Simon is quite likely to be the person who understands the Monster in the end. Why? Because Simon’s Simon.
Professor John Conway
I’ve seen a mathematical discovery! I witnessed it start! 6.37 a.m., at the Hurtigruten breakfast buffet counter, Deck Three.
What sparked it off?
Pickled beetroot.
Simon’s like a rat, or a dog. He likes to find his base before he sets out on forays. In new towns, he has first to race about – bag banging wildly against his legs, practically knocking him off his feet – to pinpoint the public library and the biggest bus stop; only then does he relax, breathe properly and head for the medieval castle. In a buffet, it’s the same. Even if there’s not a single other human between the restaurant entrance and the mountains lining the coast of Norway, he wants to know precisely where and at which table he’s going to sit, and to establish a presence there by dropping his bag on the salt-and-pepper pots. Only then will he go up to the counter to collect his food.
I met him loading his plate with beetroot.
For Simon, a good breakfast is made up of different ways to ingest vinegar.
‘What number table are you, Simon?’
‘I’m twenty-one.’ Then he hesitated, looked at me … ‘No,’ he corrected, ‘I’m not twenty-one, I’m fifty-five, my table is twenty-one.’
Provoked by grammar, he leapt to mathematics, and when I looked back at him for a moment from the grapefruit counter he was standing with his plate lifted to his lips letting jus de beetroot dribble down his T-shirt and pool at his feet.
He had spotted a chink in mathematics. It had to do with the shared properties of the numbers twenty-one and fiftyfive, and the way sunflowers arrange their seeds and scales are arranged on a pineapple, and then something else about triangles, best thought of in terms of piles of policemen standing on each other’s shoulders riding motorbikes, and how many other pairs of numbers shared these same properties …
Simon’s greatest mathematical discoveries have often begun with frivolous musings like this. For the rest of the day I could not get a word out of him.
Could it be that he had found a whisker of the Monster?
No.
False alarm.
It was nothing.