Excerpted by the author from A Numerate Life: A Mathematician Explores the Vagaries of Life, His Own and Probably Yours, published in November 2015 by Prometheus Books.
Whether because of my natural temperament, my training as a mathematician, or a late midlife reckoning and reconsideration, I look on the whole biographical endeavor, my own included, as a dubious one. Even George Washington’s signature line about cutting down the cherry tree, “I cannot tell a lie,” is probably flap-doodle. More likely he said, “No comment” or “I don’t recall the incident” or maybe “The tree was rotten anyway.” I tend to scoff when reading that a new biography has revealed that the great So-And-So always did X because (s)he secretly believed Y. I’m not particularly ornery, but I often react to such statements about the alleged actions or beliefs of well-known people with a silent That’s B.S. A more likely reaction if someone makes the claim directly to me is a polite, but pointed “How do you know that?” or even “How could anyone know that?” or, in the case of autobiographies, “How could anyone remember that?”