by Helen Dewitt
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.
Below the helicopter you could see the red structure shrinking first to the size of a football, then a tennis ball, then a golfball, then a tiny dot and then it was gone.
A camera in the helicopter showed mile after mile of houses and Sorabji on the rope ladder. We had seen the programme before but Sib said she wanted to see it again.
The helicopter came down 30 kilometres away at a field near Luton. Sorabji stepped onto the ground. He said: One of the things that makes electrons so hard to think about is that they don’t have size in the normal sense of the word, and another is the fact that you can never know exactly where an electron is at any given time. This makes an electron highly unlike this 1.5-kilo free weight from a local gym. But a 110-Astra nucleus at Wembley weighs about 72,000 times as much as this 1.5-kilo electron at Luton, and in that it’s highly like the relation of the nucleus of a potassium atom to an electron. He showed on a map that the second shell would be at Birmingham and the third shell would be at Sheffield and the fourth at Newcastle and he said that instead of going on to Birmingham he was going to introduce Mr. James Davis of Dunstable Tae Kwon Do. Mr. Davis was a black belt, fourth dan; he was going to break a brick with his bare hand.
The brick was on a stand. Davis stood in front of it. He raised his arm; he brought down his arm; the brick broke into two pieces and fell to the floor.
Sorabji asked how long he had had to train to learn to do it and Davis said he had been studying martial arts all his life but he would say he had started to take it seriously about ten years ago.
He said: I don’t want any youngsters out there watching to get the wrong idea, obviously there is an element of hardening the body involved but I’d say the essential thing is it’s about training the mind. There are a lot of misconceptions about the sport, people think it’s all blokes acting out some Bruce Lee fantasy and I won’t deny there are some dojangs naming no names where that’s about all there is to it.
He said: Well, you’ve got your programme to get on with but there’s just one point I’d like to make, which is that the more you study any martial art the less likely you are to actually get in a fight and the less likely you are to put yourself in the type of situation where you have to fight. A beginner might do that type of thing but the more you progress the more you realise the skill is something not to be used lightly.
He said: Also the more you progress the more you realise that there is more to it than trying to progress. As a beginner you just want to improve as fast as you can, you tend to obsess about getting to the next colour of belt, there comes a time, or there should come a time, when you rise above that. Obviously you improve your skill by fighting someone as good as you are or better, well, if you think about it, if the only point is to improve your skill there’s nothing in it for the better fighter. There was a time when for that very reason the last thing I wanted was to open a school. But there comes a time when you realise you have to help young people coming along, and in the final analysis that was why I agreed to come on this show. If you, as a Nobel Prize winner, can take time away from the lab to help train young minds who am I to say no.
Sorabji said: Thank you for joining us.
He said: Let’s see this one more time in slow motion, and they replayed the arm rising and falling and the brick splitting in two.
Sib said: Do they teach you all that in judo?
I said we didn’t learn to break bricks because judo was mainly about throws and falls.
Sib said: Oh well.
He said: If the space between a nucleus and the first electron shell is like the space between 110 Vauxhall Astras at Wembley and a 1.5-kilo weight at Luton, and if the space between the first shell and the second is like the distance between Luton and Birmingham, why does it take ten years of serious mental and physical training to get a hand through a brick? At the atomic level both hand and brick are almost entirely empty space. The fact is it is not the matter in the hand which repels the matter in the brick. The repulsion is the result of electrical charge. If it were not for electrical charge we could walk through walls.
The first time I saw the programme I was very impressed by this. Now I suddenly thought Wait a minute.
I said to Sib that I did not think you could have an atom without electrical charge and if you couldn’t have an atom how could you have walls and I said maybe I should write him a letter and sign it Ludo aged 11.
Sib said: If you think he is unaware of the fact you should certainly bring it to his attention. She said you should only sign a letter aged 11 if you were saying something cleverer than the average 11-year-old would say and it was not a good idea if you had completely missed the point.
She said he was obviously trying to communicate a fact to the public at large.
I said: Fine.
She said: I wonder if it’s too late to move to Dunstable.
I said: What?
Sorabji explained that the electrons orbited the nucleus billions of times in a millionth of a second, the effect was similar to that of the propellers of a helicopter and it was the speed of the electrons that made the atom solid.
Sibylla commented that Sorabji was largely self-taught.
Sorabji’s father was a Parsi from Bombay; his mother was English. She first met his father on a visit to Cambridge: her brother was reading mathematics at Trinity College and introduced her to another man on the same staircase. At first they did not hit it off, because she made a comment about India and he had the bad manners to say that as she had never set foot in the country he would be interested to know on what she based her opinion; she said later he was the rudest man she had ever met. He went back to India and she was presented and did the usual things and it was all rather a bore. She had always been unconventional and she got the idea of going out to India just to see the place. At first her father refused his permission, but she turned down three or four offers of marriage and began taking a horse out and setting it at six
-foot fences, and when she had broken an arm and a collarbone her father said he supposed he’d better let her go then, before one of the horses got hurt.
She sailed to Bombay and it was not at all what she had expected. The Club defied description. So did the people. Also, it was rather hot. That is, she had expected it to be hot, but she had expected it to be cooler. But she looked up the rudest man she had ever met and this time they got on like a house on fire. She said that now that she had set foot in the country she could say whatever she liked and he said he was delighted to hear that she had overcome the diffidence which had afflicted her on a previous occasion. She said something rather cutting and he said something quite rude. She knew he was brilliant because her brother had said he was one of the most brilliant mathematicians he knew, but though he was brilliant and rude he was not condescending. Her brother’s other friends were unfailingly charming, so that she could not talk to one without instantly afterwards taking out a horse and setting it at a six-foot fence. She had never met a man who could open his mouth without imperilling the life of a horse.
They married in the teeth of opposition from his family, and now she wondered if she had made a mistake. Her husband was much richer than anyone she had ever met, but he also worked much harder than anyone she knew, and his business took up most of his time. His family took seriously things she could not take seriously at all. His mother once told her gravely about a recent gathering of the Kaisar-i-Hind, only Indian Chapter of the Canadian Daughters of Empire.
‘How utterly ghastly’ (the only sane response to the story) would obviously bring on palpitations. Vivian murmured some noncommittal reply and downed a gin and tonic in a single swallow. Her mother-in-law added, impressively, an illustration of the loyalty of the Guides, who had concluded an assembly by rising and shouting fervently ‘One Flag, One Throne, One Empire!’ It looked bad to be having another drink so soon, but what could one do?