The Mathematician Presents

Any idiot can get a PhD in mathematics. All it takes is time and talent, a little want-to. Add to these an exhausted impatience and there you have him: Daniil Roitman.

He’d come stateside for a postdoc at Columbia University, pale, often unshaven, balding with watery black eyes. It was the research that excited him, but one of the conditions of his studies was that he teach. Thus three mornings a week he entered the amphitheater, stood at the podium, a thing on display. He favored rumpled dress shirts, jeans tracked with mustard-stains. Most striking were the fingernails which, as a matter of superstition, he left unfiled, untrimmed, inch long.

His English was formal, heavily accented, his lectures haphazard. He would pull down a chalkboard, place the textbook on the lectern, and open to where he’d left off, chapter so-and-so, page such-and-such: “The Fundamental Theorem of Algebra states that...states that...”

Of course he knew the Fundamental Theorem—why, a child of nine knew the Fundamental Theorem! But the proof—the proof!—where was it? He scanned down the page, thumbed through the next few pages. The textbook made do with cases when proof—proof was everything! All you needed were a few basic truths—run them through the engine of logic, you could arrive at the most marvelous conclusions. Alter your axioms even just a bit and you’d end up somewhere else entirely and—oho!—start with something false—one false premise!—why, with that you could prove anything. Confounded, he’d turn a page backward, flip forward, lifting the book by its cover like a dead fly before letting it fall to the floor with a thud.

“Forget what’s in the book!” he’d proclaim. “The book is childish, and like all children, needlessly complicated. Who needs cases—when you have proof!” He lost himself writing it up on the blackboard: “All we need is a basic understanding of complex variables. We go by contradiction. Assume not. Now, consider a two-dimensional space, C², which is in fact four dimensions, understood? From there we define holomorphic functions, okay?...Now, under certain conditions, we employ Rouché’s theorem...like so!...do a slight...negative z equals z, if you’ll allow it...change of variables...naturally dz equals negative dz...aha! Almost there! We assumed the function is positive over the bounds of integration but—oho!—the integral...resolves...to zero. And there. It. Is. Contradiction!” With his last stub of chalk, he’d slap down the arrows at loggerheads, scrawl a triumphant QED! with a double underscore beneath it. 

This he’d follow with a dancer’s pivot, a 180 on his heels, some thirty bewildered undergrads in sweatshirts and ballcaps staring back at him. He’d do a double-take. He’d forgotten they were there. “Well,” he’d say. “So.” Then he’d sheepishly take up the book anew, flip to chapter so-and-so, page such-and-such, and pick up where he’d left off.

Responsibility for Roitman and his antics fell to the department chair, John Prescott III, who in the sixties had done work for the NSA, hush-hush, top secret. He had elegant, golden-gray hair that swept across his forehead like summer wheat and teeth intensely white. It was said he only took out his collar stays before going to bed, and even then he kept on the bow tie, changing it only with his morning toilette. He called Roitman into his office for a conversation that would at best be awkward—for them both.

“Dr. Roitman!” he said, opening the door. 

Roitman grimaced. He’d been called in to see the headman. Nothing good came of seeing the headman. He made his way in. “Yes yes. What is the reason for this...interrogation?”

“Interrogation? Come, come.” Prescott directed Roitman to the solid wooden chair before his desk, taking a seat himself in the high-backed executive chair. The office was elegant and dark, finished in mahogany, its windows overlooking Low Library. Prescott pinched his pants by the seam to sit, then planted his elbows and steepled his hands. “The thing is...well, we’ve had some complaints.”

Complaints? Roitman widened his eyes as he drew back. “And what is the nature of these complaints?”

“It would appear that you missed some lectures.”

At times Roitman could be quite the stickler for precision: “I did not miss the lectures. I was late for the lectures.”

Prescott drummed his fingers on the desk-top. “Of course, of course. How late?”

Five minutes here, ten minutes there, say...“Seven hours.” Roitman had had to call his mother. “So for a few days I lived on Moscow time. But you are correct.” He stood up and tipped forward, hands to his side. “Doctor Prescott Three, thank you for bringing this error to my attention. It will not recur, you have my word.”

Prescott pursed his lips: “That is...that is not all.”

“No?”

“There’s also the issue of, well, your hygiene.”

“Hygiene?” Roitman sank bank into his chair. Interrogation? This was the inquisition! “Who has been complaining of my hygiene?”

“That’s immaterial.” (Though for the record there were many: students, office-workers, even other professors.) “Just between you and me, when was the last time you took a shower?”

Roitman colored. What was this abuse? “I’ll have you know! I shower every day!”

“Today?”

“Today was an exception! Trivial!” He meant it in the mathematical sense. “I had this meeting here with you.”

“And yesterday?”

“Also an exception. My landlord—a very rude individual!—came banging on the door, demanding rent. Like this!” He pounded a fist on the desktop. “Naturally, it was very trying. I was...how do you say...out of types.”

“Your landlord? Aren’t you in university housing?”

Indeed? Roitman reconsidered. Certainly someone had come banging. Under stress Roitman’s English failed him: “Not the landlord. The person from understairs.”

“Downstairs.”

“Is what I said. The sink overran.”

“The sink?”

“Yes! Yes! The sink! I went to get a glass of water, I forgot to turn off. So the sink overran, the water went drip down the stairs, and the neighbor came running up from understairs, began to insult me. Like I did it on purpose. Can you imagine?”

Dr. Prescott raised a measured index finger: “You’ll permit me to clarify. You couldn’t shower because you were upset that your neighbor was complaining about water dripping down the stairs?”

“Naturally.”

“And you don’t see the irony in that?”

Irony? Irony? “Dr. Prescott Three! I am a professor of mathematics. Not rhetoric. And she is a harridan.”

“Excuse me?”

“The neighbor! From understairs! Do I mispronounce? Harridan?”

Prescott demurred, suggesting that perhaps a change was in order? In Roitman’s living situation?

Thus did Roitman come to move lodgings, boarding first with an Estonian professor of economics. In no time the Estonian gave way to a professor of computer science, who in turn gave way to a Serbian working on a doctorate in political science. None of these placements lasted more than a month: as often he was kicked out as he abandoned ship. The noise! The smells! The constant harassment! Prescott was all at loose ends, wondering what to do with the brilliant young mathematician, who, it must be said, was doing some rather exemplary work—when Roitman at last found a home. With one of the office cleaning women no less.

Irina was Ukrainian, with a sharp nose and wide-set eyes. More to the point, her son had recently decamped for college, leaving a spartan room in a Brighton Beach apartment otherwise surfaced in doilies and vinyl. With Roitman she had a productive relationship. He cut his hair, remembered to bathe, laundered his clothing—why, he even cut his nails. 

One night on his way out, Prescott drew her aside. “What’s your secret?”

“Secret? What secret?”

“Roitman! How did you fix him?”

“Oh.” Irina stood up her mop and shrugged. “Dr. Prescott, Daniil is not like most men. Maybe he brilliant in math, I donno. But in life? He like dog. Understand? Give him food, give him drink. He want this way—nye—pull till he go the other. But...most important! You must to show him love. Every time he wash clothes or shower or remember to eat, I say to him, Daniil you do such good thing, I like you so much. Then he smile, he like...little dog.”

She was no mathematician, but she was an insightful woman, and there was truth in what she said. Which would make it all the more incredible when some twenty years later this Roitman—the very same—would become one of the most prominent voices on the world stage.

§

How did it happen? First off, his fellowship ran out. He could have gotten a job at some university or liberal arts college. But teach? That wasn’t for him. Instead he went back to Moscow, got a sinecure doing “research” at the Russian Institute for Data Science, an obscure department producing impenetrable statistics. His father was dead, his mother and sister had emigrated to Israel. He found a small gray and dim apartment on the fifth floor of a large gray and dim building consisting of two rooms: a bedroom the size of a prison cell and a great room/kitchenette. The only furnishings were a bed, a chair, a small writing table, and an ironing board that doubled as a dining table.

His official duties were slim, leaving him to devote the bulk of his time to proving the Fischer-Zhao. Ron Fischer had been an American mathematician prominent in the '50s, a lion of differential geometry. He’d had a peculiar conjecture—a mathematical idea—around the behavior of tensors. Shuming Zhao, Chinese, had taken that conjecture and run with it, developing the most potent (and fragile) branchlet of the discipline. Potent because on the Fischer-Zhao depended the very shape of the universe. And fragile, too, for as of yet, the conjecture lacked a proof.

Fame awaited the man (or woman) who could demonstrate logically, from first principles, what every mathematician felt to be true. It was the sort of thing you could devote years of your life to—and so Roitman intended. He had a plan. He had a path. That is, he had a beginning. He would first prove Kawamura’s Conjecture of Completeness, a wisp of a thing — trivial of itself. But Roitman foresaw—why, it was all so clear!—how once he proved Kawamura’s Conjecture he could use it as a stepping-stone—and thus prove the Fischer-Zhao.

In this manner did the years pass, first in the ones and twos, then three, five, eight, thirteen—the whole Fibonacci in miniature. Roitman spent three days a week in the office, the remainder of his time laboring to tease out his proof. His hair went longer, grayer, he grew out a beard, lost some weight, then lost some more. He grew so thin as to be hardly perceptible, less a man in flesh than one in theory. And all the while, Kawamura’s Conjecture eluded him—the Fischer-Zhao with it. Every time it seemed like he was closing in, the proof would wriggle free.

And then one cold gray morning after thirteen long years he logged onto the international academic forum arXiv.org only to find a post by a certain Paul Geller, a Canadian who worked in analytic number theory and dabbled in the Fischer-Zhao. An interloper, an amateur! “Kawamura’s Conjecture,” the article was titled, “an Intriguing Case.” Roitman clicked on the link, expecting to find the ordinary academic drivel but—what was this?

Geller detailed a peculiar case in which the Kawamura Conjecture—Roitman drew back from his screen, not sure he’d understood. He had to read it again. Yes, it would seem that Geller was proposing a case in which Kawamura’s Conjecture did not...hold. It didn’t work! And what was more! Geller’s example generalized. That is, this Geller—this nobody!—had demonstrated—proved!—that Kawamura’s Conjecture was...not true. 

Roitman pulled away, shaken by emotions he couldn’t begin to fathom. Thirteen years! Thirteen years down the drain to...what? Squaring the circle, trisecting an angle. And worst of all! He’d been working for so long and in such solitude—there was no one he could tell! 

Lesser men might have turned to drink. Not Roitman. Even wine made him dizzy. Trying to shift gears, devote himself to some other approach—at his age! Impossible! And yet he was too much accustomed to rising every morning, turning his mind full force to something. The question now was...what?

In a dusty corner of his great room stood an old television set, leavings of a neighbor who’d cleared out years ago, and if he turned to it now it was because he was all at loose ends, needed something on which he could focus. Drama he had no use for, comedy went over his head. He needed something with import. Bite. Analysis.

The thing for him was the news.

Within a week he was watching obsessively. His favorites were the panel discussions, particularly an evening show led by Yevgeniya Karavayeva, a zaftig blonde with beestung lips. Names were mentioned, stories Roitman knew only in passing. He had to read up on the central players, come to terms with the narrative throughlines. Thank God for the internet! Link led to link, sending him ever deeper. He boned up—he learned. He discounted half the things he read out of hand—but if only half of what remained was true! The state of the world! Russia besieged, barbarians at the gates! And here he’d been: thirteen years with his head in the sand and now—now! Perhaps it was too late! 

He had so much to say—if only people would listen! Behind anonymous avatars, he began to comment—on everything. American hegemony, mathematics, chess. Long, detailed screeds on genetically modified organisms. (“Food ‘products’ they call them. Now what kind of language is this? Products! Why not call them what they are! Westernized food weapons! Known to cause dandruff, erectile dysfunction, and—this is well established—death!”)

And no one noticed. That is, no one cared.

§

Resurrection began with the smell of burning plastic and rebar. It was mid-morning, a year since Geller had disproved Kawamura’s Conjecture, and Roitman was in front of the television breakfasting on toast and a pickle—when the smell spun him round. Flames! The building next door—why, the apartment across the way!

Smoke was billowing out the window in torrid black waves, a white cat stranded on the ledge, wailing her head off. The neighbors would be at work, doing whatever strange grunting things they did all day, and—reckless fools! They must have left the stove on.

Roitman’s heart raced. Something had to be done—but what? They were on the fifth floor, and though the two buildings were quite similar, the windows weren’t level. There was the distance between them, a horizontal offset to boot. 

In his dismay he stumbled forward, knocked against the ironing board and—of course! He swept away the remains of breakfast, ran to the window and threw up the sash, thrusting the flattened board out as far as he dared, crying, “Jump! Save yourself!”

And perhaps the cat understood, for she drew herself up and, tracing a perfect parabola,

A

E P 

L T.

The next twenty minutes were a blur. Roitman found himself on the street below wearinga parka over his fraying pajamas, the singed ironing board in one hand, a battered traveling bag housing the singed cat in the other. There were firemen everywhere. A news van pulled to the curb, and a well-coiffed reporter sprang out the back, shoving a pink-tipped microphone in his face.

“You! You there! What happened?”

What happened! Roitman breathlessly painted the scene: the stove, the flames, the cat. “The situation was lost—utterly lost! And then I remembered! The diagonal of a parallelepiped!”

The reporter exchanged a look with his cameraman. “The...what?”

“The diagonal of a parallelepiped!” Why, any fool understood—the root of the sum of the squares—the distance between any two points in three-dimensional space! He hoisted up the ironing board as if that alone served: “Thirty and seventy and one fifty make twenty-eight thousand! Which is slightly less than one-seventy!”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“The ironing board, don’t you see?”

“Is it a…magic ironing board?”

Who did this little shit think he was? “There is nothing special about this ironing board,” Roitman insisted, “but for the important fact that it is one hundred and fifty centimeters long. I thrust it from the window and—just as I calculated! It was just long enough!”

As if to confirm this account the cat poked her singed head through the zipper of the traveling bag and yowled.

“Uh-huh.” The reporter exchanged another look with his cameraman, as if to be sure he was getting it. “Could we just get your name then? For the record?” 

“My name?”

“Yes. Name and occupation.”

Roitman drew himself up, like a ball pumped with air. “I am the mathematician,” he said. “Daniil Roitman.”

§

By nightfall, clips of the encounter were circulating online. #Iamthemathematician was trending on social media. Thus did it come to the attention of one Anna Orlova, associate producer at the Rossiya 1 television station, twenty-four, freshly promoted and ambitious. She tracked down Roitman’s number, picked up the phone, made the call.

Roitman was floored: “You want me to appear on television? Not with...Yevgeniya Karavayeva?”

Orlova laughed. No no no. Yevgeniya Karavayeva was serious business! “My beat is late-night variety. We’re always on the lookout for someone to come on and, you know, do a bit.”

“What kind of bit?”

“You could do mathematics.”

“No one is interested in mathematics.”

“You’ll make them interested!”

Roitman was skeptical, but Orlova was persistent. What did he have to lose?

So it was that some two weeks later he made his first public appearance. The costumers had tricked him out in a brown flannel suit two sizes too big, a shirt that was rumpled and stained. Roitman stepped out, faced the cameras and—bang! He’d prepared a lecture on the pigeonhole principle:

“With which I shall prove certainly. Mathematically! That on the streets of Moscow this very day, there must be no less than a pair of random strangers who, unbeknownst to one another must...must! Have the same exact number of hairs on their head!”

The principle was simple—direct. There are a maximum of some 200,000 hairs on the human head. Give everyone a number at random between 1 and 200,000—why, with even a population of 200,001 you were guaranteed at least two people with the same number.

Of course, being Roitman, he got a little lost along the way. Set theory, the finer points of analysis. At a certain point the host, who styled himself a comedian, interrupted to tell him his time was up. “But don’t be upset, hey! I think I have a solution to your little problem. You and me, we shave our heads. What do you say?”

The studio audience roared.

Roitman found Orlova in the wings offstage. “He didn’t let me finish,” he pouted.

“Who cares? You should see the numbers!” 

The bit was well received. Roitman was well received. Viewers recognized the man from the internet: the cat, the flames. The parallelepiped! What a character! 

The studio called him back, again and again. Midnight hosts would throw to “The Mathematician”—they let him go on about anything. Euler’s identity, Archimedes’ approximation of π—whatever struck his fancy. The audience didn’t understand a word of it—what matter? He was on a par with the men who came on with dancing monkeys. He tickled them. He made them laugh. 

At times he let it get to him. What was he now, some kind of clown?

To which Orlova would say: “Don’t you see, though? We’re all clowns. Waving our hands around, trying to get the world’s attention. To you it comes so naturally! It’s the way you go about the thing—tak! tak! tak! You have a gift.”

And was it really so bad? With the money he was making he’d moved to a spacious, light-filled apartment on the thirteenth floor of a luxury tower. He wore new clothes, ate fine foods. Yet he couldn’t help the feeling that something was…off. From a young age he’d imagined that he was destined for something great, and for a long while he’d sustained himself with the thought. Then had come failure. And now? For all his wealth and—what else could you call it?—success: no one took him seriously.

The only person he could confide in wasn’t a person at all. The neighbors from across the way had never reclaimed their cat—reluctantly Roitman had taken her in. He’d named her Paulina, after Erdős the Hungarian mathematician, a lump of white with one black splotch on her eye. She would come up in his lap when he had his tea, purr as he stroked her head. 

“They’re laughing at me, Paulina, every last one of them. But when haven’t they laughed? When I was younger, my mother would say, ‘Danya ignore them. One day you’ll find your tribe.’ But she was wrong. I never did.

“And yet they made so much of me. Everyone. I won a gold medal at the International Olympiad. Did I tell you about that? The Olympiad that year was in Seoul. The Americans were very good. The Romanians. The Vietnamese—oh, one of them was very sharp. I was sixteen, and I got a perfect score. They wrote it up in all the newspapers. The Next Great Mathematical Mind. It seemed like the start of something. I thought, ‘One day I will do great things.’ But...Paulina, do you know? I think now that...such a day will never come.”

§

Yet come it did. After two years on air—long enough for the world to have forgotten about the ironing board, and the flames, and the cat—one evening Orlova burst into his dressing room all out of breath: “Daniil Isidorovich!” she announced. “Today is your lucky day.” One of Yevgeniya Karavayeva’s guests had suddenly taken ill, a replacement was needed, quick, quick, quick!

Not fifteen minutes later Roitman was thrust out on set with four other pooh-bahs, them in their suit jackets, Roitman in his ill-fitting tweed. They stood in a circle at Plexiglas podiums, Yevgeniya Karavayeva in a skirt and green top directing the discussion from the open space at center. The topic of the day was Ukraine, where a fascist mob had just deposed the rightfully elected President. Orlova had given him explicit instructions. He wasn’t to speak—not even to interject! “Say not one word unless spoken to.”

For five whole minutes he held his tongue. Yevgeniya Karavayeva must have noticed the strain.

“Mr. Mathematician,” she declared, “it seems as if you have something you wanted to add.”

Oh, he did, he did! So much in fact. “The issue,” he sputtered, “the issue...well, the issue is that we’re not defining the problem mathematically!”

The barest hint of a smile played at her lips. “Explain.”

“In mathematics we begin by defining the problem. We take note of our givens, our unknowns. From there, we make a plan and—” he chopped an arm out! “—proceed.”

“Would you care to demonstrate?”

“Of course! The problem is the rise of fascists at our doorstep. The defenselessness of the Russian people, the usurping of the Russian language. Is it not? Well! Once you state it all so baldly, the solution is immediately clear.”

“Which is?”

“We have tanks—we have artillery, bombers, fighter planes, helicopters. Do we not? It’s not a question of resources. Naturally, there would be certain logistical considerations—”

“Excuse me, excuse me. Mr. Mathematician. Do I understand you correctly? Are you advocating for the creation of a buffer state?”

“Advocating?” He drew back, bouncing an open palm off the podium. “My dear Ms. Karavayeva, I demand it!”

What a smash! The studio was inundated with phone calls, emails, even flowers—the public couldn’t get enough. He was a clown—of course—but beneath his buffoonery: what wisdom. What reason!

The attention and fame were so great that not one week later, Yevgeniya Karavayeva called him back onto her set for a follow-up, a live interview, one-on-one. “Who would ever have suspected that our dear mathematician understood so much of world events? My dear, dear friend, where have you been, where have you been?”

“Why, right here,” he said to applause and laughter, “right here!”

He was invited back, again and again. All you had to do was wind him up and watch him go: the taking of Crimea, Sochi Olympics, even a jokey segment on cats and dogs (dogs with their rote slavishness—naturally inferior!). But mostly he was popular for his way of disentangling global events, surfacing the hidden hands that shaped the world. 

“Don’t tell me about these Anglo-Saxons,” he said, spitting out the words. “I know all about their trickery! Don’t forget: I lived in America. I was spied upon by the NSA. What’s that, what’s that you say? You don’t believe me? Look up the record of one John Prescott Three, Columbia University, formerly of the N! S! A! Trying to impress me with his irony. He claimed I was some kind of degenerate, took issue with my hygiene—told me I was unclean. Because that is how they see us! But friends—friends! Don’t let’s get emotional. Think like a mathematician—think, think! Who gains? The answers are obvious. George Soros! Theresa May! Justin Trudeau! And last but not least, to use the American slang, that harridan: Hill-a-ry Clinton!”

As the public’s sense of him grew, so too did his sense of himself. Why, the whole arc of his life must have been leading him—to this! Back in his apartment he would stroke Paulina by the head with satisfaction. “I would have never thought it possible. But finally—finally!—they see me.” 

A couple more years and the studio went so far as to give him his own show, The Mathematician Presents. The program ran nightly and greatly resembled his old lectures. Roitman would start with some random snippet, go at it as only he could. Proof by computation (which was hardly proof at all!), his favorite chess opening (Grob’s attack—pawn to g4!—throw your enemy off balance, seize the board!), the legacy of East German mind-control still employed—still!—by whatever they were calling the Stasi these days: “It sounds crazy, I know, but they get in your head. You catch yourself craving sauerkraut, singing oompahpah in the bathroom!”

Notably there were times he strayed. For example the week he spent railing against public corruption. The stories were terrible, true—stolen school supplies, payoffs to access hospital operating rooms, an “anti-corruption” officer found with nine billion rubles in cash under the floorboards—but more grim were the numbers. Hardly anyone watched. “I don’t understand.”

Orlova set him straight. “Nobody wants to hear about how bad things are. They know how bad things are. What they want to hear is about their greatness—their promise. Above all: they want to hear that someone else is to blame.”

“Who else?”

“Their enemies, of course.”

Critics noted in him a certain—ahem—Semitic cast of character. But fans sent him notes, cards, even marriage proposals (!). “That’s what I love about you,” gushed one of his many callers. “You say things plainly, just as they are.”

“But friend, my dear friend—that is the very nature of mathematics!”

He’d graduated from a chalk blackboard to an electronic whiteboard, and when he’d covered it in neon slashes and underscores, he would pivot on one foot, turning on his heels and, on seeing the cameras—just like his old lectures!—do a double-take. He’d forgotten they were there.

Over time the studio sanded down his image, combed and slicked back his hair, trimmed down his beard. Many assumed he spoke for the Kremlin, and certainly a set of talking points were distributed weekly. But Roitman didn’t need them. Like him, his audience wanted the truth (if, like him, they refracted it through a lens of grievance and failure). He flattered their self-conception—as they in turn flattered his.

On the eve of the Ukrainian invasion, a war hitherto unthinkable, with Russian forces massed to deliver a crushing blow, he delivered an impassioned plea to the nation: “The Ukrainian people suffer under a Nazi leadership bent on removing any Russian-speaker from their soil! But they won’t stop there! They’ll soon be crossing the border to attack Russia proper, and what then, what then? You think they’ll be satisfied with a few little provinces? Taking Crimea? They won’t stop until they’re on our doorstep, NATO on their heels! Now what should we do, how should we act? Friends, there can be but one answer! Take matters into our own hands! Now! This instant!”

Tak! Tak! Tak! Shaken by the sudden possibility of an unexpected war, millions at home couldn’t help nodding along. They shared his premises (or was it he that shared theirs?). Run them through the engine of logic, and what were the conclusions if not...inevitable? 

Half a world away, Irina Chubatovsky sat on the vinyl-topped couch in her Brighton Beach apartment watching on satellite, remote in hand. Her hair was a touch whiter, her step a touch slower, twenty-some odd years since John Prescott had stopped her in the hallway, pulled her aside to ask how she’d fixed him—fixed him! Roitman, the incorrigible!

“Ay Daniil,” she lamented. “Still a dog.”

---

BEN PELED's work has been published in Fugue, The Antioch Review, and New England Review. He was a finalist in the Missouri Review Editors’ Contest. He lives in Brooklyn with his incredible wife, Noa, and their two children.

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