Struck by Genius: How a Brain Injury Made Me a Mathematical Marvel (14 page)

But first I had to make it past the men mowing the lawn on campus. Seeing them stopped me in my tracks. I was fascinated by the angles of the mowers, how they changed as the ground’s slope changed. I thought about the blades of grass, and then my mind automatically cut everything around the area into slices of the grid structure of space-time as I saw it—all webby, with lines extending as far as I could see. I saw these strange little fuzzy moving particles everywhere on the grid; more in some areas and less in others. I paused for a moment, as I was not sure why the air was so filled with those particles. I noticed the strong, sweet aroma of cut grass as I saw the particles in that magnified grid, and then I finally realized they were the pieces of cut grass floating through the air. It’s interesting to me how that happened, how I was momentarily lost. When I focus on something, it’s as though my mind is a camera and that camera switches to autofocus and zooms in. It’s not something I can control and I don’t always know how the tiny patterns I see at this level translate to the environment around me. I lose perspective. Have you ever seen a bird on the branch of a tree in the distance and wanted to capture it with your camera? Then you zoom in and it’s just a jumble of branches and you have to search around for the bird with your new focus. This is what my brain is like.

My zoom lens then pulled back so I saw things as they were and gained the perspective I needed to keep walking through this plane. I saw the particles swirl and imagined the tiniest of them going up my nose. This startled me, as I’m allergic to grass, and I tried not to panic. My brain switched to a sort of computational mode as it looked at this large, vivid grid pattern with the grass swirls. I determined the path with the fewest grass particles and walked through it like a maze.

Though I’d managed to map out a path to class, I was distracted yet again when I noticed the geometry of the plants along the way. The way the leaves and blossoms fanned out, the leaves or petals subdividing a circle with multiples—say, four leaves or eight petals—sent my mind into overdrive as it tried to calculate the geometry of flowers. It occurred to me that the number of petals or leaves in a group was seldom a prime number. And then I started thinking about how that number of petals or leaves might be an evolutionary advantage in terms of how the plants used light and space; perhaps that arrangement made the most efficient use of the space-time grid and better captured light for photosynthesis.

I hadn’t been outdoors in daylight for such a long time that I was seeing nearly everything around me with new eyes. It was all I could do to keep walking to class. The great beauty of nature’s mathematical truths was all around me, and I realized that I was experiencing the reality of living mathematics, whereas most people saw only its map and then confused the map with the actual territory and got misled. I knew that mathematicians described nature with their formulas. But to me, there was something deeper than that going on. I thought there was more to the nature of the universe than equations—I thought perhaps the universe spoke in its own form of math. And that math was geometry. Equations were symbolic; numbers were symbolic. But to me, geometry was
real.

Being outdoors and looking so closely at everything made me aware of the microscopic world, and the campus struck me as a giant petri dish crawling with bacteria. There were so many people, and I was certain that they carried countless germs. I was also feeling assaulted by the cars going by on campus, the exhaust spewing from them. I’d been cloistered for so long that I’d almost forgotten cars had exhaust. I made my way to the building where my first class was and was similarly affronted by the smokers huddled by the stairs at the entrance. I walked to their extreme left, hugging the railing as I climbed the steps, and I held my breath the entire time. I was concentrating so hard on not breathing that I inadvertently touched the railing. My hand felt warm and I was overpowered by a gross feeling of filth. I found a restroom to wash up before continuing on.

Though it was really cool to see the world in such great detail, the result was that I felt quite overwhelmed and exhausted before I even got to the classroom. There was so much to keep track of—the grass particles, the petals, the bits of interesting conversation, the clustered smokers, the spewing exhaust pipes, the potential lurking germs. I mapped them all out in my mind and found it hard to snap out of thinking about each obsessively. That promised land, that campus of my dreams, was also for me a forest with many hazards.

I stumbled down the hallway with my book bag, opening the doors with my feet or my elbows to avoid touching the handles with their millions of microbes. As terrified and overstimulated as I felt, I made a promise to myself that day that I would not drop out. I began to think of ways to avoid letting my discomfort with germs stop me from reaching my goals.

From then on, I brought a large number of hand wipes to school with me. In every classroom, I zipped open my rolling suitcase and took out a handful of wipes to sterilize my desk and chair before sitting down. The few students who shot me dubious looks as I did that got treated to the sight of a grimy, blackened cloth. They lost their skepticism with a chorus of “Ewww!” and some of them even introduced themselves. One day we all had cupcakes to eat in class, and people actually waited for me to wipe the table down before they started eating.

I was pretty sure my fellow students, as nice as they were, regarded me as a curiosity. But I didn’t care. I was so happy to have human companionship after so long in isolation, I’d have wiped down the entire school if I’d had to.

As I was heading toward class one day, it started raining cats and dogs. Even for the Seattle region, this was an extraordinary amount of rain. As I made my way through the courtyard, I noticed an enormous puddle, and it brought me up short.

The thousands and thousands of raindrops hitting that puddle were creating ripples, and as the ripples fanned out, they made an interference pattern with the other ripples. I was transfixed by that beautiful example of the nature of things and found myself staring down as the ripples made their circular peaks and valleys and thousands of new raindrops erased them and made more. It reminded me of the inverse-square law of physics that I’d begun to learn about through my own research—in fact, it was a perfect example of the law that applies when some force or energy is radiated outward from a single point into three-dimensional space. As the energy gets farther from the source, it is spread across an area that is increasing proportionally to the source—and the energy is inversely proportional to the radius of the space. Though the concept was usually applied in the context of gravity, light, sound, radiation, or electricity, I saw the distribution pattern on the surface of the water as well.

I didn’t have an umbrella, but I didn’t care that I was dripping wet and that water was cascading off my head. It was not unpleasant at all. This was a late-summer day and the rain was lukewarm. I took a camera out of my suitcase and hunched over it to keep it dry. I stood photographing that remarkable display for some time, a huge grin on my face. I wanted to always remember it.

I don’t know how much time had passed when I heard rapping on glass nearby. It was loud; I could hear it over the rain. When I looked up, I saw a group of students gathered behind the large glass wall ahead of me, laughing and talking and pointing at me. It looked like an entire class, including the professor, had interrupted their lesson in order to watch me.

It occurred to me how wet I was at that point and how strange I must look. One of the students snapped a picture, the flash briefly illuminating that gray afternoon. A bunch of students started waving at me. I waved back, and more pictures were taken. I smiled at them and laughed along with them, then continued on to my class.

When I got my photos developed, they weren’t that great. They weren’t as sharply focused or filled with wave patterns as the images I’d seen with my own eyes. Real life is so much better for me than photos; I think it’s because motion creates additional effects in my perception that can’t be captured by a camera. Flipping through a magazine one day on campus, I learned about some photography software called Genuine Fractals (now renamed Perfect Resize 7.5). This Photoshop plug-in allowed you to increase the resolution of a photo and reopen it in improved focus at almost any scale. I thought that sounded one step better than what I had, but I wished there were software that could capture precisely what I saw. Perhaps one day I could create it.

It didn’t take my teachers long to discover I was no ordinary student. Though I was going to school only part-time so I could begin working again at Planet Futon, I was serious about my courses. I sat in the front of each classroom and raised my hand often. I noticed my professors looking at me oddly during my daily purification rituals and when I engaged them in class, and it was obvious that they found me not only unusual but perhaps exceptional—simultaneously deficient in mathematical terminology and fundamentals and extremely advanced in my theorizing. I made the effort to answer a lot of questions and ask new ones. There was a guy in one of my classes who clucked every time I did, but I wasn’t going to let him get to me.

I started to be encouraged by the faculty members’ inquisitiveness. They had questions for me, too, about how I thought and how I arrived at various answers. I got the feeling that despite my nontraditional methodology, I was coming up with the right answers and maybe even some surprising questions. I started sharing my drawings after class.

My introductory algebra teacher, Tracy Haynie, asked us to draw a nautilus from triangles based on a lesson in our textbook. The exercise required us to simply find the correct-size triangles to place in the outline of the shell in a flat, two-dimensional way, but I was inspired immediately when I saw it. I realized I could build a three-dimensional spiral nautilus like the one I’d loved in childhood if I applied the Pythagorean theorem. I drew the first triangle and then, using the equation
a
²
+ b
²
= c
²
, I recursively put
c
back in the equation as
a,
kept
b
as one, and grew it out, kind of like how Mandelbrot formed his set. Placing each new triangle, calculated this way at a right angle to the first, grew out a perfect nautilus.

Haynie was fascinated enough to ask the other students to draw a seashell using the Pythagorean theorem, as I had. Mine was seventeen times larger than what she had them draw, but many of them were excited by the exercise and now we were all talking about it.

One day I was walking down the hall, struggling with my rolling suitcase and with my arms full of drawings. I was facing a troublesome hallway door that pulled inward (making my foot or elbow method unworkable). It also had a handicapped buzzer, but that was out of order. Haynie appeared out of nowhere, swooped in, and opened the door for me. I can’t tell you what this simple act of kindness, followed by meaningful conversations about the OCD that kept me from touching door handles, meant to me coming from an instructor. She even said, “I think I have a little touch of that,” and I believed her, since she kept her classroom so neat and tidy. Her reaction was so, well, human, it made me want to work even harder.

I felt very much at home and inspired by Haynie’s class and her kindness toward me that I even brought my daughter, then eight, with me one day. She learned to graph a function with the rest of the class. It was really important to me that Megan think of college as a great place to go. I wanted her to apply herself when the time came. I didn’t want her to lose time or go down the wrong road as I had when I was younger.

At the end of the semester, Haynie asked me for one of my illustrations. “One day you might be famous and this drawing will be worth lots of money,” she said with a smile. I could feel my cheeks flush red. Later she sent me an e-mail saying that there weren’t many students she remembered as well as she remembered me and telling me what a joy I had been to teach back in 2006. She still has my drawing. Thanks to her careful attention and inspiring teaching, I came to love school.

Another teacher, Meredith LaFlesh, saw my potential and zeroed in on me during her rotations in the math lab, tutoring me in trigonometry and filling in the blanks in my math vocabulary. I realized how fortunate I was to be connecting with great teachers and I tried to make the most of their generous attention. One night, freshly inspired by LaFlesh’s instruction, I set out to create a formula describing pi and arrived at the following: