Humour: The square root of fear

My expectations about films to do with maths geniuses were set by A Beautiful Mind (2001). And so, watching the trailer of the Vidya Balan-starrer Shakuntala Devi was a shock to the system I last encountered in my 10th standard trigonometry class. That memorably alienating feeling triggered by numbers speaking to each other in a language that seemed at once new and extinct. In Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories, such confounding matters are clubbed under the category P2C2E (Processes Too Complicated to Explain). Mathematics is perhaps my life’s biggest P2C2E. And here I see the eyes of a thousand readers light up and mist over, a Milky Way of maths survivors, banded together for billions of years to come.