Comfort in Numbers: Regarding “Variables in the Drake Equation”

by William Preston

Drawing from his college and high school days, memories of his math-teacher father, and more, author William Preston’s reflects on his relationship with math. William’s first Analog story, “Variables in the Drake Equation,” appears in our July/August issue

The Body (1)

I knew something was wrong because I couldn’t lower my quarter mile time on the school treadmill and I couldn’t build any endurance. I was 52, not 82. I had run track and cross country in high school when I wasn’t in a play or making a movie, and my father, a math teacher, was my coach. I knew something of the mathematics of athletic improvement.

I called my physician’s office and made an appointment.

Memory

To drill us on multiplication tables, our second-grade math teacher played a record to which we chanted along. We may have walked in circles around the room as we recited. There may have been a tune. We were quizzed and we competed.

Besides the “times tables,” as we called them, the other great organizing tool that lodged with me forever was the terminology for dinosaurs. I was small and nearsighted, yet I knew my times tables by heart and could name the great beasts that would never come again.

The Body (2)

Doctors + tests. Times time. Or maybe time involves an f(x) situation.

I needed surgery in which five pathways for blood would be “bypassed.” Five was a discomfiting number. No one ever spoke of quintuple bypass. I had thought four was the highest number possible. (In the end, one of my arteries having conducted a self-repair by generating a new route for blood, the surgery became the common quadruple.)

Rather than stop my heart for the surgery, they kept it beating to minimize the risk of a dislodged bit of plaque causing a stroke. Despite this tactic, I had a minor stroke the day after surgery. It cost me a swatch of vision on my right side, for which my brain now provides what I refer to as “bad data.”

Sweet Algebra

I sped through math in middle school, especially in the year when, in a large open room, we labored independently through slender workbooks; we slipped quizzes from paper pockets hung on the walls, and our teachers scored them at their desks. Instruction to a group was occasional. More often, it was one-on-one. This was pre-algebra, then algebra.

It got harder in high school. I struggled through 11th-grade math, “analysis.” I was on course to take calculus my senior year, but my father, the math teacher, counseled against it. He said, “You’ll never need it.”

One college summer, I revisited manageable math. In the finished attic of my parents’ house, the shelves held a few math textbooks. I sought out equations I could manage using math I remembered. Summers in that attic space could be stiflingly hot, but, sprawled on the relatively cool attic floor, I found that solving for x was easier than figuring out what exactly I was doing with my college years.

The Body (3)

A nurse brought to my house a machine for measuring—and sending to some waiting system—my blood pressure, heart rate, and blood oxygen level. In this way, the numbers provided some measure of my recovery.

I didn’t rely on numbers alone to gauge my progress. I walked a little farther every day, made my stride more brisk, pushed myself harder on every incline. I thought of my stalled endurance on the treadmill. I remembered how my father would tell us runners to use our arms to drive our legs when we came to hills.

Significant Digits

My electric tea kettle has five temperature settings. Each button—“green tea,” “white tea,” “oolong,” “French press” (a process, not a tea), and “boil black tea” (how odd)—has an accompanying numeral, a temperature, ranging from the low of 175 to the peak of 212. Do I need to explain why this is my favorite household device?

By contrast, the thermostat—on the dining room wall, close to the front door—is, if not a liar, at least an unreliable narrator. The display tells you nothing of the true state of things; you must apply judgment. Those numbers don’t account for the warming light from windows, air leaking from around doors or flowing down the stairs, how the day’s humidity has penetrated the walls, whether or not you’ve just come in from outside. You have to take stock of the air moving over your arms and face; you have to feel how you feel.

The app on my phone for outdoor temperature at least acknowledges this problem. The “Feels Like” category concedes that the value lies in the experience rather than the digits. Sun and shade; the shifting wind; the ground holding heat.

The Body (4)

Three times a week, I drove a few miles to the rehab facility on the other side of the city. The hours spent there involved a sequence of machines—rowing, biking, mimicking cross-country skiing, treadmill walking. The number to bear in mind was heartrate, and the monitor I wore sent those numbers to the nurses’ station. Sometimes, usually on the rowing machine, a voice called out to me to ease off.

When you had finished, you couldn’t leave the facility until your heart had returned to a resting rate. I sat in a line of chairs with others who had completed their sessions.

One guy about my age, but with more physical issues, regularly bantered with the nurse about what he wouldn’t change: what he drank, what he ate, how he treated his body. He spoke with great affection of bacon. In the rehab session, he did the exercises he was told to do. But at home, he couldn’t bring himself to fight mortality the way the health professionals wanted.

There are numerals with which we negotiate, digits and sequences and just plain facts that should ground us but which we suspect don’t represent reality. Is that the hour? When did I eat? How did it get so late? Can my children really be so old? This feels nothing like June.

Telling

I got maybe a third of the way through James Gleich’s book on chaos; I stopped when there were too many vectors of motion, too many dimensions, too much going on for me to picture. My tenth-grade geometry teacher would illustrate spatial relationships among shapes by balancing a piece of paper on one finger and holding another piece of paper above it or turning it so the pages intersected. Sometimes he brought a pencil into the fray. That level of complexity was about the limit of what I could visualize.

When I’m working on a short story, I print out the pages to see whether the scenes are balanced. Have the characters spent too long in one place? Does a description or section of dialogue look paltry or overlong? I reread everything many times—hearing the sentences in my head and saying them aloud—but I also rely on how things look, where the weight lies, where to let in the light, where to shut things down.

Isn’t a story itself a kind of mathematical construct? One moment on another moment. One word amplifying others. Sentence after sentence. Image upon image. But it’s never mere addition. Neither is it multiplication. Then there’s whatever the reader does, the physics and chemistry of that interaction. Readers bring their particular sensations and associations; they bring memories stored behind the eyes or in the fingers.

The math is too much; it’s math upon math. But I don’t have to picture all that.

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This is William Preston’s first appearance in Analog, and he’s delighted to connect with this readership. His work frequently appears in Asimov’s Science Fiction, and five of his connected stories have been collected in A Work of Human Hands, a paperback available through Amazon. A retired teacher, he reads, writes, walks, and tends the plants surrounding his house (That isn’t meant to sound threatening . . . ) in Syracuse, New York.