How it Seemed to Begin

I think it all began because of the shape of my mother's breasts. And it definitely began with something my mother wrote on the margin of a page stuck on the wall: Frege said that the line connecting any two points is already there before we draw it. Underneath it, she'd made two dots, pressing the nib of her fountain pen so hard the swelling scarlet ink stained the white paper. She always wrote in scarlet ink until she went mad.

And of course, there was the advertisement. Many things became linked because of it, in the way that you might be sitting in a cafe and suddenly a stranger stands at the door in an ordinary brown coat, but because of the fall of light on the brown coat you cry out, fragments from the past are linking and unwinding in you.

Or a man might walk across a room wrapped in a white towel, with windows behind him, nothing more momentous than windows, and mountains are behind the windows, only mountains, but their light is turning him emerald, turquoise, purple&emdash;so he moves inside a jewel, and tears start in your eyes.

The advertisement went like this:

WANTED: Radically new ideas about mathematics, to be read at an international mathematics conference. Perhaps, as an outsider to university mathematics, you have been figuring out revolutionary mathematical ideas that seemed too outrageous to make public. This is your moment. We want to hear from you

The conference was to be held across the world from me, in Athens, and hosted by an Australian university who regretted 'that mathematics had become the exclusive province of academics, an old men's private debating club.'

The conference was to be held soon. Applications had to be sent to a private box number, judged by the university, and then

'the person with the most intriguing theories will be invited to the conference, fares and accommodation paid, to explain them.'

I've often thought since of all the people who answered that advertisement. You'd have had to be living a particular life. On the edges, waiting, maybe not knowing you were waiting.

I saw the advertisement in the magazine on a colleague's desk, one of those cold blustery May days when trees outside the window were tearing the sky apart.

I bundled up my scribbles, three hundred and fifteen pages of them, and sent them off. I'd found the way to rescue my mother at last.

The next two issues of the bemused magazine were besieged with letters from suspicious readers. Why had the invitation been made'? Was it (some readers darkly suggested) an attempt by the university to prove it was not an elitist institution? Or to prove that it should be elitist, to demonstrate that all mathematical amateurs are lunatics? Was mathematics going round in tired circles? Was new blood needed? One reader suggested that the chosen one might be like Archimedes drawing his last diagram in the dust, engrossed, silent, absorbed, while his assassins crept up behind him. (The reader was of course only alluding to poaching, and certainly not suggesting that a murder might take place in the orange Athenian night.) The choice of Athens was mocked&emdash;was a university down underneath the world making some grab for credibility by recalling mathematics' ancient and romantic past? Some readers (ecstatically) remembered Svrinivasa Ramanujan, described (commonly) as a poverty-stricken young Indian who found a textbook on the streets he swept and changed the history of mathematics. Another reader urged that the organisers invite the world's press. The lucky amateur could wake up in his (the letter was particular in its choice of pronoun) hotel room to find his name and his theory made famous.

The magazine was still publishing letters about the competition when I received my invitation. My mother's work had been chosen.