Arthur Dapieve is waiting for the mathematical epiphany.

*Reproduction from the newspaper O Globo

The greatest mathematical feat of my life was getting caught cheating on a trigonometry test. Unable to memorize those formulas, I had miniaturized them. I hid the slip of paper under my thigh. I was caught red-handed. My test was confiscated. I got a zero. Shameful. I needed private tutoring to guarantee I passed at the end of the year.

Paradoxically, the exam proctor herself may have unintentionally shared some of the blame for my mathematical ineptitude. Dona Sônia was a Portuguese teacher. She was the one who asked us to read "O Forte" by Adonias Filho, the first book in school that captivated me. Before I realized that Machado de Assis wasn't just for children.

If that's the case, then Dona Sônia, whom I still occasionally run into at the Municipal Theater, shares the blame with my other Portuguese teachers at Colégio Mallet Soares, where I studied practically my entire life. Their names were Zulma, Maria Couto, and Thalita. Not to mention the multidisciplinary "aunts" who preceded them: Irenice, Regina, and Alice. In one way or another, they stimulated my love of reading—and writing—more than my love of math. I don't remember the names of all my math teachers.

If someone who can't read and write is called illiterate, what about someone who can't go much beyond 7 x 8 = 56? That's me. I open my phone's calculator as soon as the bill to be divided lands on the bar table. I even doubt my ability to type the numbers correctly and repeat the operation so as not to leave anyone at a loss.

However, my stupidity doesn't stem from any aversion to mathematics or loathing for those who master it. Quite the contrary. I have a profound fascination for it and great admiration for them. In fact, I envy my friend Alex Bellos, former correspondent for the English newspaper "The Guardian" in Rio. Besides writing extremely well, including about football, he's a whiz at math. He has degrees in mathematics and philosophy.

Waiting for the epiphany that never comes, I fill a shelf with books like "Alex in Numberland: A Journey into the Wonderful World of Mathematics" by Bellos, and "The Greatest Mathematical Problems of All Time" by Ian Stewart. In it, I see names like Goldbach, Kepler, Mordell, Fermat, Riemann, Navier-Stokes. And I drool.

No, I'm not a complete idiot. On my own, I read—and understood—a fair amount of philosophy when I was a teenager. What exasperates me even more is when I realize the intersection between philosophy and mathematics. It's as if the latter were an esoteric sect I didn't get accredited to in time. I also know that I would understand certain aspects of music theory better if I had some talent with numbers.

I read, in the June issue of “piauí” magazine, the obituary written by reporter Bernardo Esteves for a professor at the Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics, Elon Lages Lima, from Alagoas, who died at the age of 87. The title is “Master of Masters.” I read it with a similar respect to that with which I had previously read the profiles of the Brazilian Artur Avila—a former master's student of Lima himself, future Fields Medalist, a text by João Moreira Salles in the same “piauí” in 2010—and of the Chinese Yitang Zhang, in the “New Yorker,” two years ago.

The title of Alec Wilkinson's article in the American magazine was "The Pursuit of Beauty." It could also serve as the title for a profile of the composer Nico Muhly, for example. Here, Bernardo Esteves wrote: "More than one researcher I spoke with resorted to the adjective 'beautiful' to characterize Lima's second result (proving a theorem formulated by John Milnor) — perhaps this is the greatest compliment a mathematician can aspire to. For the man from Alagoas, however, the beauty of a mathematical result was comparable to that of a sonnet, 'as if it were an explosion of unexpected purity, of elegance,' as he said in an interview with the documentary filmmaker María Campaña Ramia."

I read this and think of Paulinho da Viola. I may not understand enough about mathematics, but I understand that it can be pure, beautiful, elegant, and moving. We associate these words with the arts or, at most, with the so-called human and social sciences. We kind of deny their use to the exact sciences, which constitutes a glaring injustice. Perhaps it's even a petty revenge of our "illiterate" majority against the minority that is good at abstract thought and its eventual practical application.

The obituary of Professor Elon Lages Lima also deserves attention because it is the profile of a great professor, remembered with admiration and affection by all with whom he worked for decades. We don't usually value them enough. According to Esteves, Lima was a man who said he had given up research "because he felt above all to be a professor." He wrote 41 books, aimed at students of all levels, many of whom themselves became professors and authors.

I think I need to add at least one of Professor Lima's books to the shelf that's patiently waiting for my mathematical epiphany.