New Yorker writer Alec Wilkinson struggled with maths at school, finding inspiration in literature instead. But aged 65, in the hope of unlocking a new part of his brain, he decided to put the limits of his intelligence to the test
I don’t see how it can harm me now to reveal that I only passed math in high school because I cheated. I could add and subtract and multiply and divide, but I entered the wilderness when words became equations. On test days I sat beside smart boys and girls whose handwriting I could read and divided my attention between his or her desk and the teacher’s eyes. To pass Algebra II, I copied a term paper and nearly got caught. By then I was going to a boys’ school, and it gives me pause to think that I might have been kicked out and had to begin a different life, knowing different people, having different experiences, and eventually erasing the person I am now.
When I read Memories, Dreams, Reflections, I felt a kinship with Carl Jung, who described math class as “sheer terror and torture”, since he was “amathematikos”, which means something like nonmathematical. I am by nature a self-improver. I have read Gibbon, I have read Proust. I read the Old and New Testaments and most of Shakespeare. I studied French. I have meditated. I jogged. I learned to draw, using the right side of my brain. A few years ago I decided to see if I could learn simple math, adolescent math, what in the 18th century was called pure mathematics: algebra, geometry and calculus. I didn’t understand why it had been so hard. Had I just fallen behind and never caught up? Was I not smart enough? Was I somehow unfitted to learn a logical, complex and systematised discipline? Or was the capacity to learn math like any other attribute, talent for music, say? Instead of tone deaf, was I math deaf? And if I wasn’t and could correct this deficiency, what might I be capable of at 65 that I hadn’t been capable of before? I pictured mathematics as a landscape and myself as if contemplating a journey from which I might return like Marco Polo, having seen strange sights and with undreamt-of memories.
