It’s Prime Time
I have been studying primes between readings of Portuguese prose poetry.
How could anyone, angel or fretting mortal, write something so exquisite as Fernando Pessoa’s The Book of Disquiet? How could anyone conceive of something so lonely as a prime number, islands of the numerical world, severed from their fellows by a nimble but unfeeling hand?
From prime factorization to least common multiples, I have been ruminating a lot on the power of a good prime and what I will do when I am further along in my mathematical journey. It is difficult to avoid getting overexcited. I bounce back and forth between the words from Euclid, pretending that at this stage I understand the distribution of these primes in the Riemman Hypothesis. It is invigorating, thinking about what I will someday carry around in my frontal lobe like a valise full of fine and exotic fabrics of fractals and linear algebra.
But for the present, I am become a collision of poetry and the nebulous world of primes. The Book of Disquiet has wrapped around my stupefied soul, and I thought, and I think, “O my discordant heart! How can I write anything of this magnitude when I am but one person?!” Maybe the solution to understanding Pessoa and to understanding mathematics is to become more than myself.
First, there is Van Hinson Rivas, and she is all bird bones, pigeon feathers, Tibetan textbooks, photographs of Northern Lights, paeans for the fish trapped in small tanks. Van is calculus, dynamic and twirling around several foundational thrusts at numeracy, from algebra to trigonometry.
Next there is Magdalena Paredes, who is crochet needles, seashells, the color maroon, old wallets, tiger lilies. Magdalena is supremely logical, speaks Italian, and does not equivocate or falter in the face of discrete mathematics. She thinks in binaries. When she reads Pessoa, she chews the inside of her cheek.
Finally, there is the girl who understands all there is to know about primes from an advanced mathematical eye. Let us call her Esperanza Saavedra. Hope. Waiting. She is leather-scented candles, sapphire rings, harmonicas, whiskey with orange peels, and winged stallions. Esperanza is the patron saint of pure mathematics, the queen with the secret to numbers nestled in the corner of her eyes with her tears.
I could be more than one.
But primes — they can only be the one. Single, unified personalities. Their DNA is taut, lined soldiers punching with one fist, thinking with one thought. I think this is why I find primes lonely, like fish in their tanks. I could write a eulogy for the prime left out in the blizzard with ice frozen in its sleepy veins. But for now? For now I will alight with the sensation of doing math, one tentative step at a time.
