CH 19: The Math Idiot Backstory

Retired CS Prof. Neal Wagner

The Math Idiot is set in San Antonio, TX, at the University of Texas, San Antonio. I spent a few years there from 1987 to 1989 and formed a close friendship with my Comp Sci professor, Neal Wagner (pictured above with a Sea Lion on a recent trip to San Diego). He has recently published a book entitled WWW: The End of Time which you should consider reading, especially if you enjoy dystopian reading. I wrote a post on another blog about learning from mentors and featured him in it -- he's a great guy and found this chapter particularly amusing.

San Antonio Riverwalk.

In this chapter, McGhee is pursuing some further education in CS after leaving his job at xCopy a few years before, and some project work after that. The budding friendship with Wagner provides yet another opportunity for McGhee to learn from an older mentor and some direct opportunities to discuss writing. The dialog for these exchanges is not verbatim but does resemble discussions I had with Wagner from that period in my life, though I was considerably younger than McGhee was in this chapter. I was about 24, while McGhee was 36.

The discussion includes further details about the temporary theft of a folder of poetry submissions conducted by McGhee in college and his resulting shame from it. Through this anecdote we learn of McGhee’s troubled relationship with arbiters of talent (i.e., literary periodicals) and begrudging need for their approval. From CH 14: Holy Orders of the Olives, we know he finds eventual publication in The New Yorker at age 74, only 38 years later!

This folder incident was initially described early in CH 3: Most of the Way on the train ride and receives further treatment here. I won’t say this actually happened, but the level of detail sure sounds credible to me.

Woodlawn Lake, San Antonio (Courtesy Mapio.net, user cooksters)

At the end of the chapter the reader has another one of those “oh no” moments when they can see McGhee’s future based upon previous reading. This is yet another advantage of the jumbled chapter order. The occasion is his introduction to a woman named Tess back at the Woodlawn Lake Park where the chapter started. If only we could tell him it was a mistake!