Life After Genius (18 page)

Mead exits the quad and heads up the walkway toward Epps Hall, where the math department is housed. Chained to the bicycle rack in front of the building is the green Schwinn that just passed him back at the intersection. Apparently the old fool on the bicycle is a professor in the mathematics department. How odd that Mead never before noticed the bike. He tries to calculate what the odds are that the old fool is his new faculty advisor. Mead didn’t get a look at his face, nor could he see his hair, stuffed as it was up under the cap, so he didn’t get a reading on the man’s age. It’s a three-speed bicycle with a bell on the handlebar, a wire basket on the back, and a blue license plate that reads: PNT.

His heart suddenly beating faster, Mead trots up the stairs to the second floor. Could it be that Mead’s new faculty advisor is the old man he met in the park? But that would be too good to be true. And the initials, they’re all wrong. But what if it is? What if the old fool on the bicycle and the old guy in the park and Dr. Andrew Alexander are all the same person? Mead stops just short of his new faculty advisor’s office. A familiar voice is coming from inside of it: Dr. Kustrup’s voice. The door is nearly closed so the chairman cannot see him but Mead can hear plenty.

“I need you to consider my offer seriously, Andrew,” he says. “It’s selfish of you to continue teaching at your age. There’s a whole new generation of mathematicians out there and it’s only fair that one of them be given a shot at working here, only I don’t have the budget to add another salaried staff member so I need you to do the honorable thing and step down. I mean, you’re seventy-seven, for god’s sake. It’s time, Andrew, it’s time.”

“Have you received any complaints about my teaching?”

“No, but that’s not the point.”

“It may not be your point, Frank, but it’s mine. I’m not changing my answer.”

“You’re being unreasonable, Andrew.”

“This meeting is over.” A chair scrapes across the floor. “I’m expecting a student at any moment so I’ll have to ask you to leave.”

Mead leaps away from the door just as Dr. Kustrup throws it open and charges through it. The man’s face is beet red. He’s so mad that he doesn’t even see Mead as he storms past him and disappears around the corner at the end of the hall. And Mead is so mad that he almost goes after the guy to give him a piece of his mind. Not only did Dr. Kustrup dump Mead but he handed him off to the very professor he is now trying to get rid of! Well, screw him. The man couldn’t talk his way out of a 4 x 4 matrix if he wanted to. Mead is not going to let Dr. Stuckup Kustrup get the better of him. He is simply going to graduate from this university —with top honors —without him. Hell, he’s going to graduate in spite of him. And he is going to do it with the old fool on the bicycle.

Mead hesitates before entering the professor’s office. Perhaps he should give the old man a few minutes to cool down, to regain his composure. He’s bound to be even more pissed off at Dr. Kustrup than Mead presently is. Only he isn’t. Instead of sitting behind his desk stewing about the unpleasant encounter, the professor is standing at his blackboard writing out a series of mathematical expressions, the piece of chalk in his hand clicking against the slate like a bird singing in a new day. “Dr. Alexander?”

He turns around. And it’s him all right, the old guy with bloodhound jowls and long gray hair pulled back into a ponytail. Mead smiles and the professor smiles back. He remembers too.

“Mr. Fegley, I presume?”

“Mead, sir, I prefer to be called Mead.”

“Come in, come in,” he says and waves him into his office. “Tell me, Mead, do you know what a harmonic series is?”

“Yes, sir. It’s the addition of terms continuing indefinitely.”

“And if it’s divergent?”

“The total has no limit.”

“And if it’s convergent?”

“It creeps closer and closer to a finite sum but never quite reaches it.”

“Excellent,” Dr. Alexander says. “Excellent.” He turns back to his chalkboard. The professor’s pant legs are soaking wet and he is standing in stocking feet. A pair of loafers sits on the radiator under his window.

“Dr. Alexander? I’m sorry but I couldn’t help but overhear part of your conversation with Dr. Kustrup.”

“Oh, that. Don’t worry about that, Mead, I’m not going anywhere. That man has been trying to get rid of me for years. Put the old geezer out to pasture, so to speak.” He stops writing and turns around. “Old is just a state of mind, Mead. I don’t feel any different today than I did when I was your age, so why should I retire? So I can go home and stare at the walls? Watch too much TV? Drive the wife crazy? Or maybe he wants me to open up a bookshop like that physics professor they bribed into retirement a few years back. But I’m not interested in shelving books, Mead. I need to keep my mind engaged and challenged.” He turns back to the board. “Besides, I have tenure. Kustrup can’t do a damned thing but squawk.”

Mead sets his books down on the professor’s desk, next to his wet cap. “I’d like to sign up for one of the courses you’re teaching this quarter. Introduction to Analytical Mathematics.”

“I think that sounds like a fine idea, Mead.”

“Sir. The license plate on your bicycle outside reads PNT. I’m just curious. What does that stand for?”

“Prime Number Theorem. Tell me, are you familiar with it?”

“No, sir, I’m not.”

“Not to worry, Mead, you’ll learn all about it in my class.” And he goes back to writing on the board.

“Uh, sir? Shouldn’t we sit down and figure out the rest of my schedule?”

“Sign up for whatever you’d like, Mead. After you complete my course, then we’ll discuss what you should do next.”

“Uh, all right, sir. Then I guess I’ll be going.”

“One other thing, Mead.”

“Yes?”

The professor turns around one last time. “Stop calling me
sir.
It makes me sound too important.”

A
POSTCARD ARRIVES
in Mead’s mailbox postmarked St. Louis. On the front is a photograph of Busch Stadium. A short message is scrawled across the back. “I can’t believe I’m being paid to play baseball! I’ve been promoted to Class A status and will be going on a whirlwind tour of the United States care of the St. Louis Cardinals. Not a bad gig for a kid from little old HG. Life is great! Love, Percy.”

Shit. No matter how hard Mead works, Percy somehow always comes out on top. And with next to no effort. Life on a silver platter and all that crap. Mead should send his cousin a picture postcard of the campus library. On the back he could write, “Studied here until midnight on Saturday night. It was awesome!! The books are incredible. University life is great! Love, Mead.” Only he figures his cousin wouldn’t get it, so instead he drops Percy’s postcard into his sock drawer, scoops up his textbooks, and heads over to Epps Hall.

D
R. ALEXANDER BEGINS HIS LECTURE
on the first day of class talking about Western Europe in the years following the Napoleonic Wars, about a section of Germany being ruled by the king of England. A few of Mead’s classmates exchange looks of confusion. Others check their class schedules to make sure they’re in the right classroom, to make sure they have not inadvertently wandered into a Western Civilization class by accident. The rest roll their eyes and smile knowingly because they got warned ahead of time to expect odd behavior from the old professor. Dr. Alexander sees them all reacting and smiles back.

“This is the world,” he says, “into which Georg Friedrich Bernhard Riemann was born. In the village of Breselenz, a flat, dull countryside of farm, heath, marsh, and thin woodland. An undeveloped region where, in the early nineteenth century, one was either a craftsman, a domestic servant, or a peasant. Or a minister. Which is what Bernhard’s father was: a country parson who struggled to feed and clothe his six children, only one of whom lived a normal life span. And it wasn’t Bernhard.”

The kid sitting in front of Mead squirms in his seat and glances at his watch. Mead imagines him heading over to the administrative building at the end of the hour to drop the class and wonders if he should follow, wonders if the old professor has begun to lose his marbles. Or maybe the unair-conditioned classroom is causing him to have a mental meltdown. After all, this is supposed to be a math class.

“Needless to say,” Dr. Alexander continues, “there were few opportunities in such a place for young men like Bernhard so he was sent to live with his grandmother in Hanover, eighty miles away. But the young Bernhard was homesick the whole time, a poor scholar interested in only one thing: mathematics. It was understood, however, that he would follow his father into the ministry so he entered the University of Göttingen as a student of theology.”

Mead sits up a little straighter in his chair. He is starting to like where this rather unconventional lecture is headed. Already he likes this Bernhard Riemann. He sounds like Mead’s kind of guy. Perhaps Dr. Alexander is not so addle-minded after all.

“The school was at a low point when the young Bernhard arrived in 1846, in the middle of a political upheaval. It did have one major attraction, however: It was home to Carl Friedrich Gauss, the man who discovered the Prime Number Theorem. The greatest mathematician of his age, Gauss was sixty-nine and did little teaching by that time, but he gave a lecture on linear algebra that our young hero attended. Afterwards, Bernhard confessed to his father that his true love was mathematics and thirteen years later, in 1859, Bernhard published a paper that mathematicians have been trying to prove or disprove ever since: the Riemann Hypothesis.”

The rest of the lecture is spent discussing the Riemann Hypothesis in purely mathematical terms. Including its genesis, the Prime Number Theorem. Many of the terms Dr. Alexander uses are unfamiliar to Mead. But this does not discourage him. It heightens his desire to know more. And he leaves Dr. Alexander’s class having been bitten by the same math bug that once bit Bernhard.

A
SECOND POSTCARD ARRIVES
, this one postmarked Cleveland, Ohio. On the front is a photograph of that city’s baseball stadium. Another short message is scrawled across the back. “I got to pitch in both the fifth and the sixth innings. My fastball clocked a respectable 92 mph and no runs were scored while I was on the mound. Not bad for a day’s work, not bad at all. Hope things are going as well for you. As always, Percy.”

Mead drops the postcard into his sock drawer and heads off to class.

D
R. ALEXANDER’S TEN-WEEK COURSE ENDS
, leaving Mead hungry for more. As the other students race out of the room, in a hurry to begin their four weeks of freedom before the fall quarter gets under way, Mead lags behind. Approaching the professor as the man erases the chalkboard, Mead says, “So when do you think would be a good time for me to meet with you to discuss what I should do next?”

Dr. Alexander does not answer, just keeps erasing. So Mead asks again. Louder this time. “Excuse me, professor? You said we could meet after I finished this course to discuss my curriculum. That you’d advise me.”

Still nothing. What is wrong with the man, is he deaf? He never seemed to have trouble hearing any of the students’ questions in class but then no one ever asked that many because the professor was always so precise in his explanations.

“Dr. Alexander?” Mead yells. “When should I come by your office?”

The professor turns around. “Tell me, Mead, how would you apply the basic prime-finding process to all real numbers up to 701,000?”

“That’s easy,” Mead says in a quieter voice. “With a pen, a pad of paper, and a list of the primes up to 829.”

“That is correct,” Dr. Alexander says and sets down the eraser. “Meet me in my office next Monday at two and we’ll discuss the young Mead Fegley’s future.”

T
HE PROFESSOR’S DOOR IS OPEN
but his chair is empty. Mead checks his watch to see if perhaps he has arrived early but he hasn’t, he is right on time. Well, Dr. Alexander has to be around here somewhere. Mead saw his bicycle locked to the rack outside so he can’t have wandered far. Maybe he’s in the men’s room. Or up in Dr. Kustrup’s office turning down another request to retire. Uncomfortable with entering an empty office —with seeming propriety —Mead strolls down the hall to get a drink of water from the fountain, then glances at his watch again. Perhaps this is the wrong day. Maybe Mead is supposed to meet with the professor tomorrow. But even as he thinks this, he knows it isn’t true. This isn’t Mead’s fault; it’s Dr. Alexander’s. He probably forgot all about their meeting, seeing as how the man does not appear to be very fond of his advisory-type responsibilities. Maybe that’s why Dr. Kustrup assigned Mead to him: to put one more thorn in the old professor’s side, to try and annoy him into retirement.

The phone on Dr. Alexander’s desk rings, startling Mead. It chimes four times before an answering machine picks up. “I’m not here right now,” the professor’s voice says, “which means I’m elsewhere. Leave a message if you must, or better yet, send a fax.” A loud dial tone is followed by a click as the machine shuts itself off.

Mead is beginning to wonder if he should do the same. Send a fax. “I showed up at two and you weren’t here,” he could write. “So tell me, which paper do you think more strongly influenced Bernhard Riemann, Chebyshev’s First Result or Chebyshev’s Second Result? And why?”

Mead glances at his watch a third time. It’s now ten after the hour. He’ll give the professor five more minutes and then he is leaving. The man may be a brilliant teacher but he sucks as a faculty advisor. Besides, Mead has better things to do with his time than stand around waiting for some head-in-the-clouds aging mathematician, who may or may not show up because he has little interest in being an advisor and even less interest in whether or not Theodore Mead Fegley of High Grove, Illinois, becomes a mathematician, to make an appearance. But then what? Mead will have no choice but to go back to Dr. Kustrup and ask for another advisor and Mead would rather switch majors than ask Dr. Stuckup Kustrup for any more help ever, and so he continues to wait.

Someone inside of Dr. Alexander’s office coughs. Mead peers in through the open door but the chair behind the professor’s desk is still empty. Maybe Mead just imagined it. The cough. But then he hears it again. “Professor?” he says. “Is that you?”