Ethan Canin - A Doubter's Almanac

“Yes.”

“And what did you find there to work on?”

“I guess I haven’t settled on anything. Nothing specific yet, anyway.”

“Well,” he sniffed, “focus yourself. Settle on something.”

—

NOW AND THEN, one or another of the graduate students in his department would stop by for an assignment or to discuss a problem. The conversation would begin optimistically; then it would falter, as conversations had all his life. Milo watched his colleagues walk back up the stairs of his apartment into the hectic brightness of the day. Satchels swinging at their sides. The spring-loaded door whooshing and slapping.

He needed something to fill the hours. Borland’s admonition breathed steadily in his ear. Startling. He’d somehow not fully appreciated that a graduate student was obligated to write a dissertation. How insanely idiotic to be unaware of a requirement like that. He needed something to unbind his thinking.

One day in Evans Library, he noticed that a girl was watching him. She was sitting at a desk by the window, and he was standing all the way across the room at the shelves along the far wall, looking at a book about Tycho Brahe, the great sixteenth-century astronomer. When he glanced over again, the girl was still looking in his direction. Dark hair and a man’s button-down shirt. That’s all he could see. He shifted his gaze.

Brahe had used a quatrant to define the orbits of the planets. Milo flipped a page and found a drawing of the instrument itself, which looked like a mariner’s sextant but was many times larger. Onto the palm of his hand, he sketched the spoked arms and the notched, chordal circumference.

When he walked back out of the stacks, she was gone.

That afternoon, at a lumberyard near the bay, he bought some cheap lengths of maple from a scrap pile. In a trash can behind the five-and-dime he found a sheaf of balsa. From there it was straightforward. A couple of weeks later, the arc and axis had emerged from the maple, and the calibrated rim from the balsa. It was scrupulous work — but so was a wooden chain and so was a mathematical proof. Puny assaults on the heavens.

Distractions, too. He was well aware that he needed to distract himself.

—

THAT SEMESTER HE was taking algebraic geometry, Lie groups, and special topics in number theory. Six problem sets per week, each calculation illustrated, each solution rederived for accuracy. Again: distractions. He was also teaching two sections of undergraduate calculus. And all the while, the carefully angled quatrant stood alongside the door of his apartment, steadily emerging from its parts. Turning back to his desk with its piles of student quizzes to mark, he imagined himself in a world where the workings of the heavens remained a mystery, a world in which observation alone might propel forward the lot of man.

This astral machine was going to lead him to a discovery. That’s what he told himself. Not directly, but along an obliquity. The sun’s otherwise imperceptible climb across the equinoxes. His daily, progressive readings on the notched scales. The enterprise touching him, unexpectedly, with a remembered calm. This would free him.

Alone in a city that ran like an unclean river outside his window, he found, for the first time in his life, that he desired friendship. This, too, might free his thinking.

—

“WELL?” BORLAND SAID, offering the decanter.

“Okay, sure.”

A bright November afternoon. In the distance, a pale-blue Frisbee rose above the frame of the window, hovered like a flying saucer, and descended into shouts.

Borland filled a glass with sherry and slid it across the desk, then cast his glance where Milo had been looking. The Frisbee showed itself again. “An imperfect set of parabolic coordinates,” he said. “More aerodynamics than quadratics. Still, one of the benefits of the view.”

“Along with the Dopplerized shouts,” said Milo.

Borland chuckled, leaning back with his glass. He seemed to be enjoying the conversation. “Christian Doppler was a mathematician more than a physicist,” he said. “Son of a bricklayer, you know.”

“Is that right?”

His eyes found Milo’s. “Yes, it’s right.”

Something had soured the man.

“I just meant I didn’t know that about him.”

“Doppler’s work wasn’t particularly impressive,” Borland said flatly. “Not compared to his reputation.”

“I don’t know much of his history.”

“Evidently.”

“But I’d like to. I’d like to read more of it.”

“Nature never lies,” Borland said, leaning forward to refill his glass. “That’s what history tells us.”

“I see.”

“Men lie.”

“Okay.” Milo sipped the sherry. It puckered his cheeks.

“Do you know Lars Hongren, the number theoretician?”

Milo searched his memory. “I might.”

“You might ?”

“Remind me.”

Borland leveled his eyes. “Never pretend to knowledge, Andret. Never do it. Learning is to be hungered for, not treated as currency.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Have you heard of Hongren then?”

“No.”

“Of course you haven’t. Lars Hongren was the most brilliant student we’d ever seen here. That’s who he was. That’s it, and that’s all.” He took a drink. “He was working on a new approach to the Catalan-Mersenne problem.”

“The double Mersennes are all primes,” Andret offered.

Borland waved him away with his hand. “He was closing in on a solution. Extremely talented young man. His dissertation was drumming up plenty of excitement. I’d phoned Stanford and Princeton about him. And then?”

Milo met his professor’s gaze. “Yes?”

“And then, I discovered what he’d been doing.”

Milo waited.

“Even recalling it disgusts me.” Borland closed his eyes. “I trusted the man at his word. Without checking on him. Suffice it to say that now Lars Hongren works in a bank somewhere, stapling together loans.”

The old man opened his eyes and let a silence settle.

“A sad story,” Milo finally offered.

“An important story. Lars Hongren stole his research, young man. He stole it. He lied to all of us. If you ask me, it should be a much-sadder story. He should be in prison. I tried to put him there, you know. But your country doesn’t deem it a crime.”

“Is that right?”

Borland leaned forward. “Look,” he said. “You have a talent, Andret. A significant one. Maybe like Hongren’s. Maybe like mine — that’s perfectly okay to say, by the way, if it’s true . Do you agree with me?”

“I can’t say.”

“This is what I’m trying to tell you, Andret. I can say. You’ve been chosen by God, young man. By humankind. By the cosmic order. By whatever you think runs this place, to translate a language. Topology is God’s rules, Andret. That’s what I’m telling you. And you’ve been called upon to translate them.” He tapped the desk. “Your talent is that major .”

“Thank you, Professor. I’m grateful.”

Borland looked across the desk again, this time blinking. He poured himself another sherry. “If you’re grateful, ” he said, chuckling once more and turning back to his work, “then perhaps you misunderstand.”

ONE MORNING, WHILE thumbing a journal in the common room of Evans Hall, he came across a problem: the Malosz conjecture. In the early part of the century, Kamil Malosz had written to a friend wondering whether certain equations might have solutions in complex projective spaces; and over the years the question had evolved into a deeper and deeper problem. No mathematician had ever been able to find a solution. In Zentralblatt für Mathematik, Milo discovered a long history of attempts.