No Two Dicks Are The Same (26 June 1996)

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Two Mathematicians (17 June 1996)

Reading a story that isn’t mine

But could be

I too was good at math (but not until high school)

I too went to high school in New Rochelle and took math classes at a local college

I too went to Hampshire College but I didn’t have two boy friends at a time (or even one)

until grad school at UMass Amherst, down the road

I wonder if the author knows old friends of mine

Yes they are getting old those young upstarts who started Hampshire College some twenty five

plus years ago

I wondered if I hadn’t left some pages of my journal in a time warp

Only to find them again, edited by another and in print

Like the woman in Blade Runner who thought her thoughts were her own until learning that

she was a machine and the memories of childhood were implanted in her fabricated mind

We two had both failed in French

But then our paths more strongly divided

I could tell where the narrative was no longer my own

And breathed a sigh of relief

My life was my own again

My identity intact

My tale left for me to tell

Where he told of Galois, I would have told of Turing

An English mathematician, equally eccentric though not as flamboyant

Living in a differently violent time

Key to breaking the German naval codes

And then left to kill himself when his drive for sex with men brought him into court and

rather than follow in Wilde’s footsteps to jail, was placed in the kinder hands of a medical establishment that fed him hormones and precipitated his suicide.

But that’s a diversion from this tale

Of how I picked up a magazine and started reading a story called Two Mathematicians

And had flashbacks to my life when I was less than half my age

And learned (or relearned) some math history

And wondered about the boys and men I studied with and where we’ve come to.

And saw a reflection that caught me, surprised,

By words in print that I knew to be true.

-- Larry Wolf (1996)

[Posted 2025]