Yoko Ogawa’s “The Housekeeper and the Professor”: Representation of a Mathematician
By Alexis Newton
Alexis Newton
Sometimes I think about how weird it is to the rest of the world how I — we! — are fixated on math, and how that looks to everybody else.
Because the average person doesn’t do math in the same way a mathematician does.
They do, however, seem to like to watch or read about other people doing math. They watch Anya Taylor-Joy in “Queen’s Gambit” by the millions, and marvel at her grasp of chess — even though the show never actually gets into the details of how she calculates her moves to win.
Rather, it paints her as an addict and misunderstood genius. Likewise, in “A Beautiful Mind,” viewers enjoy watching equations float around Russell Crowe’s head, metaphorically eavesdropping on what they think doing math must be like.
When reading books that feature people doing math, I began to notice how if they don’t take the direction of a genius or savant with addiction or mental illness issue, they take that of a frail old man whose glasses are askew and who holes up by himself to do math alone every day. They paint the picture of “the Professor.”
In Yoko Ogawa’s “The Housekeeper and the Professor,” we are quite literally introduced to “the Professor” who has an 80-minute long memory due to a car accident earlier in life. While he has no sense for decorum or people, he has a great love and grasp of numbers. The Professor spends most of his time completing prize puzzles for math competitions. This involves him staring off into the distance with a notebook in front of him for hours. He shouts when disturbed and cannot be bothered with manners for eating or dressing. This is until the Housekeeper mentions her son and the Professor demands that she bring him there for dinner so he will not eat at home alone.
With the boy, the Professor is instantaneously different, as if to model proper expectations for him. This child deserves his attention in a way that the Housekeeper did not, and he is never bothered by an interruption again. The story carries on with the dynamic between these three characters, but the Professor never seems to leave behind his characterization as a mathematician who can only talk about math when he is nervous, beginning each conversation with a question like “what’s your shoe size?” to supply a fact about the number and gain access to a topic he is familiar with.
The Professor does have some traits I admire. He is described as a caring and thoughtful teacher, who believes in “correct miscalculations” rather than mistakes as they often reveal the right answers. The Professor always encourages wrong answers over no answers and was happy to admit when he didn’t know an answer at all:
“Among the many things that made the Professor an excellent teacher was the fact that he wasn't afraid to say "we don't know." For the Professor, there was no shame in admitting you didn't have the answer, it was a necessary step toward the truth. It was important to teach us about the unknown or the unknowable as it was to teach us what had already been safely proven.”
On top of being a gracious teacher, the Professor can also be very kind, complimenting the Housekeeper on her proficiency in the kitchen and helping her son with his homework consistently. However, while the character is endearing and a generous teacher, in my opinion he is not a realistic representation of the average mathematician.
The Housekeeper, on the other hand, was someone I could relate to instantly because she is a person who struggles with mathematics. When the Professor gives the Housekeeper’s son Gauss’s famous childhood problem of adding the numbers 1 through 100 together, the Housekeeper helps take on this responsibility and she grapples with it:
“I was constantly starting off in a new direction, looking for another way to approach the problem, only to wind up at a dead end, confused. To be honest, I wasn't always even sure of what I was trying to do. At times I seemed to be going around in circles and at others almost backward, away from a solution; and in the end, I was often simply staring at the scrap paper.”
It was because of this that the Housekeeper was who I identified with in the book — the person with no mathematical experience. And I think this is what the author had intended: for the average person to identify with the Housekeeper; but even as a mathematician, she was the character I related to the most. Like her, when I do mathematics I struggle, and I don’t know many people who do not. It is not the experience of any mathematician I know to lock themselves in a room and stare off into space above a single notebook.
Moreover, for me, mathematics is collaborative. The Housekeeper even experiences this when her son points out a way to rearrange the numbers 1 to 10 that gives her an idea for Gauss’s summation formula. Suddenly, with the help of another person to bounce ideas off, she sees the problem in a new light. The novel only has one person playing off another, but my own experience has often involved multiple individuals sharing insights. While in literature, math is usually portrayed as solitary and is often tied to severe character quirks, most mathematicians I know experience it as collegial problem solving.
There are going to be people that identify with the Professor, and I can even think of a few colleagues or professors he reminded me of, but portraying mathematicians as quirky individual geniuses rather than a bunch of people all working together on a problem does a disservice to an active and enjoyable part of participating in the mathematical community.
Ultimately, The Housekeeper and the Professor was a lovely story about a familial relationship between three enjoyable characters, but it lost out on some of the beauty of doing mathematics by leaning too heavily into the quirky, hyper-individualistic trope we see time and again.
Alexis Newton is a fourth-year Ph.D. student at Emory University studying computational number theory. Outside of the math department, Alexis enjoys reading, writing, and playing with her cat Alfie.