The Devotion of Suspect X (Detective Galileo, #3)

by Keigo Higashino

Confinement was like a limitless garden of paradise for him. How short is a lifetime, he thought, compared to the time it will take humankind to find all the rich veins of mathematical ore where they lie sleeping and tease them forth into the world.

Certainly he would have liked to publish his theories, to be recognized and reviewed; but that was not the true essence of mathematics. In academia it was always a race to see who would reach the summit of which particular mountain first, but as long as he knew which peaks he had discovered, that would be enough.

Sometimes, all you had to do was exist in order to be someone’s savior.