Still the Same Man Read Online Free PDF Page B

expressing their approval for the duodecimal system and chipping in with new reasons to support it. The professor listened with a satisfied smirk on his face. After a while, the room fell silent. All eyes were on him as the students waited to hear what he would say about the lively response his speech had inspired. But rather than adding anything, he burst out laughing, and his laugh reverberated through the room like the sound of stone scratching stone.
    “You are bunch of idiots,” he told the students. “How could you possibly think that I consider the signs of the zodiac or the twelve moons of the year to be just reasons for changing our elegant numeral system?”
    And he repeated.
    “Idiots.”
    Then he added, “And ignoramuses.”
    By that point, he’d stopped laughing, and his face was puce.
    “I fed you that load of nonsense merely to test your critical faculties. And I regret to confirm that you do not possess any such faculties. From this moment on,” he cautioned, pointing at them with a threatening finger, “it is your duty to question everything I say from this podium or write on this blackboard. Absolutely everything.”

    Joanes didn’t miss a single day of the professor’s Numerical Analysis course. When he was with his friends, he joined in their harsh digs of him. But in his case, it was all an act. What he really felt for the professor was admiration.
    This feeling was only amplified by the professor’s encyclopedic knowledge (encyclopedic from a student’s point of view), his assured, precise manner of teaching, his aristocratic indifference toward his students, and the frequent and prolonged silences into which he fell, sometimes mid-sentence, during which he would stare blankly into the distance, as if the students and everything in the room had vanished into thin air. Often, after one of these silences, he would scribble a few lines in the notebook that he kept in his breast pocket. Then he’d continue the class where he’d left off.
    Joanes’s admiration of the professor was also fueled by the fame and recognition the man enjoyed in his field, and the impressive row of dog-eared books with his name on the spine that sat in the college library.
    On numerous occasions, Joanes tried to get close to the professor, to gain his confidence, but the man’s distant character and the school’s educational model, which did not allow for contact between faculty and students, rendered any efforts useless. He took out a few of his books from the library and flicked through them fervently, but their contents were too advanced for him. He had to resign himself to simply admiring the beautiful, castle-like configurations of his equations.
    All this changed when, in the middle of the course, the professor published a biography of the English mathematician Alan Turing. Turing had been one of the pioneers of computing and was greatly admired by the professor, who often cited him in class. His previous articles had been published in renowned journals in the field. However, his book about Turing, whose title was a pun—
Turing: Pragmatic Mathematics
—was published by a little-known house specialized in texts on chess.
    During the professor’s routine digressions on Alan Turing, Joanes sensed a level of admiration similar to that which he felt for his don, and on this basis, he thought that the book might hold clues to certain facets of the professor’s personality that he kept hidden from his students, information on his tastes and interests. The moment that
Turing: Pragmatic Mathematics
was published, he rushed straight out to buy it.
    The book included absolutely no mention of Turing’s private life, focusing solely on his professional career. He ran through the most celebrated episodes of that career: the publication of his famous article, “On Computable Numbers,” in which Turing postulated the existence of a hypothetical machine—the “a-machine”—which, by applying a finite series of