skills built up by generations of the Rong family in the course of their business had become concentrated in her; as if quantitative experience had finally brought about a qualitative change.

When she got to Cambridge, while keeping all her old mathematical skill, it turned out that she also had another — hitherto unsuspected — talent for learning languages. Where other people just have to grit their teeth and get on with it, she seemed to pick up languages really easily from her foreign room-mates, and she just got quicker and quicker at it. She found a new room-mate every term and by the time the term was over, she seemed to be able to speak a new language, with a remarkable verve and grasp of idiom. Of course, there is nothing special in this method of language-learning — it is a perfectly standard method that seems to work for pretty much everyone who tries it. The amazing thing was the results that she obtained. It enabled her to learn seven languages within the space of a couple of years, and what is more this was not just a matter of speaking them: she could also read and write them. One day, she happened to meet a dark-haired young woman in the college grounds and tried to talk to her. When she could not communicate, she tried each of the seven languages that she had learned in turn, but with no result. It turned out that this girl had just arrived from Milan and spoke only Italian. Once she had discovered this, she immediately invited her to become her room-mate. It was that term that she also started work on the design of Newton’s Mathematical Bridge.

Newton’s Mathematical Bridge is one of the sights of Cambridge University. The bridge is composed from 7,177 timbers, all of a different size. In total there are 10,299 tangent planes, so if you were going to nail each of the tangent planes together, then at the very least you would need 10,299 nails. However, Newton threw all the nails into the Cam and built his bridge to be held together by gravity alone — that is what makes it a mathematical marvel. For many years, students at the mathematics department at Cambridge University dreamed of cracking the secret of the Mathematical Bridge — or rather, you could say that what they wanted to do was to make an exact replica of the Mathematical Bridge on paper. No one succeeded. A number of people worked out a way of replicating the bridge that required more than 1,000 nails, but only a handful were able to design a version that required fewer than a thousand. The person who got the closest was an Icelander, with a design that required only 561 nails. The famous mathematician, Professor Sir Joseph Larmor (at that time the President of the Newtonian Mathematical Society) then promised that anyone who could come up with a design that used fewer nails, even if it were only one less than that number, would receive a doctorate in mathematics from Cambridge University. That was how ‘Abacus Head’ received a university certificate for a doctoral degree from Cambridge, because her model of the Mathematical Bridge only required 388 nails. After the award ceremony, she ended up chatting with one of the dons in Italian, demonstrating that she had mastered yet another language.