Children like giving each other nicknames; any child in the least bit peculiar will find himself being given a nickname by his classmates. When the other pupils at the school first caught sight of Jinzhen’s huge head, they called him ‘Big-head’. Later on they realized that he had all sorts of peculiar habits — like he really enjoyed counting the hordes of ants that marched backwards and forwards across the playground and was completely oblivious to anything else while he was doing it, or that in the winter he would always wear a tatty old scarf trimmed with dog-fur (apparently this had been a present from old Mr Auslander), or that he would fart and belch in class, without the least sign of restraint, just letting it all hang out as it were. People really did not know how to take him. Another thing: he always wrote his homework in duplicate — once in Chinese and once in English. What with one thing and another, people felt that there was something wrong with him, that he must be stupid. But at the same time his grades were fantastic, really impressive, better than what the rest of the class could achieve put together. So they came up with a new nickname for him, ‘Idiot-savvy’ by which they meant ‘idiot savant’. This nickname was particularly apposite because it encompassed his behaviour both inside and outside the classroom. Like many nicknames it seemed to denigrate its possessor, but at the same time it had an element of praise — a perfect mix of contempt and respect: everyone felt it was the right name for him. Everyone called him that.
‘Idiot-savvy!’
‘Idiot-savvy!’
Fifty years later, when I went to visit the university, there were plenty of people who had no idea who I was talking about when I mentioned Jinzhen, but the moment I said ‘the Idiot-savvy’, it was like putting a match to the train of their memories — this nickname brought a whole host of stories to mind. One of the people I talked to, an old gentleman who had once been Jinzhen’s class teacher, was happy to share the following memories with me:
I remember one interesting thing. During break in class, one of the other pupils noticed a line of ants crawling along the corridor and called him over. He said to Jinzhen, ‘You like counting ants, don’t you, so why don’t you come and count how many ants we have here?’ I saw it with my own eyes — he came over and counted a couple of hundred ants walking along — just like that. There was another time that he borrowed a book off me, a dictionary of proverbs and aphorisms, and he gave it back to me a few days later. I said he could keep it but he said that he didn’t need it, since he had already memorized the whole thing. Later on, I found out that he could recite the whole damn thing from memory! I can tell you, of all the many, many pupils that I have taught during my career, there was no one else who came even close in terms of basic intelligence or academic ability. His memory, creative ability, comprehension, his ability to calculate, to extrapolate from the evidence, to make a summary, to come to a decision. . in many, many ways his abilities were truly amazing; ordinary people could not even begin to imagine what he could do. In my opinion, he did not need to waste his time in high school and could have gone straight on to university, but the Headmaster refused — he said that old Mr Rong didn’t want it that way.The old Mr Rong that this gentleman was talking about was Young Lillie.
Young Lillie had two reasons for his refusal. First, he was worried about the fact that Jinzhen had spent much of his childhood entirely cut off from other people, so he now needed to learn how to build normal social relations, spending time with other children of his own age, growing up in the ordinary way. Putting him in a situation where he would be entirely surrounded by people many years older than himself would be extremely damaging to a difficult and inward-looking personality. Secondly, he had discovered that Jinzhen would often do stupid things: he would try and conceal from Young Lillie and his teachers that he was trying to prove things that they had already explained to him had been demonstrated conclusively by other people — maybe it was just that he was too clever. Young Lillie thought that someone with no experience of the world, but with such great intelligence, needed to proceed one step at a time, otherwise he might end up wasting his genius on finding out things that other people already knew.
Later on it became clear that they would have to let him skip whole grades or the teachers simply would not be able to carry on themselves: he was treating his high-school teachers to barrages of obscure questions that they simply could not answer. There was nothing that could be done: Young Lillie had to listen to the advice of the boy’s teachers and let him skip a grade. Having created a precedent, he skipped one grade after the other and so by the time that his fellow classmates from the first year of high school had reached the last, he was already long gone. He passed the university entrance exams with flying colours: 100 per cent in mathematics and seventh place in the entire province. Naturally he ended up in the mathematics department of N University.
6
The mathematics department at N University was famous; in fact it was often said to be the cradle of the best mathematicians in the country. About fifteen years ago, a famous author from C City happened to overhear some people making derogatory remarks about his home town. His response was really remarkable. He said, ‘Even if C City was twice as run-down and backward than it is, we would still have the outstanding N University. If N University also started to fail, they would still have a mathematics department that ranks among the best in the world. How dare you make derogatory remarks about us!’
He meant it as a joke, but the fact is that the mathematics department of N University has always been very highly regarded.
On Jinzhen’s first day at university, Young Lillie gave him a diary. He had written a message on the fly-leaf, which ran as follows:
If you want to become a mathematician, you have come to the very best place in the country to foster your talents. If you do not want to become a mathematician, then you do not need to attend this university, for you already know enough mathematics to last you for the rest of your life.
Perhaps there was no one more aware than Young Lillie of the rare and amazing mathematical genius concealed beneath Jinzhen’s impassive exterior. Because of that, there was no one who hoped that Jinzhen would become a mathematician more than Young Lillie. As you will have realized, the note that he wrote in the front of Jinzhen’s diary is proof of that. Young Lillie was quite sure that in the future there would be a long train of other people who followed in his footsteps in realizing that Jinzhen had a remarkable genius for mathematics. However, at the same time he was worried that if that recognition came now it would be damaging — he was trying to hold it off for a year or two, to let Jinzhen concentrate on his studies, for he was sure that Jinzhen’s mysterious mathematical genius would sooner or later shine through.
As things turned out, Young Lillie was perhaps a bit too conservative. After just two weeks of class, Professor Jan Liseiwicz joined him on the list of people who had noticed the boy’s talents. As the professor said, ‘I can see that N University has produced yet another fine mathematician, and perhaps he will be one of the great mathematicians of our time. At the very least he will be the best that you and I will ever see.’
He was talking about Jinzhen.
Jan Liseiwicz was almost the same age as the century. He was born into a Polish aristocratic family in 1901. His mother was Jewish, and she bequeathed him what people in those days thought of as a typical Jewish face: a strong forehead, a hawk-like nose, and dark curly hair. He was also remarkably intelligent: his memory amazed people; on the Binet-Simon tests he registered practically off the scale. At the age of four, the young Liseiwicz was already obsessed by games in which the competitors pitted their intelligence against each other — it was at this stage that he started playing chess and learning set variations. By the time he was six, none of his family or their friends would dare to play against him. Everyone who saw him play chess said the same thing: he was a genius such as comes along maybe once in a century. Others complimented his mother: ‘Another great Jewish mathematician has been born!’