| A soldier under Napoleon, whom the emperor himself called "the bravest of the brave", is granted immortal life by none other than Lazarus himself, and goes on to become a math professor at Davidson College in ante-bellum North Carolina. The story ends with the promise of an "epistemological proof...of the existence of God."
As unlikely as that sounds as a plot, this well-written short story successfully pulls it off. There is not much mathematical content to the story, but math arises relatively frequently in the form of a side-remark or metaphor. For example:
| (quoted from The Proof of Bravery)
I have always been able to see strengths and weakness at a glance and identify the various minimums and maximums of systems. That is my gift, as applicable in the classroom as on the field of battle. Like all things in this world given to us by le mathematicien supreme, war is but the graphical expression of an equation, comprehensible by those with the eyes to identify the variables and the brain to solve for their values.
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and
| (quoted from The Proof of Bravery)
But now my work is at a good ending point, and I am tired of teaching these stupid boys who could not solve a multivariable equation if their lives depended on it; which it will, if the battle between states is brewing here as I suspect. It takes math to aim cannon.
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The story appeared in the February 2012 issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies. |
