The Goddess of Small Victories (51 page)

Anna had always believed in justice, order. For a time, she had thought that her mission on earth was to recover those papers. Adele had accepted her own mission: her God had created her to keep a certain genius from slipping away before his time. She had been compost for the sublime: the flesh, blood, hairs, and shit without which the mind cannot exist. She had been the necessary but not the sufficient condition; she had consented to be a link: forever the nice, fat, uneducated Austrian woman.

Today, Anna would have liked to tell her that she was wrong: in the continuum of dissolved bodies and forgotten souls, one life was worth another. We are all links. No one has a mission. Adele had loved Kurt; nothing was more important.

Her office didn’t smell musty, as she’d feared. “People” had aired it out and even brought in a green plant with a card: “Be well, Calvin Adams.” She was surprised at this mark of attention: at best, she had expected a final warning shot across her bow. She looked defiantly at the tray overflowing with messages. She preferred to start with the letter. She installed herself unhurriedly at her desk after having made herself a cup of tea. She sniffed the paper and imagined a hint of lavender coming from it. She repressed the welling of emotion; Adele wouldn’t have condoned her tears.

Dearest Anna
,

I leave Kurt Gödel’s Nachlass to the Institute. I never considered doing any different. I have asked Elizabeth to have those crates delivered FROM YOU to the director of the IAS. It is not a
present, and you are not in any way to take it as such! There is a time for everything, Anna: a time to hide in books and a time to live
.

You gave me a great deal more than you could have hoped for even. My last thoughts will be for all the wonderful things that still lie ahead of you, and not for all those that I should be regretting. I wish you a magnificent life
.

Your own Adele Thusnelda Gödel

The handwriting was firm, the letters deeply incised, but after the signature she had added a more spontaneous postscript, in which Anna felt her corporeal presence: “
Vergessen Sie nicht zu lächeln, Mädel!
” Don’t forget to smile, young lady!

Anna struggled to remove the complicated wrapping; Elizabeth was a very meticulous person. The package contained a pink flamingo made of battered cement. She laughed until the tears came. She set the bulky fowl on her desk, then upturned her handbag on the desktop. She didn’t have far to go to find it: Leo’s note was stuck as a bookmark in
The Aleph
, the book that had accompanied her on all her visits to Pine Run. She hadn’t finished it.

She unfolded the slip of paper; over a few lines of code, Leonard had scrawled some numbers in a bold hand, followed by “Insist, PLZ,” which was triply underlined. Anna looked out at the long, snow-covered lawn, mirroring the low, white sky.

Then she dialed Leo’s number, a series of digits without logical connection, but displaying perfect elegance.

Thanks to my love for having believed in this work long before I did. Thanks to my children for having (from time to time) allowed me the leisure to write. Thanks to my mother for having given me a taste for books. Thanks to my brother for having introduced me to the world of geeks.

Thanks to Cheryl and John Dawson for their tremendous work and infinite kindness. Thanks to Stephen C., my editor, for his confidence and his prodding. Thanks to Simon D. for his luminous explanations of the continuum hypothesis. Thanks to Anne S. for her support of this book since its fetal stages. Thanks to Maxime P. for his ready enthusiasm. Thanks to Philippe B. for his Ping-Pong table. Thanks to Emmanuelle T. for all our girl talk. Thanks to Dan and Dana K. for their light. Thanks to Marinela and Daniel P. for their good vibes. Thanks to Thérèse L. for her how-strong-you-are theory. Thanks to Axelle L. for having been such a lovely inflection point. Thanks to Tina G., Martina and Alex T., Aurélie U., Katherin K., and Christian T. for their Austrian and German translations. Thanks to all the math lovers on the Internet: without you this book would not have existed.

Thanks to Adele. I would have liked to meet you, Frau Gödel.

While this novel is primarily a work of fiction, I have made every effort, out of respect for the memory of Adele and Kurt Gödel, to be scrupulously faithful to the biographical, historical, and scientific facts available to me. Specialists will no doubt uncover inaccuracies, errors, and numberless oversimplifications.

This story is one truth among others: a knitting together of objective facts and subjective probabilities. Adele and Kurt truly lived on the same street in 1927. That they should have met there seems to me entirely plausible. That Adele seduced Kurt is obvious; that he gave her lessons in logic is much less so. That they shared an apple in bed is poetic license. That she was allowed to care for Kurt and meet with Morgenstern at the sanatorium is a supposition. That she fed him with a spoon is fact. That her mother-in-law was a gorgon is highly probable; that she encouraged Adele to marry her son is much less so. That Adele was pregnant at their wedding is pure invention, but that she rescued her husband on the steps of the university with her doughty umbrella is a true story. That they were cold and afraid on the Trans-Siberian railway seems logical. That Adele would have liked tempura in Japan is only natural, as who doesn’t? That the
logician complained about his trunk key being stolen has been reported by good Mrs. Frederick. That Pauli and Einstein were partial to Austrian cooking is a supposition, but the “Pauli effect” is well known in scientific circles; Adele’s soufflé could never have withstood it. That Einstein and Gödel walked daily arm-in-arm is historical fact. That the genius who discovered relativity suffered from excessive perspiration is equally so. All his biographers agree on his appetite for and coarseness toward the female sex, though they are more divided on his interest in the relativistic dishwasher. Those who are familiar with Einstein’s life will easily identify the quotations and aphorisms attributed to him. The naturalization scene has been told by Oskar Morgenstern himself. That his companions derided Gödel on the car ride home is a defensible conjecture. There is little documentation about Adele’s friendships, but sources suggest that Lili Kahler-Loewy was a very appealing person. Her friendship with Albert is incontrovertible. That Adele got angry with her husband is beyond challenge; the provocation was excessive. That Mr. Hulbeck was an odd bird and that he played the tom-tom is on record; that he disparaged Goethe and classical German culture seems consistent with the Dadaist position. Theolonius Jessup, on the other hand, is pure invention. Although. It is a fact that the Oppenheimers were persecuted by Senator McCarthy, and Albert Einstein was under surveillance; that Kurt Gödel would be tailed by the FBI is therefore highly probable. That the Gödels played games of thought transference is a true story. A biographer has related that the reclusive genius was approached by a film director. I chose to believe that it might have been Kubrick. That the young Paul Cohen came to the old master’s house to sip hot water is a narrative device. That the logician’s office door was slammed in his face is historical fact. That Gödel
died of hunger is regrettably true; that Adele was unwilling to hand over his archives is a gross distortion. She donated the
Nachlass
to the Institute for Advanced Study. It occupies approximately nine cubic yards of space. That they loved each other for more than fifty years strikes me as self-evident.

Anna Roth; redheaded Anna; Leonard, Calvin, and Virginia Adams; Pierre Sicozzi; Ernestine; Lieesa; Gladys, Jack; Rachel, George; and all the bit players are, however, purely fictional.

1.
To oversimplify scandalously: first-order logic is a formal mathematical language using propositions with predicates or variables linked by logical connectives (or operators) such as
and, or
and
if … then
. Logic combines “true” and “false” predicates to return a true or false deduction.

2.
Adapted from Ninon de Lenclos.

3.
In his doctoral dissertation, presented in 1929, Gödel proved the completeness of the first-order predicate calculus. Unlike his later incompleteness theorems, this finding supported Hilbert’s positivist program.

4.
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), the Vienna-born philosopher and logician, wrote one of the seminal works of twentieth-century philosophy:
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus
(1921).

5.
In 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt authorized the internment of tens of thousands of American citizens of Japanese, Italian, and German descent. The Alien Registration Act of 1940 required all alien residents of the United States age fourteen years or older to be registered and fingerprinted.

6.
“[Mathematics] is given to us in its entirety and does not change—unlike the Milky Way. That part of it of which we have a perfect view seems beautiful, suggesting harmony.” —Kurt Gödel

7.
Georg Cantor (1845–1918), the German mathematician, is best known as the inventor of set theory.

8.
A function (or “correspondence” between two sets) is bijective if it correlates each element of either set with exactly one element of the other.

9.
A quote from David Hilbert.

10.
A remark by the German mathematician and logician Leopold Kronecker (1823–1891), who disagreed with Cantor, in the context of hierarchical infinities.

11.
John Forbes Nash Jr. (b. 1928) is a mathematician and economist who won the 1994 Nobel Prize in economics for his 1950 dissertation on noncooperative games, a field opened by von Neumann and Morgenstern in 1944 with their
Theory of Games and Economic Behavior
. Nash suffered from schizophrenia. His story was popularized in the film
A Beautiful Mind
.

12.
Wolfgang Ernst Pauli (1900–1958) won the 1945 Nobel Prize in physics for his formulation of the exclusion principle in quantum mechanics. The principle states that no two fermions (particles like electrons or neutrinos) can be in the same place in the same quantum state.

13.
Bertrand Arthur William Russell (1872–1970), mathematician, logician, epistemologist, politician, and moralist, is considered one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century.

14.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) was a German philosopher, scientist, mathematician, diplomat, and lawyer. He established—in a tiny corner of his gigantic oeuvre—the foundations of integral and differential calculus.

15.
John von Neumann (1903–1957) made contributions to many areas of mathematics and physics—quantum mechanics, set theory, hydrodynamics, ballistics—as well as to economics and nuclear strategy. He was one of the fathers of modern computer science. He never
won the Nobel Prize. Von Neumann and Robert Oppenheimer were active participants in the Manhattan Project, which developed the first atomic bomb. It was tested on July 16, 1945, in the New Mexico desert. The next two “tests” were over Hiroshima on August 6 and Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. Coincidentally, von Neumann worked before the war as an assistant to the mathematician David Hilbert.

16.
Einstein won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1921 for his discovery of the photoelectric effect, not for his work on special or general relativity. He was nominated for the prize in ten of the preceding twelve years.

17.
Borrowed from David Hilbert.