She shook her head. "I teach the primary classes back home. However, what you say sounds intriguing. What possible connection could there be between mathematics and love, and me?"
      "One of the connections is that it all started close to your home turf with the work of the Finish mathematician Albert Girard," I replied. "It started way back in time, in the year 1626. I have been told that Girard was the first person in history to formulate The Fundamental Theorem of Algebra. A friend in Germany got me interested in this. He said it started a development that became a turning point in mathematics and possibly also in history, and in both cases for the good. Turning points in history don't always have to be for the worse. This time they appear to have been for the better."
      "You are wrong about one important minor detail," interrupted a tall Russian man in dark hair who stood nearby at the fountain. His hair was almost totally black. "You are wrong on two counts," he said to me and began to smile. "The year was 1629, not 1626, and Albert Girard was Flemish, not Finish. You are right about one thing, however. The Fundamental Theorem of Algebra marks a turning point in the history of mathematics. Up to this time it was understood that every mathematical equation could yield only one single solution. Girard's theorem was that polynomial equations with powers of n must have n solutions. Except he couldn't prove it. No one could prove it. It took 170 years before someone was able to solve the puzzle. In fact it took nearly 120 years before anyone seriously tried. D'Alembert made the first serious attempt in the mid-1700s, but he failed, and so did all the renowned mathematicians of this time, like Leonhard Euler and Joseph LaGrange. They all worked on this problem. The problem was finally solved by Carl Friedrich Gauss in 1799 in his famous doctoral thesis, which Gauss submitted as an entry paper to get into the university."
      The Russian paused and looked puzzled. He turned to me. "I too am at a loss in figuring out what this has got to do with love?" he said. "There was never much love lost between the feuding mathematicians."
      I shrugged my shoulders. "A friend in Germany made the proposition, or rather hinted at a connection. I am trying to figure this out too. I also know that he is probably right. He always seems to be right in these matters."
      "What do you think, Astrid?" asked the Russian man reading her nametag. He had no nametag himself.
      She shrugged her shoulders.
      "I think the connection lies in the general history of that timeframe," I said to him. "From what I remember another friend telling me, the early 1600s had been a period of profound humanist developments. Girard's discovery in 1629, as you say, was made smack in the middle of the Thirty Years War. Historians call this the worst period of military atrocities prior to the 20th Century. It became an orgy of raving beastmen by whom entire cities became radically depopulated. Countless villages, or parishes as they called them then, simply disappeared. This horrible period also became a period of an honest, deep reaching humanist renewal. The most advanced thinkers perceived the human being in a much different light than the beasts that made war. The pioneers perceived mankind as a being endowed with the godlike capacity to reason and to discover principles, to figure things out, to understand the 'movements' behind what they could see, principles that can give society peace and a civilization that makes life worth living. Girard was probably caught up in this deep reaching search as to what we are as human beings, and what we are capable of as people with a godlike intellect.
      "I think what Girard discovered in respect to Algebra seemed to unfold in parallel with the discovery of another profound universal principle which a friend of mine called the Principle of Universal Love," I added. "My friend suggested that the unfolding recognition of this principle in the form of the Principle of the Advantage of the Other, was reflected in the Peace of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years War. We know that all of this came to a head in 1648, but it appears to have started much earlier. This means that there may be a connection between the two momentous developments, the development of an advanced perception of love and the development of an advanced perception in mathematics. Both developments might have started in parallel from a common cultural root."

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Stories about  Sex from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche