Alex's Adventures in Numberland - Alex Bellos [3]
When writing this book, my motivation was at all times to communicate the excitement and wonder of mathematical discovery. (And to show that mathematicians are funny. We are the kings of logic, which gives us an extremely discriminating sense of the illogical.) Maths suffers from a reputation that it is dry and difficult. Often it is. Yet maths can also be inspiring, accessible and, above all, brilliantly creative. Abstract mathematical thought is one of the great achievements of the human race, and arguably the foundation of all human progress.
Numberland is a remarkable place. I would recommend a visit.
Alex Bellos
January 2010
CHAPTER ZERO
A Head for Numbers
When I walked into Pierre Pica’s cramped Paris apartment I was overwhelmed by the stench of mosquito repellent. Pica had just returned from spending five months with a community of Indians in the Amazon rainforest, and he was disinfecting the gifts he had brought back. The walls of his study were decorated with tribal masks, feathered headdresses and woven baskets. Academic books overloaded the shelves. A lone Rubik’s Cube lay unsolved on a ledge.
I asked Pica how the trip had been.
‘Difficult,’ he replied.
Pica is a linguist and, perhaps because of this, speaks slowly and carefully, with painstaking attention to individual words. He is in his fifties, but looks boyish – with bright blue eyes, a reddish complexion and soft, dishevelled silvery hair. His voice is quiet; his manner intense.
Pica was a student of the eminent American linguist Noam Chomsky and is now employed by France’s National Centre for Scientific Research. For the last ten years the focus of his work has been the Munduruku, an indigenous group of about 7000 people in the Brazilian Amazon. The Munduruku are hunter-gatherers who live in small villages spread across an area of rainforest twice the size of Wales. Pica’s interest is the Munduruku language: it has no tenses, no plurals and no words for numbers beyond five.
To undertake his fieldwork, Pica embarks on a journey worthy of the great adventurers. The nearest large airport to the Indians is Santarém, a town 500 miles up the Amazon from the Atlantic Ocean. From there, a 15-hour ferry ride takes him almost 200 miles along the Tapajós River to Itaituba, a former gold-rush town and the last stop to stock up on food and fuel. On his most recent trip Pica hired a jeep in Itaituba and loaded it up with his equipment, which included computers, solar panels, batteries, books and 120 gallons of petrol. Then he set off down the Trans-Amazon Highway, a 1970s folly of nationalistic infrastructure that has deteriorated into a precarious and often impassable muddy track.
Pica’s destination was Jacareacanga, a small settlement a further 200 miles southwest of Itaituba. I asked him how long it took to drive there. ‘Depends,’ he shrugged. ‘It can take a lifetime. It can take two days.’
How long did it take this time, I repeated.
‘You know, you never know how long it will take because it never takes the same time. It takes between ten and twelve hours during the rainy season. If everything goes well.’
Jacareacanga is on the edge of the Munduruku’s demarcated territory. To get inside the area, Pica had to wait for some Indians to arrive so he could negotiate with them to take him there by canoe.
‘How long did you wait?’ I enquired.
‘I waited quite a lot. But, again, don’t ask me how many days.’
‘So, it was a couple of days?’ I suggested tentatively.
A few seconds passed as he furrowed his brow. ‘It was about two weeks.’
More than a month after he left Paris, Pica was finally approaching his destination. Inevitably, I wanted to know how long it took to get from Jacareacanga to the villages.
But by now Pica was demonstrably impatient with my line of questioning: ‘Same answer to everything – it depends!’
I stood my ground. How long did it take this time?
He stuttered: ‘I don’t know. I think…perhaps…two days…a day and a night…’
The more I pushed Pica for facts and figures, the more reluctant