When we were in the fourth grade, an old man burst into our classroom one day waving his rumpled little plaid arms and screaming. It might have been adorable if we had been old enough to find older people adorable, and also if it hadn’t been a little bit scary.
“Stop! Is he saying anything about trains?! About train times?! Stop!”
Our teacher, Mr. Hunt, had a mustache and an inner calmness about him, and we never noticed that then he must have only been in his twenties. He put his arm lightly across the old man’s back and led him to a big wooden chair in the corner of our class, a chair that none of us ever actually sat in but that might look to a visitor like a seat of honor.
“How can we help you?” asked Mr. Hunt.
“Are you asking them questions about trains?” asked the old man.
“No,” said Mr. Hunt. “We’re talking about geometry today. Can I help you with something? Would you like a glass of water?”
Mr. Hunt had an accent that my parents identified as a working-class one from Dorchester, Massachusetts. Some of us thought it made him sound cool, and some of us thought it made him sound like an old lady. Either one may have been why the old man seemed to calm down a little bit whenever Mr. Hunt spoke.
“Did he ever,” exhaled the old man, who now rotated toward the class from the chair as if he were an amateur actor with stage fright in a community musical who was nonetheless following through on the play’s plan to break the fourth wall, “ask you about trains? About trains leaving stations at different times?”
“Yes, I have,” said Mr. Hunt.
“What textbook did you use? Problems and Solutions Four?”
“I got it from the internet.”
A few of us gasped and then realized that Mr. Hunt didn’t seem embarrassed about this, and then realized that we, too, got a lot of good stuff from the internet. Why shouldn’t Mr. Hunt?
“The internet!” wailed the old man, his head sinking into his little hand. “No no no no no.”
We all just watched him breathe for a second, like we had with the turtle our class had adopted earlier that year.
“Can I talk to you privately?” the man asked Mr. Hunt.
“Anything you have to say to me, you can say in front of my students,” said Mr. Hunt. “Within the parameters of acceptable language.”
“That’s my problem,” said the man.
He stared at us all at once, somehow, with a look that said that we knew what he was talking about, but we didn’t.
“A man leaves Chicago at twelve p.m. on a train heading for Cleveland at sixty miles per hour,” he said quickly. “Another man leaves Cleveland at one p.m. heading for Chicago on a train going eighty-five miles per hour. At what time will the two trains cross paths?”
One kid, Arush, raised his hand. “Approximately—”
“I know the goddamn answer!”
“Language,” said Mr. Hunt.
“And there’s no ‘approximately’ in math,” said the old man. “It’s math. The answers are exact.”
“The answers are exact,” echoed Mr. Hunt, somewhat faintly. “Put your hand down, Arush.”
“That’s my problem,” said the old man, sitting back down in the chair. “I wrote it. That was the one thing I did. The one thing. When you’re young, you think everything you do is just the beginning. But when you’re old, no matter who you are, you realize you only did one or two things.”
We were silent. We had never heard anything like this before.
Some of us wondered what the one or two things we would do would be.
The old man smiled like it was over, but it wasn’t.
“What I did not, could not, expect and should never have expected was that it would become the most famous math problem in the goddamn United States!”
“Language.”
“Pardon … Fine. What I did not expect was that every textbook in America would rip it off from the one I worked for and that I would end up taking home thirty-five dollars, yes, that’s right, kids, a whopping thirty-five dollars for what would become the most famous math problem in America. Does that sound fair to you? What does that work out to per year?”
Arush raised his hand and Mr. Hunt signaled him to put it down.
“Mister?”
I spoke with what I believed was the right balance of politeness and confidence to get the old man’s attention. “Sir? We actually learned the problem a little differently. Does that possibly make it different, in your opinion?”
The old man listened.
“We weren’t asked where the trains would meet. We were just asked which would get to its destination faster.”
“And,” Mr. Hunt chimed in, “I taught it to them with Boston and New York.”
“Everybody changes it,” said the old man. “But when I came in here yelling about how they stole my problem, you all knew which problem I was yelling about, didn’t you?”
We did.
“So that says a lot, doesn’t it? If after all these years, you can recognize the basic spirit of something?”