2

I found my way to the library by myself, wandering first through a noisy video game room, several living rooms, two remarkably well-equipped kitchens, an indoor basketball court, and a theater with rows of red velvet chairs, each room gaudier than the last. The library, however, was beautiful, incongruous with the rest of the mansion. It had three twelve-foot-tall walls of books and the fourth wall was all glass and looked out onto an infinity pool and the bay beyond.

The collection was nothing less than magnificent. The first book I saw, placed safely in a Lucite case set a meter off the floor on a pedestal, was the Codex Leicester. The yellowed paper was like gold, the script of da Vinci barely readable, but as clear as the boldest type. Across the room was a 1440 Gutenberg Bible. On the shelves I found one treasure after another. A first edition of Newton’s Principia, a nice start, followed by Über eine Eigenschaft des Ibengriffes aller reellen algebraischen Zahlen and L’anneau d’homologie d’une représentation, crazy enough, but then works like Euler’s Recherches sur la courbure des surfaces and Riemann’s Über die Hypothesen, welche der Geometrie zu Grunde liegen. I was sitting in a very comfortable leather chair with Gauss’s Disquisitiones generales circa superficies curvas in my lap when Eigen Vector walked in. She was dressed in red this time, another bodysuit. No shoes and so they therefore matched.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” I said. I was referring to the books, but I could just as well have been talking about Eigen.

“He’s amazing.”

“I agree.”

Eigen paused, having a thought. “Our poor students,” she said.

“My seminar is next week. I have no plans to miss it.”

She stared at me briefly, perhaps with contempt, certainly judgmentally.

“What?” I asked.

“I teach three times a week. You teach once. Why is that, Wala? I know my math inside and out, backward and forward, derivatively and integrally, and I teach all the time. You understand no math and work on nothing.”

“True.”

“I don’t get it.”

“You’re right, Eigen. I know nothing and for that I am well compensated. You know a lot and receive less. I’m a terrible mathematician. You know, it could be sexism.”

“What’s that?”

I looked at her disbelievingly for a few seconds. “Prejudice and discrimination against someone because of his or her gender, usually hers.”

“That’s a thing?”

“Pretty big thing. It’s been going on for quite a while now, as in forever. It’s been in the newspaper from time to time and on occasion made clear.” I didn’t mean to sound sarcastic, not very sarcastic.

“That doesn’t seem fair.”

“No, Eigen, it’s not. That’s sort of the point. Neither is racism.”

“Don’t tell me.”

I nodded.

“The world is just a horrible place,” she said. “I’ve been locked up with equations, theorems, and proofs my entire life. What a terrible place we live in. Well, anyway, John is going to take care of all that.”