When John Horton Conway, the Princeton “mathemagician” who died in April at age 82, first found fame in the late 1960s and early ’70s, he joined the academic equivalent of the jet set. Then at the University of Cambridge, he would fly to Montreal or New York, deliver a lecture on his Conway group — an entity in the realm of mathematical symmetry that inhabits 24 dimensions — and return home all within the space of a day.
Occasionally, he made a detour to visit Martin Gardner, the mathematical games columnist for Scientific American, at his house in Hastings-on-Hudson, just north of New York. Mr. Gardner taught him magic tricks: Try tying a knot while holding onto both ends of the string, without ever letting go. Dr. Conway, in turn, regaled Mr. Gardner with puzzles and games — Sprouts, for instance, a pencil-and-paper game he had invented with Michael Paterson, a grad student, and which quickly charmed the entire math department, administrative staff included.
By the time production returns to something approximating normal, the pandemic, or the worst of it, will have passed or at least paused. How will it be treated, or will it be treated, when many will just want to look forward? Will we write it out of history, as if nothing had ever happened or might happen again, to return to the old order — the usual business of cops and robbers, comical family dysfunction and medical conditions doctors can fix in an hour? Or will it take the virus more seriously in retrospect than many seem willing to do now as it ricochets around us?
A decade ago, my father, Terry Lee, found a wooden sign behind our cottage’s boathouse. He guessed it had once hung above the door, naming this Ontario lakeside property: Brynmorwydd. Dad, who grew up in Cardiff and emigrated to Canada in the 1970s, knew right away it was Welsh. But the cottage, which originally belonged to my stepmother’s family, was actually an exercise in Canadianness for my dad, who isn’t exactly handy with canoes or campfires. I don’t suppose he ever anticipated that it would draw him back to Wales, but some weeks later he spotted the name of the cottage’s first owner stamped on one of its beams: John G Bolt.
Stephen Johnson ends this thrilling study of Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No 8, and much else besides, with a quotation attributed to Beethoven, of which Oscar Wilde would have approved: “Sometimes the opposite is also true.” The legends attaching to Mahler’s life, especially in the final years, are treasured by lovers of Mahler the Titan, and woe betide anyone daring to question them. But Johnson, one of the finest contemporary musicologists, is also a demythologiser of the gentler sort, and all the more persuasive for it.
I went out to the balcony
for the stars;
in the depth of the winter
neons of a belated new year