Books: “The Mathematician’s Shiva” by Stuart Rojstaczer

We know from the title that a mathematician has died. And she –a Jewish-Polish émigré, was one of the greatest minds of this century. A group of world renown mathematicians then descend upon the grieving family in Madison Wisconsin during winter – a place purposely chosen by the genius (she believed cold weather made the mind sharp), to sit shiva. With the lack of social etiquette unique to those of great minds, they rummage through Rachela’s papers and floor-boards, in search of a proof they believe she has completed. If math lessons, horrors of holocausts, a portrait of America optimism, failed romance, flirty mathematicians and a drunken uncle (vodka of course), isnt enough, her pet parrot recites equations in Russian.

After her death, we learn of her life through her son (the narrator), and her own writing. Unable to understand the chaos of human hearts during the war, she turned to math – a subject that is equally abstract yet follows logic, and order. The son, on the other hand, turns the other way, and becomes a meteorologist, and tries to understand what/where/how the initial conditions of a chaotic state effects its outcomes. Through his grief, he comes to understand her effect on his life, and his effect on hers.
The book flips from his/her POV, from comedy to tragedy, serenity to madness, imitating life (and math) as a process of change from one state to another.  Recently was I reminded of an apt quote: “We adore chaos because we love to produce order,” said Escher, the mathematical artist. Perhaps I am old enough now to admit to its truth -now, a bit weary and cautious of Order’s fragile nature.

I was lucky enough to encounter a math professor like Rachela. Mother to one of the students at my high school, she took a failing AP calc class, and invited us to take her own class at Mt. Holyoke where she was teaching. I remember one winter day, she wore a mini black leather skirt, black tights, black pumps, and a hot pink mohair sweater. She was so cool it was a well-known fact she had a much younger husband.  
Calculus is the study of change relative to another variable. Or putting it practically, you can find the area under a curve. But for me, it’s a rainbow. “Light rays have different speeds, relative to time, when traveling through the Earth’s atmosphere.” That week we had an assignment on why the rainbow appeared in the order that it does. We were taught to be curious. She encouraged reading. She even corrected my English homework when I was struggling to keep up in that class as well. Her favourite book, I remember was “The Leopard” by Giuseppe Di Lampedusa, which I read years later and still keep in my bookshelf. She doesn’t know it, but she was my butterfly effect. Lessons in rainbows.
Professor Davidoff – you are still the coolest.

“We, unlike all life that came before us, do have the ability to create and be Godlike, albeit in a minor way in comparison to God himself. Why not call these creations of ours miracles? They certainly feel miraculous to the creators. From out of nothing, a group of initially incoherent thoughts and images, something magically appears.”

“We like to think that our lives are ordered. It satisfies us to believe that there is cause and effect, that we can make corrections to our lives as easily as we change batteries in a radio. In fact, much of our life is chaotic. There are patterns, yes, but they are unpredictable. Very little can be improved. There are no simple batteries that can fix illness, wayward children, poverty, hurt feelings, war and government calamities. In response, our minds become irrational and do their best to distort our actual word. We make our present and future seem more positive and less calamitous than they are in reality. Psychologists of today, I’m told, understand our tendency to look through rose-colored glasses. The great Proust understood this well before them when we noted, ‘To make reality endurable, we are all obliged to encourage in ourselves a few small foibles.’”