Cambridge University

Cambridge University serves as both an educational setting and a proving ground for exceptional mathematical ability. For Rong Youying, arrival there at seventeen opens into language learning and a celebrated bridge design; for the fourteen-year-old Jan Liseiwicz, the university is an ambition he hopes to reach by examination, prize, or chess. The same institution thus marks both an achieved opportunity and a future still being negotiated.

Arrival and Academic Life

In the year she turned seventeen, Rong Youying crossed halfway around the world with a cousin who was going to study at Cambridge University. Their boat entered the thick fog over the London docks, a scene that prompted her cousin, who liked composing short poems, to write about reaching Great Britain by ocean wave. The journey establishes Cambridge as the destination of a major change in her life, not simply as the backdrop to a later achievement.

At Cambridge, Rong Youying retained her striking facility with mathematics and revealed a previously unsuspected aptitude for languages. She learned from foreign roommates, changing roommates each term; the method itself was ordinary, but the speed and extent of her results were not. In a couple of years she acquired seven languages, learning not only to speak them but also to read and write them. The account presents her learning as cumulative and social: a new roommate brought a new language into reach, and each term extended what she could do.

One encounter makes that process concrete. In the college grounds, Rong Youying met a dark-haired young woman who had just arrived from Milan. Unable to communicate with her, Rong tried each of the seven languages she had learned, without success, before discovering that the newcomer spoke only Italian. She promptly invited the woman to become her roommate. That same term she began work on a design for Newton’s Mathematical Bridge, bringing her linguistic and mathematical achievements together in the Cambridge setting.

Newton’s Mathematical Bridge

The bridge is described as one of Cambridge University’s sights and as a mathematical problem that had resisted generations of students in the mathematics department. Its 7,177 timbers are all different sizes, and the account gives 10,299 as the number of tangent planes involved. According to the story, Newton built the bridge to hold together through gravity alone, after throwing the nails into the Cam. Reproducing its structure on paper therefore meant finding a way to represent a design whose ingenuity lay partly in its refusal of ordinary fastening.

Many attempts had produced designs requiring more than 1,000 nails, while only a few had brought the total below that threshold. The closest earlier result described was an Icelander’s design using 561 nails. Sir Joseph Larmor, then president of the Newtonian Mathematical Society, offered a Cambridge mathematics doctorate to anyone who could better that total, even by a single nail. Rong Youying’s model required 388 nails, a substantial reduction from the existing benchmark. Her achievement earned her a university certificate for a doctoral degree from Cambridge University.

The award ceremony also displays the breadth of her accomplishments. After receiving the certificate, Rong Youying chatted with one of the dons in Italian, demonstrating mastery of another language. She was twenty-two and in her fifth year at Cambridge. The scene places formal mathematical recognition and conversational fluency side by side: the bridge design wins the distinction, while the conversation makes her range of learning visible in the same institutional setting.

Cambridge as Ambition and Point of Departure

Cambridge University also figures in the account of Jan Liseiwicz before he had any connection to the university. At fourteen, he attended a wedding celebration with his parents, where they met Michael Steinroder, then director of the Institute of Mathematics at Cambridge University and a chess grandmaster. Jan’s father explained that he hoped his son might one day study there. Steinroder outlined two routes: passing the standard annual entrance examinations or winning the Newtonian Prize in Mathematics or Physics, awarded by the Royal Society every two years. The first five highly commended candidates could enter Cambridge University without examinations and without paying fees; the prize alternated between mathematics in odd-numbered years and physics in even-numbered years.

Jan answered this account of admission by proposing a chess game: if he won, he suggested, he should be allowed to attend without taking the entrance examinations. The episode gives Cambridge a different narrative function from the one it has in Rong Youying’s story. For her, its rooms and academic challenges are already part of lived experience; for Jan, it is a gate whose rules he immediately tries to test. The passage records the challenge, not its outcome.

A further Cambridge connection leads beyond the university itself. The following year, two brothers who hoped to take human beings into the air visited Rong Youying there. Their vision and courage impressed her, and she went to America with them. Two years later, the first successful airplane flight took place over the sand dunes of North Carolina. Cambridge is therefore also the point in the narrative where her mathematical and academic story meets a new undertaking, one whose eventual achievement occurs far from the university.