Marquel, TPVs NYTimes Sex and Math Section correspondent, was reviewing the Euclidian theorems when he read, Top Math Prize Has Its First Female Winner. A professor at Stanford who made an important discovery about dynamical systems joined three other mathematicians in accepting the Fields Medal. Marquel had always marvelled at scientists and mathematicians who insisted women could not perform like men. That made no sense. If you look at a male chef, he throws a little odd this and a little odd that in. If a woman is cooking, it’s a tablespoon of this, a teaspoon of that. They measure. Natural mathematicians.
They’re was one more thing. Women are calm. I don’t mean to be sexist, but if you watch a gas station and someone had trouble opening the tank or the hood, the first thing you hear is a clap of thunder, the man hitting the sheet steel with all his might, and then the words,
“Fuck, Shit!”
With a woman you see her tracing the line of the hood in a logical manner, or inspecting the gas tank cover more closely. Occasionally you’ll see a woman opening up the owners manual, then driving away happily while the guy is going into his fifth or sixth epileptic fit due to frustration.
In Marquel’s view, only women have the natural ability to calmly address a centuries’ old problem and eventually solve it. So this news didn’t come as anything new except as a confession. Think of all those poor robed Arab women who could be solving Erno’s Theorem or could have solved Fermat’s Theorem a century ago. They could be solving the Hodge conjecture, or the Riemann hypothesis, or even Hilberths sixteenth problem in algebra. Marquel was sure it took calmness and that women had a surplus of that.
He went to Princeton to talk to Einstein’s former colleagues. One was around and happy to discuss last century’s genius. They don’t come along every day nor even every century. Who is this century’s genius? See?
I sat down with Bertram who was originally Einstein’s lab assistant but then went on to become a mathematician in his own right.
“Tell me something,” I said.
“Sure. Anything.”
“Did Einstein ever lose his temper at a problem, a proof, or even a stupid mistake?”
He was suddenly silent. After a while he said, “you know we have never discussed that.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Part of it was security. The government didn’t want to say what was stumping us. And the family wated him to seem super human.”
“We can talk about it now can’t we ? It’ll make him seem more human and there are no longer any secrets.” I said.
“”Okay. Sure. There were times I didn’t go near him I was so scared.”
“What did he do” I asked.
“First he would go to the far end where there’s a mirror and he would scream at it, “Dumpfkopf! Dumpfkopf! Dumpfkopf! Then he would hit himself over the head with the largest book he had calling himself the same name.”
“Well that’s pretty human, though a bit extreme.” I said.
“You have to understand these were the most frustrating problems known. For centuries nobody could solve them.”
“What if he were just working and had made a simple error?” I asked.
“At the beginning it was Dummkopf , but as his English became more fluent you could hear him mumble shit! Shit! And then he’d have to start all over again.”
“So he wasn’t averse to certain words.” I said.
“Oh know it wasn’t just Dummkopf at first. He had a string of German curses that he used continually as he worked.”
“So that changed as he became more Americanized?” I asked.
“Oh yeah,” he answered, “the last ten years it was shit fuck shit fuck until he either fell asleep or solved the problem.”
“No more German?” I asked.
“I didn’t mean to say that. There were still limitless Gottverdammt and the occasion Dummkopf. But I think he enjoyed the American words. He used them all fixing the car, mowing the lawn, when sailing. When things didn’t work out, he was a toilet mouth.”
“Say, what about women mathematicians. Do they curse like that?”
“I can’t speak for all of them. We’ve only had about a dozen. But they tend to be quieter and more systematic. They keep plugging away. Very calm, collected. If it’s a hard day you don’t hear Dumpfkopf or shit. Instead you hear, ‘I’m going home now.’ They seem to be a lot more together. But they don’t always get the toughest problems.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Funny thing, I think the men think because they don’t curse like sailors they couldn’t solve the toughest problems.” He said.
“What would you call that?” I asked.
“What would you?” He asked.
We said together, “Sexism. Dummkopf!”
***
BY MARQUEL: Gottverdammt Dummkopf Sexism
funny. Dummkopf!
love your crazy mind…