When you live with a genius - good doesn't seem that great.

 When you grow up with a genius.... and my dad was a creative mathematical genius, just getting good marks at school seems like nothing. He wasn't one of those calculating genius's who can flash answers to complex questions in split seconds, he was a slow deep original thinker about maths and physics. My dad grew up on a farm in Morrinsville. A beer drinking, V8 driving town. His parents owned a dairy farm. He went to a school that offered very little encouragement, and a lot of resistance to thinking deeply about anything at all. He often ended up sitting on a chair in a corner of the classroom wearing a hat with the words "dunce" written on it - because, as the teacher liked to say to the headmaster, when he dropped by "Wxxxx;s  been asking stupid questions again" . My dad didn't usually answer questions straight away. By the time he'd turned the question over thoroughly in his mind, and was pondering a suitable reply, whoever had asked the question had often decided that he was stupid, or possibly even a bit retarded. His speech was slow and deliberate, his words carefully and cautiously chosen. He wasn't in a hurry to let go of an idea once he caught hold of it. In fact he could pursue an idea for decades, savouring every possibilty that idea might present. He once wrote that it took him twenty years to gain a true understanding of gravity, and that physics students should be patient, not expecting to immediately master concepts of mathematics and physics that had taken decades to develop.

 So - for me - looking at the astounding array of squiggles that is my fathers life work, anything I do, know or think about pales in comparison. Everything I've ever done, ever will do doesn't even come close to the level of ability that seemed to came so effortlessly to him. He spoke a secret language I couldn't understand, worked with cryptic codes that only a select few can unlock. I can't even open the door to the world that he lived in, that contained the codebreakers for the laws of the universe itself, represented by the symbolic language that is Mathematics. 

 Seeing first hand the devastating effects of war on his own father, may have had something to do with his decision to specialise in pure abstract physics.  The maths or war was very fashionable at the time he began his career, and he quickly moved as far away from the kinds of practical applied maths that was useful in the design of missiles and bombs. Although initially he was interested in nuclear physics, he chose to pursue a more artistic side to mathematics, in love with the pure beauty of numbers for their own sake, he left the practical application of his work more and more to other more industrially minded people, and branched out into solving problems for his own personal pleasure and satisfaction.

 I can't even come close to penetrating the surface, let alone the depths of his world. I felt closer to him hanging out together in the vege garden. Or watching a Polish cartoon. Then he was just the simple farm boy from a small rural town.