This book piqued my interest because it is advertised as a biography of a mathematician and his philosopher sister. Mathematics and philosophy have been hobbies for many years, and I have been very interested specifically in the people who work in these milieus. I had heard and read about his book from many different book reviews, and I figured it would be a good read.
I didn’t expect this, which is high praise.
This is the story about the Weil family and their two very
precocious children. It is about how the children developed and grew to be
Andre and Simone Weil, as seen through the eyes of the author. It is about the
conflicts between brothers and sisters made complicated by the upheavals of the
mid-20th century, and how the disruptions wreaked havoc with their
lives. It is about how the siblings’ reactions to the upheavals formed their lives
at that moment and shaped their future lives.
It is also about the author’s inner story. About her lifelong
curiosity about mathematics, and most importantly, about her obsession with how
these mathematicians do what they do and the seemingly opaque mental processes
that they use to see the insights that had been denied to her and to many
others.
The instant I read the author’s words about her own
background, I felt both a sense of alarm and empathy. Alarm because it is a
foreshadowing that the book could just be a self-indulgent exercise in
psychological offloading and purging. Fortunately, it was not what I had feared
at all. The book was instead, a personal history that intertwined tightly with
the Weil sibling’s story. Once I realized the possibilities of this unique kind
of narrative, I started to empathize with the author because our interests and
history are somewhat parallel in nature.
I am a passionate lover of mathematics, but I was too
impatient to learn the tools of theoretical mathematics because the need for
finding answers in my nature was too strong. In the end I became an applied
mathematician by becoming an engineer. I was, however, obsessed with the idea
of theoretical mathematics. I obsessively tried to read theoretical mathematics
and tried to understand the kind of insights and results that came from that
kind of magic. I continued to do so even though I was only partially successful
in understanding each step and being able to put the logical sequence together
in a coherent thought process. I will keep trying to this day.
Here is the frustration: Most of us look. The genius
sees. the author and I, cannot see.
In my frustration at not seeing, turned my attention to the
people who can see, reading about their upbringing, and pondering how they were
able to see what I was not able to see. I became a mathematical history bluff
to compensate for my inability to see.
Karen Olsson’s writing, especially regarding the transcendence
of pure mathematics, became a major reason for reading this book. She has a
knack to convey the beauty of mathematics without having to explain mathematics,
that is a rare ability. One way to demonstrate the beauty of mathematics is to
just dig into the mathematics, but if the reader is not a mathematician, the
long and drawn out explications of the mathematics is lost on the reader. The second
way is to describe the how and the why mathematics is considered to be beautiful
and elegant without diving into the technical granularities of the mathematics.
This second way is rarely successful, because mere words cannot fully convey
the emotional responses of the people who understand mathematics, yet Karen
Olsson is able to pull out the aesthetics of mathematics, to give the readers
the reason why mathematics is considered beautiful and to elicit the kind of
responses from an amateur practitioner that is often reserved for the expert
practitioner. It is, however, understood that we amateurs only have a partial perspective.
In the book, Simone Weil’s story spoke for the readers and
the author, as her frustrations with her lack of mathematical accomplishments that
paralleled those of her brother reflected the frustrations of the author and
this particular reader. The narratives in the book that are based on her correspondences
between Andre and Simone describe the internal struggles of anyone who is thwarted
from reaching a higher level in anything, from seeing. The irony is that her
work in philosophy had propelled her to greater notoriety in present-day
intellectual society, so much so that in many ways her writings superseded her
brother’s accomplishment in mathematics, which is rather astounding.
The narrative became ever more riveting as my reading took
me to the end of the story. Karen Olsson deftly drew the picture for us about
the agonizing mental process of being professional mathematicians and the strain
it exacts on the mathematicians and the people closest to them over time. Her
description of the end of Simone Weil’s life was heartbreaking, but Andre’s
life, though lasting far longer than his sister’s life, was also sad, given that
his successes had mostly been during his youth and the love of his life, mathematics,
had deserted him decades before his own demise.
At the end of the book, I felt that I had taken a step, albeit
a small step, towards understanding how mathematicians thought and worked. It
was a clarifying book and a riveting read.
