Maths O’ Maths

Mohit: “Dad, will you do my Math tonight?”

Dad: “No, son, it wouldn't be right.”

Mohit:  "Well Dad, you could at least try." 

The other day, I took my 12-year-old daughter to Nil Battey Sannata by debutant director Ashwini Iyer Tiwari and what a realistic treat it turned out to be for the two of us. The story of a rebellious teenager and her single mother (Chanda), a domestic help, who rightly believes that education can be the great leveler in changing the life of her daughter (Apeksha), except for a small hitch - the duo's Maths phobia!

To be honest, Aarzoo and I am a bit like Mohit, Chanda and Apeksha --- no heavyweights at Maths. Wasn’t it P.Erdos who wrote “A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems”?  

The movie took me down the memory lane. Our Maths teacher in school was a Sikh gentleman by the name of Tajender Singh. He had this rather irritating habit of abruptly darting out of the class, while in the middle of solving an Algebra problem and returning a few minutes later, pretending nothing had happened. We fretted, fidgeted and fumed, waiting for the turbaned head to pop in again.  

Though a good teacher, this vanishing act always left us puzzled. So, one day, a bright nut decided to explore. As soon as the teacher was out, he scooted after him and saw Mr Singh pause at the corridor and fishing out a small piece of chalk from his trouser pocket begin to furiously rub it on the wall.  So that was it! The walls in the classroom were painted pink and since the noble Professor didn’t want to spoil those, he used the corridor walls to sharpen his chalk. The Maths riddle was solved to everybody’s satisfaction.  

A second Maths teacher I remember from school always brought a cane to the class. One solid kick on the door (He could never bring himself to use his hands, which, were reserved for wielding the cane, of course) and in he’d trundle, one arm bearing voluminous books on Trigonometry, Algebra and some such shit, while the other, carried the cane. Once in, he’d take his time sizing us up before offloading all his complex theorems on us.

I know, I could never get the value of pi right and my antiderivative never agreed with the answers in his book. Even he was aware that my answers were always off the mark by a constant C.  Some days, he would give us a TEST and all Hell broke lose when the results came.

On one such occasion, while I was listening to my heart pounding violently against my chest, the test papers began to fly thick and fast, as he hurled them at his Maths-phobic students, while he chopped each one of us down to size with his bone-cutting, sarcastic remarks.  “….And this one!” he screeched with laughter like a bat, holding up a piece of paper for everyone’s inspection, “It beats them all!” he cheered. “Is it yours?” he demanded to know, voice dropping to a threateningly low, as he waged his finger at me.

With a sinking heart, I realised the scribble was indeed mine. The bomb was about to explode and I braced myself for it.“I want to know,” he said, the pitch rising just a quarter or two, “IS THIS REALLY YOURS?” “Yes Sir,” I squealed like a mouse, knowing there was no escape from the cat that was about to pounce on me. “Your…  paper, I must admit, is EXQUISITE,” he said, dramatically pausing at every syllable, eyes gleaming as he ran them over my answers again, scanning each one minutely.  

Little titters broke behind my back, turning into peals of laughter as he went on relentlessly, “Never came across such brilliance before…” The class was beside itself with laughter. Everybody knew the exact potential of my intellectual capital resource when it came to Maths and their reaction was justified. Yet, I felt so miserable, I began to wish there was a place where I could bury my head Ostrich-like and die.   

“Look at her first answer --- solved! The second --- solved! And the third --- also solved! ALL CORRECT,” he declared, utterly amazed at my rare stroke of genius. He was zapped. How I managed to break all my previous code of performance, I have been unable to figure out till this date.     I also know of this jerk who went to the campus once, tried to return home but couldn’t make it to the same place he started from, guess why? Because, like me, he was a “non-commuting” student, which goes on to prove that 2X2 don’t always make 4; sometimes it also goes on to make 1 – go figure that out!

Sir Isaac Newton once said, “If I have seen farther than others, it’s because I was standing on the shoulder of giants.” But to my mind, there was an even greater genius in Hal Abelson, who changed it to “If I have not seen as far as others, it’s because giants were standing on my shoulders.” 

If Newton came up with the idea of Calculus on a warm, summer afternoon of 1665, after being hit on the head with a ‘soft, blunt’ object, I wish the hitting object were a ‘hard, blunt’ object, which would have saved all subsequent generations from the ordeal of dealing with Calculus. I am given to understand that even Newton suffered a stroke after publishing some of his findings in 1693.

 There is something about Maths that makes all Maths wizards lose their equilibrium at some point in their lives. Look at John Nash, Stephens Hawkings and Archimedes (the bloke jumped out of the pool in the buff, running through the streets of Syracuse, yelling ‘Eureka! Eureka!’ and, no one thought of reporting him to the Shiv Sena goons, or he would have been hauled behind bars under the Obscenity Act.)

 It’s quite sad that old mathematicians never die. They just begin to lose some of their marbles. That’s why, every university in the world maintains a department of Mathematics because it’s far cheaper to put them in one place than to have them institutionalised. Don’t believe me? Try shoving a statistician’s head in the oven and his feet in ice and moments later, he’ll surface again saying “On an average I feel fine…Probably.”

 The real problem is that if an engineer is condemned to think that his equations are an approximation to reality; a physicist, that reality is an approximation to his equations, a mathematician simply does not care. For him, reality is illusion and illusion reality, so long as the two always add up.

Hence, the theorem stands proven.