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2001-11-30 | 6:04 p.m.

Just reading Maddy's bio and it reminded me of something I meant to tell Duff, but forgot. The other day we were in the car, and Felony asked me, "What's one plus one?"

"Two."

"Two plus two?"

"Four."

"Four plus four?"

"Eight."

And so on, until she got me up to 1024, at which point she seemed exhausted by the attempt to stump me, to my relief (I was careful to hide my own anxiety that she would keep me going into five or six digits). Then Criminy said, "Do numbers just go on forever?"

It was one of those moments when I felt so proud, and I knew Duff would have loved to have been there, because any perceived math breakthrough on the part of the kids makes him proud to bursting.

Then I quizzed them the same way, and they got up to 64. Which is not great, but not terrible for first-graders whose mother is sort of hit-or-miss when it comes to enrichment, who watch a lot of TV and go to a school that doesn't score very highly in state testing. They are learning chess with their Dad, who doesn't make them play with knights yet (I had a lot of trouble with that L-concept myself, though I was 20 years old when I learned).

The first time Duff and I met in person, we played chess (probably on that same magnetic travel set he's teaching the girls on, which I've had since I learned), and I beat him. It was only luck, but he had been extremely confident that he would win, and I teased him about it, and of course, we haven't played since.

Duff was something of a math prodigy as a kid. Something that amazes me about him is that he never met a theorem he didn't like---or remember. We'll just be in the middle of something completely banal and he'll pull this formula out of his ass and I can't help but think, "HOW do you remember this stuff?"

I mean sure, I've absorbed most of the grammar rules and I know what synecdoche is (actually, now that I mention it, I don't, but it's really easy to look up should I ever have a need for it), and I can sort of fumble my way through a definition of Occam's Razor, but some of these mathematical formulas are pretty complicated, and he rattles them off--and it's not as if he's using them!

The only analogy I can draw between us is that I know the recipe for Toll House Cookies by heart. Which is much more useful in my line of work.

Okay, one more revealing anecdote about Duff, and then I'm done. If we're watching a video and there is a "hard" math problem written on a chalkboard or on a piece of paper, he will invariably rewind or pause the tape to have a closer look, and then solve or identify the problem. And nine times out of ten, he will say dismissively, "Ah, that's not very hard," as if filmmakers are under some obligation to try to stump him, the mathhead. I guess that's just the way math people think.

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