Decoded

by Mai Jia

  With heads held high,

  Grinning in the teeth of danger,

  We cross the Yalu River.

  The newspaper he had just been looking at was lying on the table in front of him – the headline was one of the political slogans of the day: ‘American Imperialism Is a Paper Tiger’. Listening to the rousing words of the song, looking at the heavy black ink of the headline, he felt completely helpless. He had no idea what he should say to his faraway correspondent – he was also more than a little frightened, as if there was some other person, hidden in the shadows, who was waiting for him to write back. At that time he was the vice-chancellor of N University, but he was also the deputy mayor of C City. That was the reward the People’s Republic of China had given the Rong family for their many years of devotion to science, learning and patriotism over the course of several generations. This was the happiest time of his life – he wasn’t the kind of person to care for nothing but personal aggrandizement, but he wouldn’t have been human if he didn’t enjoy it. The Rong family had been going through a long period of decline, but now the good days were back again – he was treasuring every minute of it. It was only the fact that he had very much the air of an ivory-tower intellectual that made people imagine that he did not appreciate his present good fortune.

  In the end, Young Lillie did not write back to Jan Liseiwicz. He took Liseiwicz’s letter and two newspapers full of coverage of the bloody battles between the American Army and the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army in Korea to Jinzhen, and told him to write back to the man.

  He said, ‘Thank him, but tell him that you can’t leave because of the Korean War. I am sure that he will be very sad that things ended like this: I am too, but the person who has lost the most here is you. I think that God wasn’t on your side here.’

  Later on, when Jinzhen handed him the draft of the letter and asked him to have a look, the old man seemed to have forgotten his earlier advice. He struck through about half of the text, which expressed regret and disappointment – the remainder was given back to Jinzhen with further instructions: ‘You had better clip some of the newspaper reports and send them to him along with your letter.’

  That was in the spring of 1951.

  After Chinese New Year, Jinzhen went back to class. Of course, he didn’t go to Stanford, or to Princeton, but back to N University. When Jinzhen dropped his carefully worded letter and a couple of newspaper reports that he had clipped into the postbox, he was confining one of the paths that his life might have taken to history. As Master Rong said, some letters record history while others make it: this was a letter that changed one person’s entire life.

  [Transcript of the interview with Master Rong]

  Before Zhendi went back to class, Daddy discussed with me whether he should go back to rejoin his original class or whether he should start again as a freshman. I knew that Zhendi had fantastic grades as a student, but he had only spent a total of three weeks in class; what is more he had just recovered from a life-threatening illness – he could not possibly cope with a heavy workload. I was afraid that sending him to join the third-year classes would put too much pressure on him so I suggested that he re-enrol as a freshman. However, in the end he did not have to start again from the beginning; the university allowed him to rejoin his original classmates. Zhendi wanted it that way himself. To this day, I remember what he said: ‘God wanted me to become sick so that I would be forced to spend some time away from science books – He was worried that I might become their prisoner and lose my way creatively – in which case I would never have achieved anything.’

  A weird thing to say, don’t you think? So bizarre as to almost seem a bit mad?

  The fact is that Zhendi had previously suffered from very low selfesteem, but getting so sick seemed to have changed him. In actual fact, the thing that really changed him was the books that he read, a huge number of books that were nothing to do with mathematics. While he was at home recovering, he read all my books and all Daddy’s books, particularly the fiction. He read them very quickly and in a very strange way – some books he would pick up, flick through a few pages and then put them straight back again. Some people imagined that he was actually reading the books from cover to cover in that time and so they called him Little Tuk, after the H. C. Anderson character who learns his lessons by putting his schoolbooks under his pillow at night. That was ridiculous, of course. He did read very quickly, it is true – the majority of books that he took from our shelves were back within twenty-four hours. The fact is that reading quickly is related to reading a lot; the more you read, the more you know and then the quicker you read the next thing. As he read more and more books related to topics beyond the subject he was studying at university, the less interested he was in the things written in his textbooks. That is why he started to cut classes – sometimes he even cut my classes. At the end of the first term after his resumption of study, both his grades and the number of classes that he had missed were quite eye-opening: he was the top of the class and by a very long way. Another thing that he was way ahead of his classmates in was the number of books he borrowed from the university library – in one term he had borrowed more than two hundred books in subjects ranging from philosophy to literature, economics, art, military science – there was all kinds of stuff in there. It was for this reason that during the summer holidays, Daddy took him up to the attic and opened up our storeroom. Pointing to the two cases of books that Liseiwicz had left behind, he said: ‘These aren’t ordinary textbooks. Liseiwicz left them. In the future when you don’t have anything else to do, why don’t you read them? I am afraid though that you may not understand them.’

  Another term passed and then in about March or April of the following academic year, Zhendi’s classmates all started working on their graduation theses. It was at around this time that a couple of the other professors in the same department came to see me, because they thought that there was a problem with the subject that Zhendi had chosen. They were hoping that I would speak to him, that I would find a way to persuade him to pick another topic. Otherwise it was going to be impossible for any of them to supervise his graduation thesis. I asked what topic he had picked and they said it was a political problem.

  Zhendi had decided that he wanted to write his thesis based on a theory propounded by the famous mathematician Georg Weinacht concerning the binary nature of certain constants. The topic was to be structured around coming up with a mathematical proof for this theory. The thing is that Georg Weinacht was famous at that time in the mathematical community for his anti-communist stance – it was said that he had a notice pinned to the door of his office saying, ‘No Communists or Fellow Travellers Beyond This Point’. At the time of the most appalling carnage during the Korean War, he went on record encouraging the American Army to cross the Yalu River. I know that science is international and knows no borders, and that it is not affected by any ‘ism’, but Weinacht’s powerfully anti-communist stance did overshadow his mathematical theories and give them a political dimension. At that time, there were a number of communist countries, led by the Soviet Union, where the validity of his theories was not admitted and his work was not even mentioned – if it did come under discussion, it was the subject of much criticism. If Zhendi was hoping to prove one of his theories that would very much run counter to the tide. It was a very sensitive topic and would be seen as having dangerous political implications.

  Well, I don’t know what kind of intellectual maggot Daddy got in his head – maybe he was persuaded by Zhendi’s cast-iron proofs – but at a time when everyone else was either avoiding the issue or hoping that he would talk to Zhendi and get him to change his topic, he not only did nothing of the kind, he even went so far as to weigh in on Zhendi’s side and take over as his thesis supervisor. Daddy consistently encouraged Zhendi to continue with his chosen subject.

  In the end, the title of Zhendi’s graduation thesis was: ‘The Constant π as a Definable yet Irrational Number’. This was a subje
ct far from anything that he had ever studied in class – it was much more the kind of topic that you would expect for an M.A. thesis. There is absolutely no doubt that his choice was heavily influenced by the books that he was reading in the attic . . .

  [To be continued]

  When he read the first draft of Jinzhen’s graduation thesis, Young Lillie was more enthusiastic than ever. He was transfixed by the beautifully incisive and logical thinking recorded therein, but some of the mathematical proofs he felt to be unnecessarily complicated and in need of improvement. The improvements were aimed at simplifying the presentation and removing unnecessary elements to the proofs. However, in order to develop the basic proofs (which in some cases were extremely elaborate), he had to use comparatively sophisticated and direct means, showing an understanding that was far from simply being confined to the field of mathematics. The first draft of Zhendi’s thesis came to 20,000 characters. After a couple of revisions, the final version came in at just over 10,000 characters. Later on it was published in the magazine Popular Mathematics – and made not a small splash in Chinese mathematical circles. However, there seemed to be no one who was prepared to believe that Zhendi had done it all on his own because, having been revised a couple of times, the quality had also been significantly improved. It really didn’t look like an undergraduate student’s thesis, but the ground-breaking essay of an established academic.

  Having said that, the good points and the failings of Zhendi’s thesis were both perfectly clear: when you talk about the good points, beginning from a single mathematical constant, Zhendi had developed Georg Weinacht’s binary theory into a pure mathematics solution for one of the major problems facing scholars working on the issue of artificial intelligence. This gave the reader something of the feeling of having seen the invisible wind caught and held in the human hand. The failing of this thesis is that it was all built upon a supposition, whereby π is treated as a constant – all the proofs that he had developed were based upon this theory and so it was impossible for the reader not to feel that this particular castle had been built entirely upon sand. If you wanted the castle to be built upon firmer foundations, if you wanted to demonstrate the academic value of this thesis, then you would first have to prove that π is indeed a genuine constant. As to the problem of whether or not π is actually a constant, even though this issue was first raised by mathematicians many centuries ago, it still has not been conclusively proved. Today most mathematicians do believe that it is a constant, but the fact remains that as long as proof is lacking, it remains in the realm of supposition – you cannot ask that everyone else agree with you. In the same way, until Newton noticed that an apple will always naturally fall to the earth and expressed this in terms of his theory of universal gravity, everyone had the right to express their own doubts as to gravity’s existence.

  Of course, if you don’t believe that π is indeed a constant, then Jinzhen’s thesis was completely useless – the theory upon which it was based falls through. On the other hand, if you accept that π is a constant, then you would be amazed by what he had managed to achieve – it was somewhat like bending an iron bar into the shape of a flower. In his thesis Jinzhen suggested that human intelligence should be regarded as a mathematical constant and an irrational number, one that never comes to an end. If you accept this concept, then the second part of Georg Weinacht’s binary theory comes into play, which could serve to resolve one of the major problems with developing artificial intelligence. Human intelligence also includes an element of confusion. Confusion is indefinable: it represents something that you cannot know completely; it is also something that you cannot replicate. Therefore he suggested that under present conditions, it is impossible to be very optimistic about the prospect of entirely replicating human intelligence by artificial means, since the closest you were going to get was a near approximation.

  I should mention that there are plenty of mathematicians who entirely agree with Zhendi’s position, including many working today. You could say that there was nothing new about his conclusion: the interesting thing is that starting from a daring hypothesis about the binary nature of the mathematical constant π, he went on to develop a proof for this derived from pure mathematics. At least he was trying to develop a proof; the problem is that the materials he was using (the foundations of his house) had not been proved themselves.

  To put it another way, if one day someone does succeed in proving that π is a constant, then the value of this thesis is clear. The problem is that this day still has not dawned, so strictly speaking, his work remains completely pointless – its only success lies in demonstrating his own intelligence and daring. But thanks to his connection with Young Lillie, many people found it difficult to believe that it was entirely his own work and hence his genius remained under question. The fact is that this thesis brought nothing good to Jinzhen: it did not change his life in any way, but it did change the very last years of Young Lillie’s life . . .

  [Transcript of the interview with Master Rong]

  I can be absolutely categorical: Zhendi wrote that thesis all on his own. Daddy told me that apart from recommending a couple of reference books and writing the introduction, he had nothing to do with any of the contents – it was all Zhendi’s hard work. I remember what Daddy wrote in the introduction. He said, ‘The best way to deal with our demons is to go out and fight them – let the devils see how strong we are. Georg Weinacht is a demon infesting the sacred halls of scientific research, and for a long time he has been able to get away with murder. Now is the time for us to lay this demon to rest. This thesis will serve to set Weinacht’s pernicious theories in their place forever; although some of the notes that it strikes are dull and muffled, the rest ring true.’

  Not long after the thesis was published, Daddy went on a trip to Beijing. No one knew what he was up to; he left quite suddenly one day without telling anyone what he was doing. About a month later, when someone came to N University with three decisions from the central authorities, we finally realized that this must have been the motive for Daddy’s earlier trip to Beijing. The three decisions were:

  1. They gave permission for Daddy to resign as chancellor.

  2. The government gave the necessary money to found a computer research unit at the university.

  3. Daddy was going to be responsible for setting up this research facility.

  At that time there were a lot of people who were hoping to be recruited by this new research facility, but after Daddy interviewed them, he decided in the end that none of them came up to Zhendi’s standard. Zhendi was the very first person recruited for the research facility and as things turned out he was the only person who could have done it – the remainder of the people hired were basically just his assistants, helping out with day-to-day tasks. This gave people a very bad impression, suggesting that this international standard research unit had basically been monopolized by members of the Rong family, and there was a lot of gossip about it.

  The fact is that when Daddy was a government official, he was determined to demonstrate how impartial he was, particularly when it came to hiring new staff – he avoided giving a job to anyone with even the remotest connection to the family, to the point where he seemed positively heartless. We in the Rong family founded N University, and if you gathered together all the members of the clan who had worked there over the generations, at the very least you would have had enough people to fill a couple of dinner tables. When Grandpa (Old Lillie) was alive, he looked after the family, finding them jobs in the government and giving those in academia the opportunity to develop their talents, visit other institutions and learn something from them . . . But when it came to Daddy, to begin with he had an official position but no real power, so even if he had wanted to help out he would not have been able to. Later on, when he had both the official position and the power, he could have helped out but he didn’t choose to. During the years that Daddy was the chancellor of the university, he did not give a job to one single memb
er of the Rong family, no matter how well qualified they were. Even in my case, the department recommended me for promotion a couple of times, wanting to make me assistant dean, but each time he turned it down. He put a cross down just like you would when finding a mistake on an examination paper. What happened to my brother was even more infuriating – he had come back to the country from abroad with a PhD in physics and he really should have been recruited by N University, but Daddy told him to go elsewhere. Just think about it: in C City, where else could he go? He ended up at the Normal University, but the working conditions and the level of the students were both significantly inferior – he took a job in a university in Shanghai the following year. Mummy was really furious with Daddy about this. She said that he was intentionally forcing our family to split up.

  Well, when it came to recruiting Zhendi for the new research facility, all Daddy’s principles about not giving jobs to members of the family went out of the window. He ignored all the gossip and just did what he wanted – he seemed to have become completely obsessed. Nobody understood what could possibly have changed Daddy’s mind; but I knew, because one day he showed me the letter Jan Liseiwicz wrote just before he left. He said, ‘Liseiwicz’s letter did tempt me, but the real clincher was when I saw Jinzhen’s graduation thesis. Up until that moment I thought the whole thing was going to be impossible, but when I saw that I decided to give it a go. When I was young, I really hoped that one day I would be able to make some concrete contribution to science. Maybe it really is too late to start now, but Jinzhen has given me the confidence to try. You know, Liseiwicz is absolutely right: without Jinzhen, I would not stand a hope in hell; but with Jinzhen, who knows what we might not achieve? In the past, I have always underestimated the kid’s genius; now I am going to give him a real chance to show what he can do . . . ‘

  [To be continued]

  That is how it all happened. As Master Rong said, her father was inspired to work on this project by Jinzhen – how could he possibly give the job to anyone else? She went on to explain that Jinzhen not only changed the last years of her father’s life, he also changed one of his long-standing principles – you could even say he changed his faith in humankind. In the very last years of his life, the old gentleman went back to the dreams of his youth – he decided to make a real contribution to the development of the field, to the point where he was prepared to discount as worthless everything he had done during most of his working life; everything he had done during his public career. It has always been one of the problems that Chinese intellectuals face: that they regard an academic career as fundamentally incompatible with an official position. Now the old gentleman was effectively starting his working life over again; whether this was a tragedy or a source of great delight, only time will tell.