What if you had a belief so intuitive, so unassailable, that you oriented your life around it? What if you then had a personal role in upending this belief?
The story “Division by Zero” is part of "Stories of Your Life," a collection by Ted Chiang. It appears immediately before the short story that inspired the movie "Arrival."
I’ve read most of Chiang’s short stories (he has just two celebrated collections published in the last three decades). As the title might indicate, mathematical concepts are part of “Division by Zero” but only in the minimal dose needed to tangle with a few deep philosophical ideas. The story is incredibly concise. In a scant 20 pages, we meet Renee, a generational mathematical talent, and Carl, her biologist husband. Renee has made a mathematical discovery that upends her life. Although Carl is sophisticated enough to technically understand the broad strokes of Renee’s realization, he discovers he is unable to empathize with his wife’s devastation.
I studied math in college and identified with the lovely descriptions of a precise and elegant mathematical conclusion. The Renee experienced this as a precocious seven-year-old:
“…Renee had been spellbound at discovering the perfect squares in the smooth marble tiles of the floor. A single one, two rows of two, three rows of three, four rows of four: the tiles fit together in a square. Of course. No matter which side you looked at it from, it came out the same. And more than that, each square was bigger than the last by an odd number of tiles. It was an epiphany. The conclusion was necessary: it had a rightness to it, confirmed by the smooth, cool feel of the tiles.”
When compared to Renee, my experience studying math involved exponentially more striving (due to my disappointing dearth of instinctive observational prowess). I’m in the same boat as Carl, who is aware that his sympathy for his wife can never rise to the level of empathy. He can’t really understand the worlds that Renee has spent her life constructing– or her devastation as these are dismantled by her own discovery.
“Division By Zero” reminded me of Mary Doria Russell’s “The Sparrow.” That novel is also science fiction but deals more with theology (a space-faring, Jesuit priest named Emilio Sandoz suffers the collapse of his dearly held faith after a Job-like trial). “The Sparrow” is one of the most disturbing books I’ve ever read. The lengthier format allowed Russell to portray Sandoz’s haunting experience with a suspense and vividness that might not be possible in a 20-page story. But both Chiang and Russell’s works feature the blissful ignorance of bystanders as they issue platitudes to the devastated ex-believers.
Of Chiang and Russell’s themes, the rarified field of mathematics is perhaps even less relatable than a belief in God. Chiang’s story shows us that paradoxically, a casual, underexamined structure of meaning may be more durable than one where each intricate piece of truth follows from the last.
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