In The Invisible Writing , Arthur Koestler writes about scratching out mathematical proofs on the walls while in solitary confinement during the Spanish Civil War.
“I went on to recall Euclid’s proof that the number of primes is infinite… the scribbled symbols on the wall represented one of the rare cases where a meaningful and comprehensive statement about the infinite is arrived at by precise and finite means. I must have stood there for some minutes, entranced, with a wordless awareness that ‘this is perfect, perfect’, until I noticed some slight mental discomfort nagging at the back of my mind, some trivial circumstance that marred the perfection of the moment. Then I remembered the nature of that irrelevant annoyance: I was, of course, in prison and might be shot. But this was immediately answered by a feeling whose verbal translation would be: “So what? Is that all? Have you got nothing more serious to worry about?”- an answer so spontaneous, fresh and amused as if the intruding annoyance had been the loss of a collar-stud.”
Maths as life-affirming in the face of death is unusual. But maths possesses, as Bertrand Russell pointed out, “not only truth but supreme beauty – a beauty cold and austere like that of sculpture.”
I read that Koestler book in school; I devoured books by George Gamow, Martin Gardner, and later, E T Bell, Ian Stewart, Marcus du Sautoy, Simon Singh. And more.
My maths teacher M V Channakeshava (‘Channa’) would be thrilled, I felt. Especially since he put me on to some of the writers himself. Maths teachers tend to be the least popular in school – they speak an esoteric language, they tend to be hard on students who can’t keep up, they seldom bring to their teaching elements of history and biography. Channa was an exception. For him context was important. Now, one of his students, Sheshagiri Rao, has written a fascinating book on the man and his method, spliced with stories of mathematics that captivated him. For above all, Channa was a storyteller who brought alive Euler and Gauss and Riemann and used their stories as pathways to their work.
“Who discusses teachers these days?” Rao asks, “It is not a sexy topic.” But it is sexy enough for the those whose lives Channa touched. Here’s the playwright Mahesh Dattani in an email to Channa: “I feel so privileged to have had teachers such as yourself who taught us the real value of the subjects we learnt.”
Channa, now 80, taught at Baldwin’s from 1964 to 1999 with a short break in between. The Gentle Man Who Taught Infinity, Rao’s tribute, is equally a passionate book on the teaching of maths – the author, an engineer, taught maths at Valley School before moving onto primary schools in villages and working on improving the way maths is taught in our schools. “I was an average student,” he says.
But clearly an average student with a social conscience whose inspiration was his school maths teacher. It is an unusual tale.
(Suresh Menon is Contributing Editor, The Hindu)
