Rebecca Goldstein - 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

By the time Lucinda went on the job market, post-Society, she received offers from every top department in the world that had an opening, which had been her goal. She had accepted Princeton’s offer. All the other job candidates in the field that year who got hired elsewhere were aware that they were employed only because Lucinda Mandelbaum hadn’t wanted their jobs. That was three years ago, and her productivity had not suffered since. Only last year, Newsweek had included her in their cover story of “Thirty-Five Scientists Under Thirty-Five Who Are Remaking Their Fields.” She had stared out of the pages, one of only six women, and the single representative of the “soft sciences” among the cosmologists, molecular biologists, and computer scientists. Of the thirty-five who had been featured, it had been, unsurprisingly, Lucinda’s striking face that had been reserved for the blowup photo on the first page of the article, her pale-gray eyes staring straight at the reader as if daring him to be the one to look away first, her measured mouth only hinting at her victory smile.

Game theory is the attempt to use mathematics to capture the relative rationality of different strategies in various situations, where how well a person fares isn’t just a matter of his own decisions but of the decisions of the other players. It’s a theory that analyzes behavior in terms of rational agency, meaning the theory assumes that each agent wants the biggest payoff, or utility, for himself. Each agent wants to balance a minimum of expected loss with a maximum of expected gain. Lucinda Mandelbaum is famous for having found applications for game theory everywhere, not just in economics and statesmanship and warfare, which are the most obvious places to look, but in areas that don’t seem to involve rational agency at all. All living things, down to the level of the so-called selfish gene, are following strategies that people like Lucinda are elucidating.

Given Lucinda’s area of expertise, it was ironic that she should be sitting here in the auditorium of the Katzenbaum Brain and Cognitive Sciences Center, chatting up Cass Seltzer under the illusion that he was someone else entirely. Even Lucinda could-wincingly-admit that she was here only because she, of all people, had let her enemies outplay her.

Of course, Lucinda had her share of enemies. Everybody does, since life, as she can demonstrate, is often a zero-sum game, where one person’s win is another person’s loss. But a person like Lucinda attracted not only more enemies, but enemies of a different kind, namely griefers: people who wished her grief for no other reason than to wish her grief. Lucinda was unabashedly ambitious, she was unapologetically successful, she had always played hard, and… she was a woman. A beautiful woman. The imbalanced distribution of natural gifts seems unfair because it is; and people will always try to make things fairer by giving grief to the gifted. Griefers present one of the complications in the rational-agency model.

The trouble for Lucinda had begun when Shimmy Baumzer, the president of Frankfurter, wanting to restore the university to those refulgent days when it had been able to boast on its faculty such international figures as Jonas Elijah Klapper, had used that article in Newsweek as a strategic plan. He made fabulous offers to each and every one of those Thirty-Five Scientists under Thirty-Five Who Are Remaking Their Fields, from Aashi Alswaan, computer scientist, to Simon Zee, cosmologist.

Lucinda had only intended to use the generous terms-not only a whopping salary but a minimal teaching load-to improve her situation at Princeton, playing one institution off against another. This was standard academic strategy. Instead, it was Lucinda who had been played, and she couldn’t believe that her being a woman wasn’t relevant.

David Prentiss Cuthbert, who was the chairman of the Princeton Psychology Department, had frankly had enough of Lucinda Mandelbaum, whose aggressive intellectual style had always been off-putting to him, and most especially after the Newsweek article had appeared. Lucinda hadn’t even tried to pretend to be embarrassed by the hype. If she could have had that damn article shrunk down and laminated to wear around her tyrannical throat, then she would have. So, while Cuthbert had encouraged her to press her demands and to threaten to leave if Princeton failed to match Frankfurter’s offer, he had also gone to the dean and told him that, “between the two of us, Bill, I wouldn’t be sorry to see her go. Her demands are infinite. I spend more time trying to keep her happy than I do the rest of my department put together. If I’m going to run this department, I have to assume that no one is indispensable.”

The Goddess of Game Theory had been knocked off her game, and it had been a chastening experience. She had spent the summer doing what someone like Cass might have called searching her soul. The depth of the animosity against her-she had learned of Cuthbert’s treachery- astounded and wounded her. He apparently resented her so much that he was willing to act against the interests of his department just to damage her, for surely it couldn’t be good for Princeton to lose her to Frankfurter.

She had only tried to game the system, and now here she was, within retching distance of the stink of failure, packing up her office in Green Hall and nobody stopping by to help her or offer her even a token word of insincere regret. She didn’t doubt for a moment why this punishment was being inflicted on her. It was the combination of her mother’s beauty with her father’s brains, which he had used to become an extremely successful doctor-lawyer specializing in malpractice. Caught in the summer’s swampy misery, she almost felt aggrieved with her parents for bequeathing her the singular genetic sum.

Perhaps the nagging sense that her parents had somehow done her wrong explained why she ended up sticking out the summer in Princeton instead of returning to the home in the Philadelphia Main Line that the Mandelbaums had bought from the estate of the late Eugene Ormandy the conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra. That summer made her hate New Jersey so much that she wondered how she could have lasted in Princeton for the three years she’d been there. Nevertheless, she stayed the summer, though there was no place she would rather have placed herself than supine on a chaise lounge, Tanqueray and tonic in hand, in the middle of the rose garden that lay just outside the french doors of the room that the Mandelbaums called “the conservatory.” Philippa, her mother, had planted the rose garden herself and did much of the tending with her own delicate hands, although Hy Hua, their Vietnamese gardener of twenty years (he’d been a boat person), did the heavy lifting.

Philippa had once used the beloved rose garden as the setting to try to draw her little daughter into a fantasy of the sort that Philippa herself had loved when she was a child of seven. Standing under a folly smothered with Rambling Rector, Paprika, and a few other climbers, she had smiled at her little towheaded daughter in her corduroy Oshkosh and said:

“Someday, you’re going to stand here in your flowing white dress and your white tulle veil, with some strong, good, handsome man beside you, and he’ll be thinking that, of all the beautiful roses in this garden, he has picked the loveliest one of all.”

“Which one did he pick? The Alchymist?”

This was their favorite rose, not only because of its beauty-it changes shade day by day, deepening from cream into orange-but also because Philippa had been able to grow it herself from division, a fascinating process which little Lucinda had avidly followed.

“No, you silly! You! You’ll be the rose he picks.”