#Leonhard euler education background full#

Indeed, I overheard more than one debate regarding whether Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken’s proof of the long-unsolved Four-Color Theorem was valid, for everyone agreed that it was neither as concise nor as elegant as a poem. I spent my days attempting to write mathematical proofs that distilled hidden truths into concise, elegant prose. “The most distinct and beautiful statements of any truth must take at last the mathematical form,” he wrote.Īt Dartmouth, I felt like a poet.

Thoreau, I was certain, would have understood. Like Henry David Thoreau, I went to the woods to “live deep and suck out all the marrow of life,” which in my case meant spending all of my waking and many of my sleeping moments thinking mathematical thoughts.

#Leonhard euler education background full#

When Dartmouth College offered me a full scholarship and fellowship to study full time in its mathematics doctoral program, I did not stop to think. Mathematicians, I learned, aspire to write proofs like poems. Vincent Millay, as if she understood my daily algebraic and geometric meditations. “Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare,” wrote Edna St. Leonhard Euler’s exquisite identity, e^(πi)+1=0, which connects mathematics’ most fundamental numbers in one simple equality, took root in my daily thoughts. Over time, however, the clucking hens and Latin American traffic receded to background noise. Initially, I devoted equal attention to my divergent pursuits. If nothing else, my adventures would provide fodder for my writing. And so, upon graduating from college, I moved into a shoebox-sized cabin 50 feet from a barn housing 42,000 chickens, took a job that had me traveling through Central and South America, and began studying theoretical mathematics.Īt the time, I could not distinguish between white leghorn and Plymouth Rock chickens, knew no Spanish, and had last pursued math in high school when I had failed out of calculus. These gifted masters lit a fire in me but also conveyed an unspoken message that I needed life experience to give my writing soul. Kelly’s artful mix of words, silence, and intonation matched his throaty voice and hyperbolic eyebrows.

Weaver discussed Umberto Eco over caprese salad in his home as easily as his transition from a devout Catholic boyhood to confident gay man. (Toni Morrison had left the year before my arrival, but her presence still hung in the air.)Īchebe’s quiet dignity made him stand taller than anyone else in a room, despite his wheelchair. As a student at Bard College in the late 1980s and early 90s, I crossed paths with an intoxicating bloc of writers, including Chinua Achebe, William Weaver, John Ashbery, Mona Simpson, and Robert Kelly.