A DIVINE LANGUAGE

Nearing his eighth decade, a New Yorker writer decides to confront his math phobia.

"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.” So reflects Wilkinson, who admits that the challenge he set himself—to master or at least become comfortable with algebra, geometry, and calculus—was a kind of grudge match meant to avenge his first encounter, back in high school, with a smackdown that would “knock the smile off math’s face.” It turns out that math’s smile is as enigmatic as Mona Lisa’s. It also turns out that math has a philosophical dimension few adolescents are likely to pick up but that lends itself to mature reflection. As Wilkinson observes, math remains the same, but people change. “In Book 7 of Republic,” he writes, “Plato has Socrates say that mathematicians are people who dream they are awake. I partly understand this, and I partly don’t.” Many other mysteries are resistant to easy solution, but as Wilkinson slogged through the material, recognizing that math is both a kind of language and religion, he appreciated more and more of its philosophical nature. He was often stumped by the problems he faced. “To be unable to fulfill an intellectual task is frustrating,” he writes, but regardless, he doggedly worked his way up to calculus, there to find that, again, he sort of understood it—at least more than he thought he would. In the end, what Wilkinson learned from math and its adepts—including one brilliant mind who applied his skills not in academia but in the World Series of Poker—was not just solving problems, but a humility “forced on me by engaging in a pursuit that I appear to be unfitted for.”

Inspiring reading for anyone seeking to overcome intellectual defeat in any realm.