The Gift of Numbers Read Online Free PDF Page A

do if I found the apartment in
flames.
     
    Any reticence or wariness I felt for the Professor vanished the moment
I saw him with my son, and from that point on I trusted him
completely. As I'd promised the evening before, I gave my son a
map to the house and told him to come directly from school. It
was against agency rules to bring children to the workplace, but
there was no denying the Professor.
    When my son appeared at the door the next day with his
schoolbag on his back, the Professor broke into a wide grin and
opened his arms to embrace him. I didn't even have time to point
at the line he'd added to his note—"and her son, ten years old."
As a mother, it was a joy to see someone so completely embrace
my child, and I felt a slight twinge of jealousy that my welcome
from the Professor was always much more reserved.
    "I'm so glad you've come!" he said, without any of the questions
he asked me every morning. Bewildered by the unexpected greeting,
my son stiffened, but managed a polite answer. The Professor
took off my son's Hanshin Tigers baseball cap and rubbed his
head. Then he gave him the nickname before he'd even learned his
real one.
    "I'm going to call you Root," he said. "The square root sign is a
generous symbol, it gives shelter to all the numbers." And he
quickly took off the note on his sleeve and made the addition:
"The new housekeeper ... and her son, ten years old,."
    At first I made us name tags, thinking that if the Professor
weren't the only one with notes clipped to him he might feel less
anxious. I told my son to change his school name tag for one I
made that read "." The experiment proved less successful
than I'd hoped. No matter how much time passed, I was always
the young woman who made painfully slow progress with numbers,
and my son would be the boy who simply appeared, and was
embraced.
    My son soon grew accustomed to the Professor's enthusiastic
greeting and even came to enjoy it. He would take off his cap at
the door and present the flat top of his head, as if to show how
proud he was to be worthy of the name Root. And for his part, the
Professor never missed his cue, he mentioned the square root
whenever he met my son.
    My contract stipulated that I would make dinner for him at six
o'clock and leave at seven after finishing the dishes; but the Professor
began objecting to this schedule as soon as my son arrived
on the scene.
    "I won't stand for it! If you have to finish here and then make
another meal once you get home, Root won't get his dinner until
eight o'clock. That just won't do. It's inefficient; it's illogical. Children
should be in bed by eight o'clock. You can't deprive a child
of his sleep—that's when he does his growing."
    For a mathematician, his argument wasn't very scientific, but I
decided to ask the director of the agency if it would be possible to
deduct the cost of our dinner from my salary.
    The Professor had never before thanked me for my efforts in
the kitchen, but his attitude changed when the three of us sat
down to dinner together for the first time. His manners were exemplary.
He sat up very straight and ate quietly, without spilling so
much as a drop of his soup on the table or his napkin—all of
which seemed odd, given how terrible his manners had been
when it was just the two of us.
    "What's the name of your school?" he asked.
    "Is your teacher nice?
    "How was lunch today?
    "What do you want to be when you grow up?"
    As he squeezed lemon on his chicken or picked out the carrots
from his soup, the Professor would ask Root one question after
another, without hesitating, even when the question concerned
the past or the future. He was determined to make our dinner
hour as peaceful and pleasant as possible. Though Root's answers
to his questions were mostly perfunctory, the Professor listened
attentively, and it was thanks to his efforts that we ate together
without drifting into any awkward silences.
    He was not simply humoring a child. Whenever Root would
put his