The Mathematician's Shiva

by Stuart Rojstaczer

Tornadoes are a good metaphor for how bad things happen in our lives. They build from small disturbances that usually don’t mean a thing and almost always dissipate. But somehow one particular random bad event attracts others, and all of them together grow and attract more nasty stuff. Once it gets up to a critical size, the odds of it growing even larger are no longer remote.

it was Kowalevski—who wrote a novel and a memoir in addition to her mathematical work—who inspired her. ‘The mind changes as you get older,’ she said to me. ‘It is a different machine entirely than it is when it’s young, with a different purpose.’

“My mother wrote a memoir of her childhood. She didn’t know what she would do with it. It was of a lost world, she said. I don’t think she ever intended this memoir to be published formally. Rather, it was a family document, a record of a vanished time and place that could be handed down from generation to generation.

I didn’t know whether the bulbs had any nutritive value, but I did know that it was exquisitely pleasing to dig for them. I can’t fully describe just how uplifting it was to have the normal experience of cutting into something steaming hot at a table, putting that piece of food in your mouth, and feeling it against your tongue. It was more than just the eating of it and whatever calories and nutrients it did or didn’t provide. It was about the dignity of being able to be something other than a slave to your stomach. We would be civilized again for just a little moment, reminded of what we would have once the war was over.