Daniel muddled through the boredom of early school, but his pent-up intelligence burst its confines in grade three, and in early September of that year, he'd stood up in Mrs. Renald's class and declaimed passionately on the beauty and mystery of math. This had come just as his homeroom was to tackle double-digit addition, and Mrs. Renald had written 14+37= on the blackboard. She was goind to demonstrate the power of vertical formulation, but the vision of the numbers with their operators had caused Daniel's fervor to coalesce.

"The equals sign is like a magic trick," he'd said, standing and speaking as if he were merly a conduit for a voice from another place. "Before it, numbers gather and decide to do things together. Fouteen, thirty-seven....they want to be something else. This is why they come. Sometimes they join together, or one takes itself away, like it's digging a hole in the other number. Or one number will come together with another number as many times as that other number is. Or it will take itself out of that number as many times as it can, until there's nothing left. That's called division." He'd been gesturing with his hands about the room, as if the figures he was speaking of had taken form in the air around him. Then he lowered his eyes again to his bewildered classmates. "But this isn't the best thing about numbers," he said. "What's really neat is that everything is math. Like, if you add time and pressure to coal, that equals diamonds." (He'd considered going to the front of the room and taking up some chalk to write C+(T x P)=D, but he did not want to confuse them.)