The Last Theorem - Arthur Charles Clarke [109]
The twenty-first century had not been good to either of the two countries. In Venezuela it was politics, in Colombia drugs; in both countries there had been violence and frequent governmental crises, capped by the decision of the former narcotics lords to take over some of their neighbor’s now far more profitable oil business.
“Pax per Fidem took on North Korea first because it didn’t have a real friend in the world,” Ranjit told his wife. “This time they took on two countries at once because they had different friends—the U.S. has been propping Colombia up since the nineties, and Venezuela was close to both Russia and China.”
“But there’s a lot less killing going on now,” Mevrouw said thoughtfully. “I can’t feel unhappy about that.”
Myra sighed. “But do you think we’ll be better off when the whole world is run by Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia?” she asked.
30
BIG NEWS
When the seminar was over, no student had managed to produce a rigorous proof of the infinitude of twin primes, but then Ranjit hadn’t expected one would. Neither had Dr. Davoodbhoy. At their postseminar conference, though, he was visibly happier than before. He flourished the student comment slips at Ranjit with a grin. “Listen to these. ‘I had the feeling I wasn’t just learning how to do mathematics; I was learning what doing mathematics was all about.’ ‘Good stuff. Dr. Subramanian doesn’t treat us like children, more like we were new members of his research team.’ ‘Can I take his next seminar, too?’ And what would you say to”—he glanced again at the slip—“this young lady, Ramya Salgado?”
Ranjit looked uncomfortable. “I know who she is; she was very active in the seminar. Maybe if we needed another warm body to fill the class out.”
“Oh,” said Dr. Davoodbhoy, “I don’t think you need to worry about that. You do want to do another, don’t you? Have you thought of a subject? Maybe something like the Riemann conjecture?”
“There are proofs of that,” Ranjit reminded him.
“Some people don’t think they’re satisfactory. Anyway, there was a proof of Fermat, too—Wiles’s—and that didn’t keep you from finding a better one.”
Ranjit considered, then shook his head. “I’m afraid Riemann is too complicated for anybody but a professional mathematician to care about. How are you going to get the average college student to care about what way the zeros in the Riemann zeta function are distributed? There are better ones around. Euler’s reworking of the Goldbach conjecture, for instance. That’s pure gold. ‘All positive even integers greater than four can be expressed as the sum of two primes.’ Six is three plus three, eight is five plus three, ten is five plus five—or seven plus three, if you like that better. Anybody can understand that! Only nobody has ever proved it—yet.”
Davoodbhoy considered for one of the smaller fractions of a second, then nodded. “Go for it, Ranjit. I might even like to audit one of those sessions myself.”
As the years flowed from that point in time onward, Ranjit began to realize that he truly loved teaching. Each semester brought a new flock of eager students, and of course he had his monthly reviews of the ladder to tend to, and Natasha was growing from a young, promising girl to a slightly older girl of significant promise. If anyone in the world shared Myra’s concerns about the three Pax per Fidem sponsors’ dividing the world among them, there was little sign of it. Silent Thunder was as gentle a conquistador in South America as it had been on the Korean peninsula. The casualty list was not much longer. The problems of feeding and caring for the suddenly technology-less populations were as quickly met. The outside world observed, and discussed, and seemed to think that Pax per Fidem had done a reasonably good thing.
Part of the reason why the affair had gone so well, Ranjit knew, was that the advance planning had been meticulous. Weeks before the attack the two surviving old American aircraft