Maverick Genius Read online

  LOWER SAXONY

  Till then Dyson was having a pretty good life. He had grown up in Winchester, an hour’s train ride southwest of London. Filled with Roman walls, medieval churches, and blocks of Tudor dwellings, the town was a museum. History dwelt down most streets. When the Danes pressed in upon the Saxons in the ninth century, the capital of England transferred temporarily to Winchester. The Gothic cathedral there, the longest in Britain, contains the bones of several kings and of Jane Austen.

  The Dyson household was upper-middle-class. His father, George Dyson, was a composer and conductor. His mother, Mildred Dyson, was a lawyer and ran a birth-control clinic. He ran music schools; she helped run a birth control clinic. They had two children, Alice and Freeman. Four servants smoothed difficulties: a cook, housekeeper, gardener, and nursemaid. A cottage on the southern coast near the Isle of Wight provided relief in warm weather. They made trips to Wales and France. The extended family was perfectly suited for a BBC or PBS docudrama: Aunt Dulcibella was one of the first women to pilot an aeroplane. Aunt Margaret was a nurse. Aunt Ruth won an Olympic silver medal in figure skating.4

  Freeman’s mother was forty-three at the time of his birth in 1923 and he came to view her more as a grandmother; his sister, Alice, seemed to be the mother. Mildred looked formidable but actually was kind. His father, though friendly, was a bit distant. For George Dyson, little Freeman was something to boast about: reading by the age of four and already doing mathematical puzzles. When the father was at a podium conducting an orchestra, the son could follow along in a musical score.

  With piercing eyes and aquiline nose, Freeman looked like a little wizard, and so he was, always doing or saying something clever. At the age of seven he was observed reading one of his father’s books, Arthur Eddington’s Space, Time and Gravitation. The son, who himself would later have professional things to say on these subjects, was drawn to a diagram depicting space along the horizontal axis and time along the vertical. Two additional crossed diagonal lines depicted the trajectory of light shooting forward and backward. These lines served to divide the universe into four quadrants: the “absolute future,” the “absolute past,” and two other parts called merely “elsewhere.” One day, as he was absorbing Eddington, the boy’s nanny asked the youngster the whereabouts of his sister. “Somewhere in the absolute elsewhere,” was his reply. Overhearing this, George sent a description of the encounter to Punch, the humor magazine, which later illustrated the affair in the form of a cartoon.5 The lad was already famous. When shown the cartoon, he didn’t think it was funny.

  At the age of eight Freeman was sent a few miles south to board at a school called Twyford. It was a common practice for children of his class to be farmed out like this, but he bitterly resented it. These were the worst years of his life, he later said.6 The headmaster was brutal, and the older boys loved to torture the younger ones. To make matters worse, because of academic overachievement Freeman had been advanced into classes with boys who were much older and bigger. His classmates were severe. The punishment for being smart was sandpaper scraped across skin. His refuge was the school library, where he encountered the adventure stories of Jules Verne and the novels of H. G. Wells.7 Besides serving as a retreat from the unpleasantness outside, these tales helped Freeman visualize the regions of outer space hinted at in Eddington’s diagrams. He began reading the encyclopedia, so his mental inventory extended to the mundane parts of the cosmos also.

  Then came Winchester College, one of England’s oldest boarding schools, what in the United States are called prep schools. Winchester School is sometimes deemed to be the best academic school in Britain (at least by those at Winchester itself). And since in the year of his entrance Freeman’s test scores had been at the top of the list, you might argue that he was something like the best schoolboy in Britain. Twyford School, proud of its star student, declared a holiday.8 The distinction and burden of being the smartest guy in the room began here.

  He spent the years from 1936 to 1941 at Winchester College. Since his father was head of the music staff, Freeman had really grown up there. He knew the hallways and grassy fields beyond. The central quadrangle and many of the buildings date to the fourteenth century when the institution was founded, and so it looks a lot like Harry Potter’s fictional Hogwarts School. Freeman had earned a “Scholar” designation, which allowed him to eat in a special dining hall where cutlery was laid out—Hogwarts style—on plain wooden tables dating from the 1600s.

  Freeman was helped along by an older boy, Frank Thompson. Frank relished poetry as much as he did. Frank loved medieval history, so Freeman did too. Frank studied Russian, so Freeman studied Russian.9 He also studied Latin, which was mandatory, and Greek. He dabbled in biology and considered a possible medical career. Because there was no course in physics, Freeman taught himself this subject using a textbook by Georg Joos. As a protest against compulsory Latin and soccer, he helped organize a science club.10

  Where did Freeman obtain his lifelong love of literature? In his chemistry class. Like the Robin Williams character in the movie Dead Poets Society, Freeman’s teacher, Eric James, oddly preferred to recite and passionately discuss poetry with the boys rather than stick to the accepted chemical curriculum.11 Thus, to Freeman’s everlasting delight, Wells’s and Verne’s adventurism was supplemented with the works of William Blake and T. S. Eliot.

  Winchester was particularly strong in mathematics under the direction of Clement Durell, and by the end of his stay Freeman was the regular prize winner. Best of the best. He spent his available prize money on math books, occupied his vacations solving math problems, and worshipped math heroes.

  Over one Christmas break, at the age of fifteen, he contented himself each day from morning to night with forging through the difficult textbook on differential calculus by Henry Piaggio, solving all 700 problems supplied by the author. Another book catching his fancy happened to be in Russian, so he (by then taking private tutoring in that language) made his own translation. Instead of going outside and playing like other boys, he practiced Russian verbs in order to learn equations, and to make a little money doing translations.12 He piled on additional mathematical tutoring from Daniel Pedoe, a teacher at Southampton University who weekly came up to Winchester.13

  For those that have it, an addiction to mathematics can be as difficult to overcome as an addiction to tobacco or alcohol. The logic of mathematics is different from most habits of mind. Few things in life are as pure and self-consistent. To many teenagers life appears messy and hopeless even without the onset of world war around the corner. The chesslike rigor of mathematics kept chaos at bay, at least temporarily.

  Freeman’s parents were worried. Mathematics was fine but there are other things in life. The world is a big place. His mother stressed the importance of friendship. Nothing in life is more important, she said, than sympathy for other people. He should keep that in mind.14 She much admired Goethe and commended Goethe’s large outlook on life—he was artist, scientist, diplomat.15 She told him Goethe’s story of Faust, the man who always had his nose in a book. Faust not only became bored with life but was cut off from all human companionship.

  She needn’t have worried. Freeman was shy but not a loner. Most boys liked him. His best friend was James Lighthill, who later became prominent in mathematics and aeronautics. They shared a love of advanced mathematics and together worked through the pages of a famous textbook, Cours d’Analyse, by Camille Jordan. They were less enthusiastic about a rival comprehensive classic, the Principia Mathematica, by Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, which they felt to be pedantic.16 Freeman went so far as to write notes into the margin commenting upon or even “correcting” the text here and there. These juvenile scratchings were still there when, seventy years later, Dyson was handed the book off the shelf during a tour of Winchester College.17

  A tradition at Winchester was the keeping of a logbook, “Chamber Annals,” in which boys could write comments about other boys. In
these pages are enshrined some of the earliest documentary evidence of Dyson’s personality, and it is evident that much of what we see later in the man is present already in the boy. For example, Dyson (then aged fourteen) was said to be a musical genius. He despised authority. Even allowing for sarcasm, the comments about Dyson (aged fifteen) were respectful: “He has never been known to fail at anything.” “His life is monotonously regulated.” Dyson (aged sixteen) “works standing, sometimes for hours, deep in thought.” “He will argue most opinionatedly, but without losing his temper.” “He is a vigorous controversialist with a gift for opposing for the sake of opposing.”18

  Dyson played the violin in some school performances. He became prefect of libraries. He was scrawny of build but fast of foot. At one track meet in 1938 he won at several distances and took the steeplechase events. In 1941 he acted in Elmer Rice’s play Judgment Day. In 1941 he also won an award for a scientific essay. His writing talent began to emerge here alongside his mathematical ability. In English literature he came in third in 1940 and second in 1941.19

  The Second World War began in 1939, and Dyson’s anxiety intensified. What good were mathematics and all the other acquirements if you were going to die? Young Dyson went on passing through the school’s war memorial, with its 500 names of Winchester boys lost in the First World War.20 The graduates of 1914, 1915, and 1916—eighty boys each year—had largely perished in the mud in France or Flanders or at Gallipoli.

  Dyson was haunted by the case of the mathematician Evariste Galois (1811–1832). Galois founded group theory and proved that you cannot trisect an angle or square a circle with a compass and ruler alone. He did all this before he died in a duel at the age of twenty. The night before the duel, as if sensing his coming annihilation, Galois crammed a notebook with mathematical insights. The young Dyson, imagining his own early death in the war, saw himself as a new Galois. Would he, Dyson, make a name for himself? Would there be time?

  Grappling with the conundrum of human relations—why nations went to war, why the strong tyrannized the weak, why the rich had so much more than the poor—the teenage Dyson suddenly saw the solution. As he approached a notice board to see whether he’d been chosen for a sporting team (he had not) it came to him as a jolt of recognition. He perceived a fundamental kinship among people. We were all related. Indeed we were all one person. When we hurt our neighbor we are hurting ourselves. To inflict violence on others is really to injure oneself. The young man thought about his scheme day after day. He gave it a name: Cosmic Unity. The fundamental truth of his proposition seemed to offer a basis for ethics and much else. It could, to say the least, address the problems blazing forth in Europe and Asia.

  He tried to convert his friends to the cause, but his “moral earnestness” was off-putting, a reality many prophets must grapple with.21 His mother, at least, was sympathetic to his vision, but mostly Dyson remained a party of one. “I always feel uneasy if I have to join a majority,” he said later.22

  But war came. Instead of Cosmic Unity there was widespread killing. Dyson’s pacifism waned. He finally joined the officer’s training program at Winchester College. He also clung to mathematics.

  NIGHT CLIMBING

  In September 1941, a few months shy of eighteen and still not required for military duty, Dyson went up to the University of Cambridge, a powerhouse in mathematics. He quickly reestablished himself there as an academic all-star. It was almost too easy: “After two years in Durell’s mathematics class [at Winchester] I found the life of a student at Cambridge University quite relaxing.”23

  At Trinity College Cambridge under wartime conditions his studies were to be compressed into two years. Classroom activity was held to a minimum, which is the way Dyson liked it. He tended to learn best on his own or in the company of one or two friends. With most of the faculty and graduate students off to fight in the war, only the oldest professors remained.

  The most notable of these was G. H. Hardy, who is famous for two things. The first is his collaborative series of papers written with two of the other great mathematicians of the twentieth century, John Littlewood and Srinivasa Ramanujan. The second is his expressed dislike for any kind of applied mathematics. In his book A Mathematician’s Apology, Hardy grumbled about the very fact that he was writing a book rather than practicing his craft. He regarded pure mathematics as something joyful. It was closer to being art than science. “The mathematician’s patterns,” he said, “like the painter’s or the poet’s must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test; there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.”24

  Hardy, hoping to exemplify pure mathematics, boasted that none of his research had ever been useful. None of his work would contribute to the benefit of the world and certainly not to the cause of warfare. Some would consider this attitude admirable. Others might view it as an expensive or even arrogant form of self-indulgence in a time of war. German armies were filling Europe, and the Japanese navy was fanning out across the West Pacific.

  Dyson, while not so dogmatic himself about the glories of mathematics, was in love with the subject and had, since he was a young boy, read Hardy’s books with enjoyment. Now at Cambridge Dyson took mathematics classes appropriate for a graduate student and had a chance to sit near Hardy several times a week.

  Cambridge was depressing. Dyson had few friends and was afraid of girls. He continued to worry about war. It was evident that his mathematical studies would soon end and he would be thrust into the fighting. He kept feeling that the Cambridge class of 1943 would follow the young men of the class of 1915 into an early grave. There would be no mathematics career, only a long residence in the Absolute Elsewhere. Perhaps he should do what so many other young men he knew were doing: enlist straightaway. This was the proposition that lay before him every day.

  One of Dyson’s few pleasures was “night climbing,” making nocturnal scurries across the towers, roofs, and upright walls of Cambridge buildings. He had done some building climbs during his Winchester years, but here at Cambridge the tradition of ascending drainpipes and spires to the highest places in town was practically a club sport. It was like rock climbing but in the middle of a town. Why couldn’t you think of an enclosed quadrangle of medieval buildings, including dining hall, chapel, lecture rooms, and living quarters, as a miniature mountain range? The rock had been quarried, cut into slate tiles, and lapped down the roof of an apse. Was this not a minor Matterhorn? A guidebook written by some former undergraduates offered advice on how to avoid injury and detection, along with assessments of the more challenging climbs. The spire at King’s College, for example, was considered to be practically impossible.

  Night climbing was illegal, which only increased its allure. Even if you made an inadvertent noise up above you wouldn’t attract attention, since after dark it was difficult for pedestrians at street level to see you at rooftop. High up you were anonymous. There, among Gothic gargoyles and arches you could, at least for an hour, take refuge in the Middle Ages, far from the present agony. Dyson loved the evocative sound of chimes at midnight.

  The long roll of Dyson’s published papers begins with some mathematical efforts sent in 1943 to the university magazine, Eureka, and the Journal of the London Mathematical Society. Much of his work centered on number theory, which is to numbers what sociology is to people.

  Dyson did not speak much to Professor Hardy but he did have thoughtful conversations with the mathematician Abram Besicovitch. Dyson and he took extended walks together. Speaking only in Russian, they would discuss poetry as well as mathematics. They played billiards.25 Dyson learned from Besicovitch how to write technical papers, how to build a formal argument in such a way that the conclusion would follow clearly from the foregoing groundwork.26 He also developed a love of Russian literature and a desire to know more about Russian culture.

  Dyson attended some lectures by Paul Dirac, one of the founders of quantum mechan
ics. Dirac was famous for using few words. In class he didn’t so much teach as recite, from his own textbook. Dyson found both book and man to be incomprehensible. Dirac did, however, carefully frame replies to Dyson’s frequent questions. On one occasion the answer required so much reflection that Dirac was obliged to stop the lecture in order to consider the matter more seriously.27

  Under ordinary circumstances Dyson would have gone on to obtain an advanced degree and take an academic post. But the war had not gone away. No amount of diplomacy, much less pacifist sentiment, had kept Adolf Hitler at bay. France was defeated and Britain was under dire threat. It was 1943 and Freeman Dyson, now nineteen years old, had to do his bit. He had to go off to war.

  Enlistment as a uniformed serviceman was the only option for most men. But one of Hardy’s friends was able to offer Dyson another route. C. P. Snow, the physicist and novelist, who would a dozen years later write a testy essay—published as a bestselling book, The Two Cultures—about the intellectual divide between the scientific and literary cultures in Britain, was searching for bright young men to do war work of a technical nature.

  Dyson was just the sort of chap Snow wanted. So off Dyson went into the war, but not to the places like Malta or Singapore where people were actually dying. Snow’s fellows were mostly sent off to do radar work at Maldon, code breaking at Bletchley, or bombing logistics at High Wycombe.28 Instead of firing a gun Dyson would be practicing his well-cultivated training in logic. He would be performing exactly the kind of applied mathematics Hardy loathed. The work would be purposeful and poignant, involving as it did the saving and taking of lives.