The Last Samurai

The consul looked at Pete. If you are a consul people are constantly spinning you ridiculous stories and expecting you to believe them, but this was the most ridiculous he had ever heard. He said correctly: If he is a Brazilian national I’m afraid there is nothing—

Sorabji said: You. Stupid. Ignorant. Bureaucrat.

And he said: Newton is sitting in this cell. If I leave they will kill him. I shall not leave this place unless he goes with me.

But what exactly do you think I can—

Sorabji said: Do you have a piece of paper?

He was handed a piece of paper and a pen, and he wrote on it

1+2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9+10+11+12+13+14+15+16+17+18+19+20

and he said: How long do you think it would take you to add it up?

The consul hesitated—

That boy, said Sorabji very gravely, can add all the numbers between 1 and 500 in 20 seconds.

The consul said: Hm.

Sorabji was a Zoroastrian but he was not much of a believer, and he had been to chapel a lot at school but he believed even less in that, and yet he found himself saying Please Please Please Please. Please let him not know about Gauss please please please please please.

Because Sorabji had taught Pete a trick that the great mathematician Gauss had discovered at the age of 8:

Suppose you want to add 1+2+3+4+5

Add the sequence to itself backwards: 5+4+3+2+1

The sum of each pair is the same: 6+6+6+6+6

But that’s easy to work out! It’s just 5 × 6, or 30.

So the sum of the first sequence is just 30 divided by 2, or 15!

If the sequence went up to 6, each pair would add up to 7, so the sum would be 6 × 7 ÷ 2, or 21; if the sequence went to 7, the sum would be 7 × 8 ÷ 2 = 28. If the sequence went up to 500 the sum would be half of 500 × 501: 250,500 ÷ 2 = 125,250. Easy.

The consul was still staring at the piece of paper.

He said: But how’s that possible?

Sorabji said: Look, don’t take my word for it. Take him up to the office. Write down a sum, all the numbers between 1 and 257, 1 and 366, whatever you choose. He doesn’t know how to use a pen, you’ll have to spread some dirt on the floor for him to write on. Give him the problem and time him and then work it out on a calculator.

The consul said: Well …

He went off to speak to the head of police. It is not standard practice in the Brazilian system of justice to release convicts who can add all the numbers between 1 and 500 in 20 seconds, but all the same there was something very strange about it and the head of police said he would like to see it. So Pete was brought up from the cell.

After a little conferring they decided to try him on 30. The consul wrote out the sum on a piece of paper, and a little dirt was brought in and spread on the floor, and the piece of paper was handed to Pete. 30 times 31 is 930 divided by 2 is 465 and he squatted down and wrote 465 in the dirt while the chief of police was punching 17 into his calculator. The chief of police got up to 30. 465 appeared on the display.

The chief of police and the consul stared at the boy, and their eyes got wider, and wider, and wider.

They tried 57, and 92, and 149, and each time the same thing happened. The boy wrote a number in the dirt, and a very long time later the same number would appear on the display of the calculator.

The consul looked at the boy, and he remembered the great Indian mathematician Ramanujan. He called Sorabji’s supervisor in Cambridge and received confirmation that the brilliant young astronomer had disappeared en route to a conference in Chile six months before. He hung up the phone, and he explained to the chief of police that Sorabji was a brilliant eccentric scientist. That was why he had turned up in the jungle wearing a loincloth. The boy was his pupil. The chief of police looked at him steadily. The consul made polite but firm enquiries as to the precise nature of the charges. The chief of police looked at him steadily.

Accounts differ as to what happened next.

The numbers were the only thing that Pete could understand in the proceedings, and he later said that he remembered doing the sum of numbers between 1 and 30, and the numbers between 1 and 57, and 1 and 92, and 1 and 149, and he remembered five bundles of notes with the number 10,000 changing hands.

The consul maintained that there had been absolutely no irregularity of any kind, the F.O. had extremely clear guidelines on bribery, he had made a call to Britain to speak with Sorabji’s supervisor and had naturally reimbursed the chief of police for the cost of the call, and he had also authorised the purchase of clothes for which he had reimbursed the chief of police and for which he had a receipt.

The chief of police confirmed this story.

Whatever the truth of the matter, Sorabji returned to Britain and sold the story to the papers and got a TV deal and Pete went to Caltech and learned English and eventually developed an interest in physics, and he was reunited with Sorabji for the production of Mathematics the Universal Language.