“If I do not like what I see, you will be dismissed.” He held up his tablet, a red box reading DISMISSED on the top of the screen. His shirt was rumpled, his eyes red, and I wondered how late he had stayed at the piano. Echoes of the Satie lilted through my mind as he spoke. “If you are incorrect, I will dismiss you. If you are slow, I will dismiss you. If you are sloppy, unorganized, or uncreative in your work, I will dismiss you. Are there any questions?”
His eyes scanned the room, and before I could duck behind Quentin again, he saw me. I swallowed hard. He caught himself, doing a second take upon seeing me, then turned back to the other students.
“No? Then we will begin.” He moved back to the blackboard behind him and wrote the problem on the board, then read it to us out loud, the problem appearing on the top of our tablet screens. “Write all partitions of the number 13. Begin.”
My mind flashed back to my first discrete math class. I had always been good at math, but it was discrete that made me realize I loved it more than anything. And partitions were easy—just different ways of writing numbers as sums. Thirteen could be written as 10+3, or 5+6+2, or thirteen ones all added together.
I took a deep breath. The students around me scribbled furiously on their tablets, and I was worried about going too slow, but I was also worried about being sloppy and missing a partition. And to top it all off, I was worried about Eliot figuring out who I really was. I thought we would have to register at the beginning of the test, but he’d said it was anonymous—would he ask for our names at the end? Did he already know the student list somehow? Did he already know I had lied to him? Take it easy, Brynn. Step by step.
There were so many partitions. Start with the basic ones. 13. 12+1. 11+2. 11+1+1. I settled into an easy rhythm, breaking up the numbers in order and writing them down in separate columns. Not so bad, once I got everything organized. 10+3. 10+2+1. 10+1+1+1. I heard a chair behind me creak as a student got up. Dismissed already? Well, the physics majors probably didn’t even know what a partition was. I felt better, more certain, and I kept on working steadily. 9+4. 9+3+1. I had gotten down to the line of fives when a voice broke my concentration.
“Next question.” Eliot’s voice startled me. He erased the question from the blackboard and began to write another. My tablet screen blanked out the question as well as all of my work, and the second question appeared.
“What if we aren’t finished yet?” a student from a few rows back called out.
“You’re still here, aren’t you?” Eliot said. “Then you’re finished. Next question.” He drew a circle on the board and began to sketch out chords between the points on the circle. “Let M be the midpoint of the chord PQ…”
I knew this proof. The butterfly theorem. The chords sketched out drew the shape of a butterfly in the circle. I quickly wrote out the proof, adding in the missing perpendiculars. I finished in only a few minutes and looked around the auditorium, surprised at what I saw. Already a third of the room had been eliminated. I leaned back in my chair but then remembered what he had said. We were being tested on creativity, and my proof was the most straightforward version. I panicked and went back to the problem. There must be another way to do it. I scrambled to think of another proof, maybe one based on angles. Maybe projecting the circle, or maybe thinking of it as a conic section…
Math was wonderful for me. It was an escape from the world which was messy and full of vague ambiguities a frightening muddle, into a new world of perfection. A world of lines which had no end, and points which were infinitely small, of curves that reached out always further and further into the plane, functions that repeated themselves in undulating waves which had no beginning and no end.
It was only in this clean, perfect space that I felt comfortable playing. In my imagination I could drift off into daydreams, and in math I could construct the realities that I wanted to live in. I worked for twenty more minutes until Eliot called time, but couldn’t finish a second proof.
“Next question.” I sighed as my tablet blanked out again. I must be doing okay, but this test stressed me out more than any other I’d ever taken.
The next question was even harder, involving some partial differential equations that I had just learned. I worked on it without success for a half hour, but when time was called I wasn’t even close to an answer. I gulped, waiting for the red DISMISSED bar to appear on my screen, but it never did. Eliot wrote the next problem on the board and we continued working on our tablets. Students left the auditorium throughout, a stream of dismissals at the beginning of every problem that trickled down as time went on.