The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [100]
Mevrouw Vorhulst, of course, was waiting for them at the Colombo airport, since it was obvious that the best thing was for them all to stay at her house again. “Just until we find an apartment,” Myra said, while being hugged by her.
“As long as you like,” said Mevrouw Vorhulst. “Joris wouldn’t have it any other way.”
There was a strange thing about those classrooms at the university, Ranjit found. When his principal dearest wish had been to get out of them, they had seemed oppressively small. Not now, not to a brand-new professor who had never faced a class before. Now the room was a vast jury box, packed with young men and women sitting in judgment on him. Their eyes were unerringly focused on his every move, their ears impatient for the great revelations Professor Subramanian would have for them of the innermost secrets of the world of mathematicians.
It wasn’t just how to nurture this nest of hungry hatchlings that baffled Ranjit. It was what to nurture them with. When the university’s search committee had welcomed him to the faculty, they had generously left the exact nature of his duties to his own good plan.
He didn’t have one.
Ranjit was aware that he needed help. He even had a hope of finding it in the person of Dr. Davoodbhoy, the man who had behaved so exemplarily in the matter of the stolen math teacher’s password.
He was not only still at the university. He had, in the natural attrition of deaths and retirements, already moved up a terrace or two along the slope of authority. All the same, when Ranjit applied to him for help, there wasn’t much available. “Oh, Ranjit,” he said. “May I still call you Ranjit? You know how it is. Our little university doesn’t have many world-famous stars. The search committees want you here very much, but they don’t have a clue about what to do with you. You do realize that you don’t actually have to do much teaching? We don’t have many faculty members who specialize in research instead, but that is a possibility.”
“Huh,” Ranjit said thoughtfully. He went on thinking for a moment, then said, “I suppose I might take a look at some of the famous old problems like Riemann, Goldbach, Collatz—”
“Certainly,” Davoodbhoy said, “but don’t give up on teaching until you try it. Why don’t we set up a couple of quick seminars for practice? That sort of thing we can do on short notice.” And then as Ranjit prepared to leave, turning that idea over in his mind, Davoodbhoy said, “Oh, and one more thing, Ranjit. You were right about Fermat and I was wrong. I haven’t had to say that very often in my life. It leads me to want to trust your judgment.”
It was pleasing for Ranjit to know that the provost trusted his judgment. Ranjit himself, however, was not quite as trusting. His first seminar was called Foundations of Number Theory. “I’ll give them a sort of overview of the whole subject,” he promised Davoodbhoy, who immediately started the wheels in motion. It would run for six weeks, four-hour classes, limited to juniors, seniors, and graduate students and a class size no larger than twenty-five.
The subject, of course, was one Ranjit had paid little attention to since he was fourteen and just beginning his fascination with Fermat’s jotting. So he mined the university library for texts and taught out of them, trying to keep at least a dozen pages ahead of the dismayingly bright and worrisomely quick students who had signed up for the seminar.
Unfortunately, it didn’t take them long to figure out what he was doing. That night he confessed to Myra, “I’m boring them. They can read from the book as well as I can.”
“That,” she said loyally, “is ridiculous.” But then, as he repeated some of the quite respectful but unimpressed comments students had made, she thought more carefully. “I know,” she said. “You need to make a