20 - An Insipid Prize

Kazantzis whose entire professional life was devoted to teaching maths with remarkable intensity and passion, inspired me more with the ingenuity, sharpness and acuteness of his brain than the undisputable breadth and depth of mathematical knowledge in his possession. I would have been unable to grasp a chunk of the latter without becoming myself a mathematician, which was not on the table and my career plans. On occasions, subtly encouraged me in that direction: by posing complex problems, which before I even had the time to comprehend its structure and formulation and begin to develop of response, being generally considered slow-witted, he promptly presented the solution himself –with a cigarette permanently between the fingers of his left hand. And he formulated it within minutes in the excellent calligraphy that distinguished him, either with a gold-plated Parker on a white sheet of paper that he laid on his imposing mahogany desk, or on the blackboard in an empty classroom, where I stood beside him. I envied his mathematical brain and tried in vain to emulate his quick and methodical thinking process. Hundreds of problems passed before me, with the crafting of their solutions inflicting considerable mental torture, would serve no practical purpose whatsoever –at least in real life beyond school. They were mostly pickings from Kazantzis' books: the ‘Functions’, the polytomous ‘Algebra’, the ‘Number Theory’, the ‘Polynomials’, and so on, which filled an entire shelf of my bookcase. He was a proliferate author of mathematical textbooks and he duly appreciated me buying his oeuvre and, perhaps, felt flattered seeing his model-student with another of his books, well-read, with main points underlined, marginalia scrawled across pages, and worn out from studying. He often rushed to forewarn me for errors I would spot in those books –and there were plenty: ‘I already made a note of those; they will be corrected in the next edition!’, he would add. With admirable perseverance and tenacity, unprecedented levels of concentration, and the organization and method in studying, attributes I prided myself on, I managed to tame most of their content. The lack of great cognitive processing speed and agility was counter-balanced by perseverance and depth in thought, in proportion to the knowledge I had accumulated from hard study. For that nebulous ‘someone’ in science and engineering I was aspiring to become that maths was more than enough; in fact, superfluous by most professional standards.

The inspiration from Mr. Kazantzis led to some modest success, albeit at national level, in mathematics of course, in that last year of school and adolescence. It now looks as an insignificant dot from the time gap of decades, but it then solidified temporarily an always fragile self-confidence; it even inflated an otherwise skillfully suppressed and hidden ego. It led me to believe in a kind of potential at that threshold of life proper. Delving into the maths itself and study them in depth, as I did for two years thanks to Kazantzis, by a person who was by no means a prodigy, if anything else, formed a hardworking and persistent character, unyielding in the face of problems of any kind, which first and foremost require patience and exhaustive analytical processing, before a final solution is reached. People who can spend hours and even days grappling with a difficult mathematical problem display no less tenacity when confronted with complex situations of a different kind.

In the final year of my high school studies, I was awarded the second national prize in the low-profile and barely publicized annual competition of the Hellenic Mathematical Society. It spread the wings of confidence in mathematics and life beyond. It was unexpected and I felt, based on my own perception of my performance in the competition, a simple commendation would be more appropriate. I suspected Kazantzis, an active and prominent member of the Mathematical Society had a hand in all this, a terrible thought which I struggled not to entertain. Despite my doubts about whether I truly deserved such an accolade, I was basking for days and months in that familiar feeling of self-pride in more or less to everyone at such moments in life for an apparent talent and worth recognized beyond the narrow boundaries of school or the suffocating family environment. I did not boast but Kazantzis did, and surprisingly my parents ignored it: Mother did not understand what it was all about, whilst for both it was seen as a distraction ahead of the university exams.

My school, of course, remained nonchalant to the news. For most teachers it meant nothing; they had no contribution in the small yet nationwide success of one of their students. The teaching profession and employment in the high-school system was no more than at day-to-day job to make a living; it was the routine work of a civil servant. I did not expect any congratulatory mention and recognition in front of the school assembly, neither did I desire it, because of the modest and extremely reserved character. Nevertheless, in the manner of Mr. Notarides, the somehow dignified Mathematics teacher of my last years in Lyceum, I often discerned smiles of approval, perhaps even a recognition and maybe a slight admiration for that achievement. But Mr. Notarides, who imposed himself on an unruly class more by his portly figure than by a gift in teaching maths, was the most relevant to what was all about amongst the ragtag of teachers, and held me in high esteem: I could see it in his eyes when he was seeking a deliverance from the torment of a teacher in front of a non-responsive and indifferent class. Mr. Notarides’ implicit praise I sensed was a scant reward for the support I reluctantly contributed to his uninspiring teachings.

My imagination for its part, still immature as much as vivid, was weaving dreams of broad recognition and fame, gazing at the peaks of mathematics and science, involving the establishment of an own magna theory, attaching my name to at least a theorem and its elegant proof, even the solving of a hitherto unsolved theoretical problem that tormented, if not humanity, the circles of prestigious mathematical intellects. Where were those naïve thought and preposterous ideas rooted? The world of science and mathematics seemed vast in its diversity of domains and disciplines, while I only had a blurred picture through the small loopholes presented to me in the few books I studied here and there, usually school and tutorial textbooks: from Father's bookcase, and whatever interesting ‘aid’ the eye caught in bookstores of Thessaloniki. With the few mathematical tools and knowledge acquired, and indeed consolidated to a basic level, I endeavored lame-crookedly, but with intellectual effort of commendable perseverance as much as vanity, as in some afternoons of earlier yeas when I was trying to understand and naively expand theories of modern Physics, to prove Fermat's famous theorem that tormented the minds of great mathematicians for centuries. To no avail, of course, here too, as with particle physics some time back, despite the dozens of false starts and pages of scribbled notes with symbols and equations that filled the floor of my room. Whom did I think I become after that low-key award?

Not much fuss, not a single announcement about the Mathematical Society's award at the school assembly or class was made, thankfully for the shy and modest character who trembled in front of and amongst people. The praise and the smiles and the friendly pats on the back came less from the family environment than Kazantzis himself, who showed more pride than close relatives. And his praise counted the most given the great mathematician he was. Possibly he considered himself the mastermind behind my success, which was unprecedented for a student of his small tutoring school. The wings the prize spread would not take long to be clipped, at least partially, and for me to land onto realistic levels of self-awareness and self-esteem, and become again rational and level-headed vis a vis my mathematical genius. The illusions a young man, perhaps justifiably, cultivates around himself for success and glory in his life and the self-centered thoughts he harbors about a special and gifted personality, talent and intellect, would soon be suppressed. The narcissism that followed this and a similar minor success in the university entry exams was henceforth exhausted in temporary reflections of the self with consciousness, on the four walls of my room, without much resonance outside those walls. But that prize had somehow shielded my ego for the battles in the arenas of adult life.

Eight of us, the Society's awardees, eight ‘mathematical talents’ so to speak who excelled in that year's competition, would represent the country at the annual International Mathematical Olympiad, which in July 1981, after the most welcome end of high school studies, ahead of university enrolment and the enticing student life (or the beginning of ‘academic’ life, as my parents liked to put it), in Washington DC. For me, a lonely person for the best part of those years, with a non-existent social life and intimate friendships and especially female ones, a teenager starved of the experiences and sensations of love often the butt of tasteless jokes by the two or three bullies in the class, who had spotted and sneered at my ‘virginity’ (or incel as called today) and the pimples of my face, which their theory went had no other cause than systematic masturbation in my room or a seedy cinema auditorium, the anticipation a trip to America and the student life that would immediately follow flooded my being with enthusiasm and a longing for the future, for after school life. It was state of an unprecedented bliss, beyond and above the school routine I would soon leave behind, once and for all, as a thankless and gray and depressing part of life. I drew little satisfaction from the thought that many of my schoolmates who mocked my social isolation and celibacy might feel a little envy, now that the chains of school would be shaken off, as they would face up to a future of different and less attractive prospects.

That poor country, my homeland, still held a small, albeit shrinking place in my heart. The rare distinctions of Greek athletes and teams in international competitions still stirred some patriotic emotions of pride, and that country, with its scarce means, would pay for our Olympic Airways' tickets to New York. The expectations of the few, who had a concept of what this international competition was all about, were low from the onset, and the publicity our participation received non-existent: taking part in the so-called Mathematical Olympiad was a small internal affair of the insular family of the Mathematical Society, comprising a sub-section of maths teachers, along with some hobbyists and dilettantes of mathematics with a residual passion for the subject. The school, as long as it was not yet formally finished, kept its distance from my participation in that unknown international arena, indifferent to any kind of individual distinction -no matter how small or large. The reasons were various and explicable. The root causes were to be found: in the structure of the educational system and its chronic inability to inspire and mold talented students and even identify their talents and inclinations; in the body of generally mediocre and unqualified teachers, a homogeneous and amorphous body, which they viewed their profession through the prism of civil servant. With a unity in purpose and an unambiguous direction, and a disclaimer of responsibility for poor results without accountability or assessment, they had undertaken to teach to the letter, in the predetermined period of time of the school year, a predetermined syllabus bureaucratically dictated by the ministry. Those teachers, with a few exceptions, could well and perhaps have preferred to teach in half-empty classrooms, spared from the ordeal of ill-discipline from the bulk of unruly and inattentive teenage students. The indifference was mutual. A plethora of tutoring centers and private schools, those para-education establishments, had undertaken (with the accountability that the parents who paid tuition fees would demand) the assimilation of this exam material in every possible way and its implantation in young minds, mechanically and with over-the-odds intensity. A substantial and valuable education of young people was of secondary importance.