• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Dyson

That fall Freeman Dyson arrived at Cornell. Some of Cornell’s mathematicians knew the work of a Briton by that name. It was hardly a common name, and mathematics was certainly known for its prodigies, but surely, they thought, this small, hawk-nosed twenty-three-year-old joining the physics department could not be the same man. Other graduate students found him genial but inscrutable. He would sleep late, bring his New York Times to the office, read it until lunch time, and spend the afternoon with his feet up and perhaps his eyes closed. Just occasionally he would wander into Bethe’s office. What they did there, no one knew.

Indeed, Dyson was one of England’s two or three most brilliant mathematical prodigies. He was the son of two supremely cultured members of the middle class who were late to marry and entering middle age when he was born. His father, George, composed, conducted, and taught music at a boys’ college in the south. Eventually he became director of England’s Royal College of Music. His mother, Mildred, trained as a lawyer, though she did not practice, and passed on to Freeman her deep love of literature, beginning with Chaucer and the poets of ancient Greece and Rome. As a six-year-old he would sit with encyclopedia volumes spread open before him and make long, engrossing calculations on sheets of paper. He was intensely self-possessed even then. His older sister once interrupted him to ask where their nanny was and heard him reply, “I expect her to be in the absolute elsewhere.” He read a popular astronomy book, The Splendour of the Heavens, and the science fiction of Jules Verne, and when he was eight and nine wrote a science-fiction novel of his own, Sir Phillip Roberts’s Erolunar Collision, with a maturely cadenced syntax and an adult sense of literary flow. His scientist hero has a knack for both arithmetic and spaceship design. Freeman, who did not favor short sentences, imagined a scientist comfortable with public acclaim, yet solitary in his work:

“I, Sir Phillip Roberts, and my friend, Major Forbes,” he began, “have just unravelled an important secret of nature; that Eros, that minor planet that is so well-known on account of its occasional proximity with the Earth, Eros, will approach within 3,000,000 miles of the Earth in 10 years 287 days hence, instead of the usual 13,000,000 miles every 37 years; and, therefore it may, by some great chance fall upon the Earth. Therefore I advise you to calculate the details of this happening!” …

When the cheers were over, and everybody had gone home, it did not mean that the excitement was over; no, not at all; everybody was making the wildest calculations; some reasonable, some not; but Sir Phillip only wrote coolly in his study rather more than usual; nobody could tell what his thoughts were.

He read popular books about Einstein and relativity and, realizing that he needed to learn a more advanced mathematics than his school taught, sent away to scientific publishers for their catalogs. His mother finally felt that his interest in mathematics was turning into an obsession. He was fifteen and had just spent a Christmas vacation working methodically, from six each morning until ten each evening, through the seven hundred problems of H. T. H. Piaggio’s Differential Equations. That same year, frustrated at learning that a classic book on number theory by I. M. Vinogradov existed only in Russian, he taught himself the language and wrote out a full translation in his careful hand. As Christmas vacation ended, his mother went for a walk with him and began a cautionary lecture with the words of the Latin playwright Terence: “I am human and I let nothing human be alien to me.” She continued by telling him Goethe’s version of the Faust story, parts one and two, rendering Faust’s immersion in his books, his lust for knowledge and power, his sacrifice of the possibility of love, so powerfully that years later, when Dyson happened to see the film Citizen Kane, he realized that he was weeping with the recognition of his mother’s Faust incarnate once