The Elegant Solution (Ploughshares Solos Book 7)

“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.

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.