A graduate student in the second row notices her. He scoots over and pats the empty seat beside him. She sits down. She doesn’t take her eyes off Whitney. In the engineering building across campus, two professors who’d planned to skip the colloquium have pulled up the live stream on a laptop. One of them mutes a phone call mid-sentence. The other says, “Wait. Wait. Who is that woman?”
Across the country, a math department chair at Stanford gets a text from her post-doc that says only, “Open YouTube now.” The live stream comment counter ticks past 2,000, then three. The chat is moving so fast nobody can read it. One comment, in all capital letters, freezes on the screen for a full second before scrolling. She is not a janitor. She is not a janitor. She is not a janitor.
Ashford recovers. He’s a man who’s recovered from worse, professionally. He turns to the audience and spreads his hands. “Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to point out for the record that we have just been treated to” He searches for the word. “a creative observation. Whether it stands up to peer review is another matter entirely, but please, by all means, Ms. I’m sorry, what was your name again?” Whitney does not answer. She is studying the board. “Ms. Brooks, was it? Ms. Brooks here has 1 minute and 48 seconds remaining to convert her creative observation into an actual solution. Otherwise, this becomes simply the most entertaining anecdote of my year.” A few people laugh nervously. Most don’t.
Whitney lifts the marker again. She turns slightly so the camera can see her face. She’s not nervous. She’s not angry. Her expression is the expression of a person who has been waiting a very very long time to be in this exact place. “Professor Ashford,” she says, “I want to be clear about something. I’m not going to claim what I’m about to do is original. The substitution I’m going to use was first sketched in a Russian paper in 1962. The contour deformation I’ll apply is in any complex analysis textbook. The residue calculation is freshman. None of this is hard.”
She finally turns to look at him. “What’s hard,” she says, “is being willing to look at line three.” The room exhales. It actually exhales. You can hear it. Eleanor Vance on the panel has not stopped staring at the board. She is doing the math herself. Her lips are moving. Henrik Sandberg has set his pen down on his notebook because his hand is shaking too hard to write. Ashford’s smile has now flattened completely. It’s still on his face, but it’s not really there. “Solve it,” he says. His voice has lost something. The cheerful bully tone is gone. What’s left underneath sounds smaller. “Solve it, Ms. Brooks. Don’t give me a lecture on humility. Solve the integral.” Whitney nods once.
