But I was distracted, unable to tear my gaze away from his t-shirt, which proclaimed: ‘I believe in mathematics‘. Noticing my catatonic stare, he smiled, introduced himself as a scholar, and explained that his girlfriend, an Indian fellow student, had designed and printed a pair of jerseys, one of which he was now proudly sporting.
‘And are you convinced?’ I asked tentatively. ‘Totally,’ he replied. ‘But if you wait for a bit, you can ask my girlfriend about it. She explains it best.’ I thanked him but excused myself.
‘Numbers are everywhere’, he purposefully ventured. ‘Wait till you see the paintings. They’re full of them.’
I had forgotten about this encounter until a fortnight ago, when my attention was arrested by not one, but sundry, pronouncements emanating from the mouths and keystrokes of new-age CEOs, investment gurus, crypto-evangelists, and the like, whose unerring belief in the truth, science and power of numbers left no room for doubt.
One VC – gently misquoting Galileo in the inspired belief that AI is a manifestation of divine intelligence – stated that mathematics, ‘the language of gods’, talked to him more clearly and compellingly than any corporate leader. Moreover, both ‘success and upcoming failures hid in the stories of numbers’, proving that these numerals were beyond the scope of human interference or manipulation. And yet, when I had originally read that ‘mathematics [was] the language in which god [had] written the universe’, I had thought that Galileo only meant that mathematics helped to measure and decipher natural phenomena more accurately than any other human tool. I was chastened.Obviously, the scientist’s limited Italian intelligence seemed unwilling to extend agency to numbers themselves, even sedulously avoiding the dire warnings concealed in his astronomical calculations. I now wonder if this lack of faith may have been the reason why, despite his extraordinary genius, he misjudged the intentions of the Church and remained under house arrest for the last decade of his life.
The founder of an Indian unicorn provided another startling admission. With a certainty lacking in the nebulous prophecies of Nostradamus, he compared 1885-1914 with 2015-2034. As morning shows the day, the two periods were, he said, destined to be eras of great productivity on account of inventions, entrepreneurs and political leaders. The internal combustion engine, electricity, the gold standard, Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, JP Morgan, Mahatma Gandhi, and Teddy Roosevelt in the former period were natural harbingers of AI, while autonomous vehicles, space travel, bitcoin, Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Modi, and Trump in the latter.
Even more eye-opening was his deductive inference, using an inductive technique, to prove that since there were some 2 trillion galaxies, containing many trillion times that number of planets, not only was it certain that life-forms existed elsewhere, but it was equally likely that these sentient beings were avidly reading, deleting, forwarding and loving his messages like his office minions.
It was this procession of revelations which vividly recall that fateful California day when the leaves were turning brown. Inside the museum cafe, I happened upon the scholar and his partner, who decided to query my scepticism.
‘Do you not believe in mathematics?’
‘Only in so much,’ I weighed my words carefully, ‘that they are a human convention, meant for representation, calculation, and estimation.’
‘Oh!’
‘Both the astrologer and the astronomer can be adept in this regard. But only one of them is a scientist,’ I insisted.
‘In this, I tend to agree with you,’ she said.
Her boyfriend took that as his cue to break the news that he had proposed to her that very morning.
‘Congratulations,’ I said. ‘When’s the big day?’
‘We don’t know yet,’ she said. ‘I first need to consult the numerologist.’
