The mathematics of chocolate

This is a small speculative story about reputation and how that might grow. It was written before the advent of social media, which makes it somehow more relevant.

His lectures on the mathematics of chocolate bars went down a storm with his students. They had, they told him, shone a light into areas of differential calculus that they would otherwise have ignored, and that, as he knew, would have made it difficult for them to make progress in the numerical world that they would have to confront at some time or other.

The lectures became a recognised part of his repertoire. At 27, they made him an assistant professor, and then one of the red-top newspapers found out about them. They made fun of the idea of course. He became to them, ‘Professor Curly-Wurly’, but after a while, after their questions were answered very straightforwardly by him, they began to ignore him.

“Sometimes, it helps to illustrate complex problems by applying them to everyday items,” he said. “It helps to make the complexity understandable.” He was no fun. Comments like these reflected badly on the papers’ position in society.

A more respectable paper gave him a Saturday column. He was a guest on a radio programme where the public asked politicians and others about issues of the moment. He was asked about the likelihood of dying from bird flu.

“Life is a dangerous business,” he told them. “Here we are on a mysterious, ball-shaped contraption, hurtling through space, with no control and very little understanding. Yet we take to the air in heavy machines. We cross roads where lumps of metal whizz by. We overdose ourselves with drugs from bottles labelled ‘wine’ or ‘beer’. In that context, to worry about a mathematically improbable cause of our demise seems strange.”

He did not receive the customary round of applause, which was usually given to special guests. Instead, the audience looked thoughtful.

But soon, there were those who approached him in steadily increasing numbers, looking for insights, looking for certainty. “I have none to give you,” he said, “Though perhaps we should think more about the consequences of our actions.”

He told them stories to illustrate how our lives should be more simple if we wished to avoid problems like global warming and food shortages, about how economic differences helped to contribute to wars and terror, about how our basic desire was for fairness in a world which was randomly heartless, about how each of us could help to make a difference and make life livable, at least for some of the more fortunate.

In response to their money, which they sent without his asking, he founded a charity to promote education in mathematics.

His personal life was a mess. Sometimes he was seen in public with an African woman, from the Congo, who had survived a gang rape in her own country, who had been educated at the University where he taught and was now prominent among those seeking to unravel the damage wrought in her country. On other occasions, he was accompanied by an actress, rather older than him, who was noted only for her vacuousness and a liking for cosmetic surgery. At his insistence, she toured Africa, and her career reinvigorated itself. He was photographed accompanying a prostitute. He admitted a liking for pornography.

All the while, his stock was rising.

An American president sought a brief meeting with him and recounted how his son who had previously found math a difficult subject, had been enraptured by the chocolate analogy.

He was invited to join a parliamentary enquiry into educational standards. He published a rather odd book – part psychology and part popular mathematics – which surprisingly sold in millions.

But as his celebrity increased, so his life became more reclusive. He was, so they said, afraid to leave his house in daylight. He had his telephone disconnected. He communicated by email and text message.

His death was shrouded in mystery. Unusually, he had ventured out in his car, apparently to meet a celebrity media owner, who had wanted to offer him a contract for a television series. On his way home, a tourist coach hit his car and tipped it down a steep incline near a well-known beauty spot. He had been driving erratically. Whether he had been drunk or drugged was never revealed.

After he died, a few prominent people who had known him talked of strange happenings when he had been alive.

They claimed to have seen him walking across a swollen river near his home. (He was, possibly, simply walking on the bank where the water had washed over.) They said that they had seen him impossibly revive a dead man. (He had actually given the kiss of life to a student who had jumped into the river from a bridge when drunk).

Most curiously of all, one past friend claimed to have met him, walking up the path to the friend’s house, after he had died. (For that, there was no explanation, though the past friend had been moved by the death and was known to use recreational drugs.)

Academics wrote about his economic doctrine, which, simply put, instructed those who had more money, to think about what they could do for those less fortunate, and which argued also that ways of limiting the size of human populations should be sought.

For a while, his memory was the subject of a personality cult. Its members claimed that he had not died at all. They shared chocolate bars, which they said, mysteriously, were his body.