Read Online The Devil's Dream: Book One by David Beers - Free Book Online Page A

his brain to actually start moving. I don't know about
that and I don't really care what anyone thinks. I was just pissed
that he was going to take my class and not put in the same effort
everyone else was. That's what I cared about. Effort. When he looked
up from that computer though, I wouldn't have said it then and I
wouldn't have said it for years after, but I guess at eighty-plus I
can. I was scared. It looked like someone had turned on a nuclear
reactor inside his head, like the heat of the sun was coming through
his eyes. He wasn't going to fail out of college, as lazy as people
said he was, I didn't think he'd simply sit there on his computer
knowing he would be front page news when they kicked him out of Yale.
No, I thought he would participate, I just didn't know what it
meant."
    The
class was eighteen weeks long, an hour and a half on Tuesday and
Thursday.
    Matthew
Brand left his computer at home for only that class, showing up with
his hands swinging, not holding pencil or paper. Apparently he didn't
need them.
    "I
started the class as I did every time I had taught it before. I
didn't understand then that I would never teach it again."
    It
was an eighteen-week class in which Matthew began as meekly as a
single wave against a vast beach. He asked if he could come to the
board.
    "Said
he had a question about the previous class' assignment."
    He
built out the problem across the large board while everyone watched.
Ten years younger than anyone else in the class, and mentally
remembering every number, letter, and symbol used for a problem that
contained over one hundred steps. When he got to the answer, he asked
Dr. Watson if it was correct.
    "I
told him it was. I was pretty amazed at what he did. No one else in
that room could have laid out the problem as quickly and simply as he
did."
    Matthew
told him no, the answer was incorrect, and he hoped by the end of the
semester, Dr. Watson would see it.
    "I
laughed right out loud at him. I understood he was smart and I had
just seen what he was capable of, but to say that basically an entire
field of mathematics was wrong? That would be like me telling you
that your belief in the earth revolving around the sun was
misplaced."
    It
was eighteen weeks of the most intense brain power anyone in the
class had ever seen. All of them, including Dr. Watson, struggled to
keep up. Every class period Watson would send them away with work and
so would Brand. Brand's became necessary because in discussing
Watson's homework, they always had to bring in the antithesis that
was Brand's work.
    A
classmate of Brand's told me "it was like unlearning English and
then learning it again, except instead of the alphabet we were using
grains of sand."
    He
tore down the field Dr. Watson loved, right in front of his face.
    "There
wasn't anything I could do. I'd stare at the work he put on the
board, and I'd study it, and then I'd tell him I'd get back to him at
the next class. I studied it for hours over the next few days,
searching every database I could, consulting other professors. I mean
literally not sleeping. And in the end, I'd show back up at class and
say let's continue. He was morphing mathematics in front of my eyes.
Changing it from what I believed to be true, what I was taught for
thirty years, into something similar but with stark differences that
mattered. With differences that were supposed to be there and somehow
the rest of the world had missed them. It was, it is, the most
beautiful thing I've ever seen."
    Jerome
Watson was dry eyed when he said those words to me but he looked out
into some space that existed beyond his wall, talking to himself as
well as me, and remembering all those years back when he watched an
eighteen year old kid stand up from his seat and change the course of
mathematics in a few hours. Dr. Watson never taught the class again,
and within three years, no one else ever taught that class either
because it no longer existed. The whole field of Complex