Hilde Verbeke

Hilde Verbeke taught mathematics to Belgian teenagers for thirty-eight years, most of them at a municipal secondary school in Ghent, where she became the teacher former students came back to visit long after they had forgotten the quadratic formula. She never set out to write a book. She set out, every September, to convince another room of sixteen-year-olds that mathematics was not a wall but a window — a way of seeing the ordinary world a little more clearly.

It was a question from that classroom that became this book. A student weighing two summer jobs asked her how many he ought to look at before he simply chose one. Verbeke recognised the question: mathematicians had answered it decades earlier, and the answer was stranger and more useful than the boy expected. Over the years she found the same shape beneath a hundred ordinary dilemmas her students — and later their parents — carried to her desk: when to stop searching, when to let go, when to call a thing good enough. The mathematics of stopping, she came to believe, is quietly the mathematics of living well.

Born in 1957 in West Flanders, she studied mathematics at Ghent University and then chose the classroom over the lecture hall, a decision she has never regretted. She distrusts any formula she cannot explain to someone who hates formulas, which is the spirit in which this book is written. She retired in 2019 and lives near Ghent, where she walks a great deal, keeps an unreasonable number of clocks, and remains, by her own cheerful admission, hopeless at leaving a party at the right time.