Lots of people know the story of how Huang Yiyi came to work for von Neumann; it was thanks to her amazing skills on the abacus. Her brilliance with an abacus was hereditary. In the Huang family shrine in Dayuan village, Yingde County, Guangdong Province, there hangs right up to the present day a calligraphic inscription by the Empress Dowager Cixi reading: ‘The Best Abacist in the South’. That was her grandfather. As an old man he followed Sun Yat-sen, and for a while he was a manager in the Department of Revenue in the provisional Nationalist government. Later on people deduced from that that he had been Sun Yat-sen’s personal accountant. Her grandfather started teaching Huang Yiyi to use an abacus when she was three years old, and by the time she was thirteen and moved to Guangzhou to start middle school, she wasn’t appreciably slower than he was. When he was on his deathbed, he gave her his greatest treasure: a very valuable abacus with ivory beads. This made all the other members of the Huang family green with envy.

The abacus that she inherited from her grandfather was about the size of half a cigarette packet. Like a jade pendant, you could fit it in the palm of your hand, and the unusual materials and magnificent workmanship amazed everyone who saw it. The frame was carved from a solid block of wild elephant ivory, absolutely beautifully done, and each one of the hundred and one beads was gilded with pure gold, so that they glittered and shone when you looked at them. It was a remarkable experience to hold that abacus in your hand, because it was so lovely and so special.