The Elegant Solution (Ploughshares Solos)

by Jim Tilley

Overview

"A mathematician," G. H. Hardy wrote, "like a painter or a poet, is a
maker of patterns." Throughout his childhood, Jim Tilley was
encouraged to discover such patterns through the mathematical puzzles
his father posed for him to solve. Never satisfied with ordinary
solutions, his father insisted on mathematical elegance. Always more
comfortable in the realm of the mind, he could never bring himself to
give Tilley a hug; they'd merely shake hands on parting. Both father
and son set standards for intellectual achievement so high it was
difficult to ever be satisfied. Now, as his father loses his grip on
his mind in old age, Tilley, concerned that he is glimpsing his own
future, looks back on the decisions he has made in his life and tries
to locate the points at which ambition and drive cross the line into
unhealthy obsession.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940016399614
Publisher:	Ploughshares / Emerson College
Publication date:	02/14/2013
Series:	Ploughshares Solos , #7
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	130 KB

About the Author

Jim Tilley earned a doctorate in Physics from Harvard University. He
retired in 2001 after a 25-year career in insurance and investment
banking. He has won numerous prizes for his papers in actuarial
science, finance, and investments, and received the 2008 Beckley Award
from the International Insurance Society for his pioneering work in
asset-liability management. His poems have been published in several
top literary journals and magazines. He has won the Sycamore Review's
Wabash Prize for Poetry and the New England Poetry Club's Firman
Houghton Award. His first collection of poetry, In Confidence, was
published by Red Hen Press in 2011, and his second, Cruising at Sixty
to Seventy, will appear in 2014. He resides with his wife in Bedford
Corners, New York.