“As in childhood, I was more or less serially defeated by the practice of mathematics,” Alec Wilkinson writes, about teaching himself math at age 65. “Whereas some people are tone-deaf, I came to wonder if I was math-deaf.”
Hoping to make myself smarter and then write a book about it, I began studying mathematics when I was sixty-five, which was five years ago. As a boy, I had been kicked off the math train at the algebra station, so I decided to start there and then learn geometry and calculus—three of the disciplines that the eighteenth century called pure mathematics. I passed algebra and geometry in high school by cheating, which is not a good life lesson for an adolescent, but I had never taken calculus.
What did I learn? Among other things, that, despite mathematics being the most explicit artifact that civilization has produced, it has also provoked many speculations that are not capable of being settled. Even those figures occupying the most exalted positions in regard to these speculations can’t settle them. A lifetime doesn’t seem sufficient to the task.
Some things I had to learn were so challenging for me that I felt lost, bewildered, and stupid. I couldn’t walk away from these feelings, because they walked with me in the guise of a gloomy companion, an apparition I could shake only by working harder and, even then, often only temporarily. There were times when I felt I had declared an ambition I wasn’t equipped to achieve, but I kept going. I was inspired, partly, by indignation and bruised feelings.
Numbers were invoked by counting, a form of organization. Letters changed speech from something ephemeral to something capable of being preserved, another form of organization. By means of addition or subtraction or some other mathematical operation, one number can deliver us to another, something letters can’t do, though, unless you think that adding letters to one another to spell a word is similar, which it isn’t. You can’t divide a word by a word, or a letter by a letter.
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