The misery began when I moved beyond the Pythagorean theorem to
sine, cosine and tangent. I couldn’t grasp such abstractions. I could feel
the logic in them, could sense their power to bestow order and
symmetry, but I couldn’t unlock it. They kept their secrets, becoming a
kind of gateway beyond which I believed there was a world of law and
reason. But I could not pass through the gate.
Mother said that if I wanted to learn trigonometry, it was her
responsibility to teach me. She set aside an evening, and the two of us
sat at the kitchen table, scratching at bits of paper and tugging our
hair. We spent three hours on a single problem, and every answer we
produced was wrong.
“I wasn’t any good at trig in high school,” Mother moaned, slamming
the book shut. “And I’ve forgotten what little I knew.”
Dad was in the living room, shuffling through blueprints for the
granaries and mumbling to himself. I’d watched him sketch those
blueprints, watched him perform the calculations, altering this angle
or lengthening that beam. Dad had little formal education in
mathematics but it was impossible to doubt his aptitude: somehow I
knew that if I put the equation before my father, he would be able to
solve it.
When I’d told Dad that I planned to go to college, he’d said a
woman’s place was in the home, that I should be learning about herbs
—“God’s pharmacy” he’d called it, smiling to himself—so I could take
over for Mother. He’d said a lot more, of course, about how I was
whoring after man’s knowledge instead of God’s, but still I decided to
ask him about trigonometry. Here was a sliver of man’s knowledge I
was certain he possessed.
I scribbled the problem on a fresh sheet of paper. Dad didn’t look up
as I approached, so gently, slowly, I slid the paper over the blueprints.
“Dad, can you solve this?”
He looked at me harshly, then his eyes softened. He rotated the
paper, gazed at it for a moment, and began to scrawl, numbers and
circles and great, arcing lines that doubled back on themselves. His
solution didn’t look like anything in my textbook. It didn’t look like
anything I had ever seen. His mustache twitched; he mumbled. Then
he stopped scribbling, looked up and gave the correct answer.
I asked how he’d solved it. “I don’t know how to solve it,” he said,