The Housekeeper and the Professor

I read this book in two days which is almost my record for finishing so quickly (almost like After Drakness by Haruki Murakami which is similar in lightness). It was short, easy going, and sentimental. It also combined artistry with mathematics.

The story is about a mathematician (the Professor) who gets into an accident and cannot remember anything for more than 80 minutes since that day in 1975. The housekeeper has a son who everyday, introduces herself and her son and diligently works at his house. It is an extremely heart warming book but without being too heavy.

The Professor sticks mini memos onto his suit to remember things, thus I can imagine how disheveled he must've looked.

What was funny was that as I was reading the book, many mini memos fell onto my lap from between the pages. It was probably my mom who read before me and sent me this book.

It must've been marking such important formulas. She had even marked the page with the Euler's formula (in the book it is referred to as e^iπ + 10)!

I was really struck by one thing that the Professor said. That humans invented the number 0, which is too well known to have come from India. But that non-zero numbers are not known when and how they were formulated that it is us humans that have to decipher them, not the other way around. Alas that was what mathematicians were/are doing!