the housekeeper and the professor by yōko ogawa

'So you'd need to get -1 by multiplying a number by itself?' 'Then what happens if you take the square root of negative one?' he asked. This gave us confidence even when our best efforts came to nothing. He had a special feeling for what he called the 'correct miscalculation,' for he believed that mistakes were often as revealing as the right answers. He preferred our wild, desperate guesses to silence, and he was even more delighted when those guesses led to new problems that took us beyond the original one. The Professor never really seemed to care whether we figured out the right answer to a problem. Outside the window, the blossoms on the apricot tree were heavy with rain.

The light in the Professor's study was dim. My son's schoolbag lay abandoned on the rug. I remember when he taught us about the spell cast by placing numbers under this square root sign. As interesting as all this was, it could never match the experience of simply spending time with the Professor. He taught us about enormous prime numbers with more than a hundred thousand places, and the largest number of all, which was used in mathematical proofs and was in the Guinness Book of Records, and about the idea of something beyond infinity.

No doubt he would have been bothered by my use of the word countless-too sloppy, for he believed that the very origins of the universe could be explained in the exact language of numbers-but I don't know how else to put it. Of all the countless things my son and I learned from the Professor, the meaning of the square root was among the most important.

The housekeeper and the professor by yōko ogawa