Authors: Helen de Witt
Sorabji had been en route to a conference on pulsars in Santiago when the plane made an unscheduled stop in Belem because of mechanical difficulties. Sorabji had taken a small local plane instead; it had crashed deep in the Amazonian rainforest, the pilot dead on impact, Sorabji rescued by a local tribe but stranded for six months.
At night he would look up at the brilliant Southern sky which could be seen from the clearing, thinking about how far away everything was and how long it took the light to reach him and how little time a man did have to observe the light as it came.
He would spread soft dirt on the ground outside his hut and work on mathematical problems, because there was nothing else to do.
One day a boy from the tribe stood by him and seemed interested.
Sorabji thought: But how terrible! Suppose he is a natural mathematician, born into a society without mathematics! He had not bothered to learn the language but he had a sneaking suspicion you couldn’t count in it much past four. Imagine a mathematical genius born to a language where you went one fried ant, two fried ants, three fried ants, four fried ants, lots of fried ants, lots and lots of fried ants, lots and lots and lots of— The prospect was too frightful to contemplate.
Smoothing out the dirt he gritted his teeth and addressed himself to the basics. He put a stone on the dirt, and below it he wrote: 1. He put two stones in the dirt, and he wrote: 2. He put three stones in the dirt, and he wrote: 3. Four stones: 4. Iki-go-e (or Pete, as Sorabji called him) squatted down beside him; Sorabji couldn’t tell if 5 came as a surprise.
Six months later Pete and Sorabji were in jail.
A group of loggers had turned up in the jungle. A couple of members of the tribe had been killed, others had scattered in different directions, and Sorabji had set off on the tracks of the trucks for civilisation. Pete had followed. They had come to a small town deep in the jungle, and Sorabji had tried to find a telephone. There was only one in town, at a building marked Polícia; Sorabji had walked in the door and at once been arrested.
Five days later the British consul in Belem flew up the Amazon to Manaus, then headed inland in a borrowed Land Rover.
The British consul in Belem loved Brazil. He loved the language; he loved the music; he loved the wild, savage country; he loved the people. The fly in the ointment was the fact that this marvellous country had not closed its borders to all Britons not travelling on official business. The British were not, in his opinion, actually more intrepid than other nations; they merely had a boundless belief in the powers of their consul, a belief which would have been justified had the F.O. placed at his disposition, for example, a small private army and a slush fund of several millions, but which went well beyond what could be achieved on a small emergency fund and modest entertainment allowance. What do they imagine I can do? he would fume, and What on earth do they imagine
I
can do? was the refrain as the Land Rover bounced and jolted over the potholes.
He arrived at the logging town in late afternoon. He went at once to the Polícia, was shown into the jail, and nearly threw up.
It was close to 100 degrees outside; worse in the jail. Twenty men were crammed into a room in which ten could have breathed.
The jailer crunched over the cockroaches and pointed at Sorabji.
Sorabji’s hair was long and matted, as was his beard. He’d spent six months in a tropical sun, and was now dark brown. His clothes had been disgusting after the first week; following local custom he had taken to wearing his shirt as a loincloth. Sorabji always liked to say that the unfortunate consul had travelled hundreds of miles into the interior to rescue a British citizen, only to find Gunga Din. It was true that the loincloth had come from Gieves & Hawkes, but this was not something you’d notice on a casual inspection.
Good of you to come, Gunga Din said suavely. So glad you could make it.
And then, because the question had been tormenting him for months, You wouldn’t happen to know if they’ve got anywhere with binary X-ray emissions?
The consul said not to his knowledge. He introduced himself.
And you are?
The name’s Sorabji, said Gunga Din. George Sorabji.
The consul explained that he would need some proof of his nationality.
Gunga Din explained that he had been on a plane that had crashed in the jungle and that his passport had gone up in flames. He suggested that the consul telephone his supervisor at Cambridge, verify his identity and determine the state of play on binary X-ray emissions. He demanded immediate release and repatriation.
And we’ll have to get Pete out of here too, he added.
Who’s Pete? asked his rescuer.
Gunga Din gestured to the corner.
Do you mean one of the Indians? asked the consul.
I don’t think he’d get much joy at the Indian Embassy, Din replied haughtily. He is an Amazonian.
I’m sorry, but there’s nothing I can do for a Brazilian national. I can tell you the procedure if you’d like to lodge a complaint—
Sorabji looked at Pete. His head had fallen back, and the whites of his eyes were showing. He would die soon but that was not good enough. He could probably get a decent mark at O-level; it was a miracle of sorts but not good enough.
Sorabji said: He is a mathematical genius. I shall take him back to Cambridge.
The consul looked at Pete. If you are a consul people are constantly spinning you ridiculous stories and expecting you to believe them, but this was the most ridiculous he had ever heard. He said correctly: If he is a Brazilian national I’m afraid there is nothing—
Sorabji said: You. Stupid.
Ignorant
. Bureaucrat.
And he said:
Newton
is sitting in this cell. If I leave they will kill him. I shall not leave this place unless he goes with me.
But what exactly do you think I can—
Sorabji said: Do you have a piece of paper?
He was handed a piece of paper and a pen, and he wrote on it
1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9+10+11+12+13+14+15+16+17+18+19+20
and he said: How long do you think it would take you to add it up?
The consul hesitated—
That boy, said Sorabji very gravely, can add all the numbers between 1 and 500 in 20 seconds.
The consul said: Hm.
Sorabji was a Zoroastrian but he was not much of a believer, and he had been to chapel a lot at school but he believed even less in that, and yet he found himself saying Please Please Please Please. Please let him not know about Gauss please please please please please.
Because Sorabji had taught Pete a trick that the great mathematician Gauss had discovered at the age of 8:
Suppose you want to add 1+2+3+4+5
Add the sequence to itself backwards: 5+4+3+2+1
The sum of each pair is the same: 6+6+6+6+6
But that’s easy to work out! It’s just 5 × 6, or 30.
So the sum of the first sequence is just 30 divided by 2, or 15!
If the sequence went up to 6, each pair would add up to 7, so the sum would be 6 × 7 ÷ 2, or 21; if the sequence went to 7, the sum would be 7 × 8 ÷ 2 = 28. If the sequence went up to 500 the sum would be half of 500 × 501: 250,500 ÷ 2 = 125,250. Easy.
The consul was still staring at the piece of paper.
He said: But how’s that
possible
?
Sorabji said: Look, don’t take my word for it. Take him up to the office. Write down a sum, all the numbers between 1 and 257, 1 and 366, whatever you choose. He doesn’t know how to use a pen, you’ll have to spread some dirt on the floor for him to write on. Give him the problem and time him and then work it out on a calculator.
The consul said: Well …
He went off to speak to the head of police. It is not standard practice in the Brazilian system of justice to release convicts who can add all the numbers between 1 and 500 in 20 seconds, but all the same there was something very strange about it and the head of police said he would like to see it. So Pete was brought up from the cell.
After a little conferring they decided to try him on 30. The consul wrote out the sum on a piece of paper, and a little dirt was brought in and spread on the floor, and the piece of paper was handed to Pete. 30 times 31 is 930 divided by 2 is 465 and he squatted down and wrote 465 in the dirt while the chief of police was punching 17 into his calculator. The chief of police got up to 30. 465 appeared on the display.
The chief of police and the consul stared at the boy, and their eyes got wider, and wider, and wider.
They tried 57, and 92, and 149, and each time the same thing happened. The boy wrote a number in the dirt, and a very long time later the same number would appear on the display of the calculator.
The consul looked at the boy, and he remembered the great Indian mathematician Ramanujan. He called Sorabji’s supervisor in Cambridge and received confirmation that the brilliant young astronomer had disappeared en route to a conference in Chile six months before. He hung up the phone, and he explained to the chief of police that Sorabji was a brilliant eccentric scientist. That was why he had turned up in the jungle wearing a loincloth. The boy was his pupil. The chief of police looked at him steadily. The consul made polite but firm enquiries as to the precise nature of the charges. The chief of police looked at him steadily.
Accounts differ as to what happened next.
The numbers were the only thing that Pete could understand in the proceedings, and he later said that he remembered doing the sum of numbers between 1 and 30, and the numbers between 1 and 57, and 1 and 92, and 1 and 149, and he remembered five bundles of notes with the number 10,000 changing hands.
The consul maintained that there had been absolutely no irregularity of any kind, the F.O. had extremely clear guidelines on bribery, he had made a call to Britain to speak with Sorabji’s supervisor and had naturally reimbursed the chief of police for the cost of the call, and he had also authorised the purchase of clothes for which he had reimbursed the chief of police and for which he had a receipt.
The chief of police confirmed this story.
Whatever the truth of the matter, Sorabji returned to Britain and sold the story to the papers and got a TV deal and Pete went to Caltech and learned English and eventually developed an interest in physics, and he was reunited with Sorabji for the production of Mathematics the Universal Language.
Most members of the British public are not interested in mathematics, but they were intrigued enough by Pete to tune in anyway, and so got their first taste of Sorabji in action. Most had been sceptical of Sorabji’s claim to have taught an Amazonian the subject from scratch. Sorabji demonstrated his methods using numbers, stones, leaves, flashing eyes, eloquent gestures and not a single word of English, and they changed their minds. Most viewers had never heard of Gauss, nor felt the lack. Seeing Sorabji they felt that things might have been different. Had they had a teacher who looked like Robert Donat, who knew what heights they might have scaled? At the end of the programme Sorabji descended into English to explain that the best-dressed Indians bought their loincloths at Gieves & Hawkes, a tip which most teachers of mathematics are not in a position to offer. Sorabji was even able to persuade people to sit still for a circle of radius 1 described in the Gaussian plane.
People said say what you like he has a sense of humour, and they watched Mathematics the Universal Language and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Sun because he had a sense of humour and because he was like Robert Donat in The Winslow Boy and The 39 Steps but not Goodbye Mr. Chips.
Today the programme began at Wembley Stadium. Sorabji stood in the middle of the field.
He said how big an atom do we need to see the nucleus? He took from his pocket a tiny steel ball. He said that if this were the nucleus of a potassium atom the atom would be the size of the stadium, and 99.97% of its mass would be in the tiny steel ball, which would weigh about 105,000 kilos. For those of you who have trouble visualising 105,000 kilos, said Sorabji, that’s roughly 110 Vauxhall Astras.
Wembley wouldn’t let us stack 110 Vauxhall Astras on the field, he said regretfully. But here’s one we made earlier.
The camera cut to a car park. The stadium was now in the background. In the foreground were 110 red Vauxhall Astras in an irregular polyhedral formation, stacked in scaffolding that looked as though it had gone a heartstopping five times over budget.
There was a helicopter standing to one side.
Sorabji looked up at the structure which was about four times his height. He said the good thing about this example is that we get a real sense of the weight of a nucleus the size of a tiny steel ball. The bad thing is that we tend to lose sight of the electrons. Literally. The electrons of this 105,000-kilo nucleus weigh about 1.5 kilos apiece, and to see what
that
means we’ll have to go to Luton because the first two are in a shell 30 kilometres away.
The helicopter’s propellers began to turn, and the helicopter to rise. Below it dangled a rope ladder. Sorabji leapt onto the ladder and began to climb. We were in the 39 Steps segment of the programme.