Counting  Sheep

John Calvin Rezmerski

数羊

（美国）约翰·雷斯莫斯基

       胡宗锋 李 萌   译

Restlessness

T

he man couldn't get to sleep for days. He had heard about counting sheep, but didn't know that he could just imagine the sheep. He thought he had to count real sheep. He went out looking for some, and it took a while in his part of the country to find a farmer who had sheep. He counted them -17 in all. He didn't feel any sleepier. In fact, he was reinvigorated by his venture. He asked the farmer who else had sheep he could count. The farmer gave him four or five names of people around the county who had a few sheep. The man got in his car, and in a few hours had counted them all. He now had a total of 143. The last farmer he talked with said, "We don't keep many sheep around here. If you want sheep, you should go down where the Navajos are. They have lots of them." The man followed his cue. On the way, he picked up other hints: the stockyards, Scotland, the Middle East. His count grew into the millions. Australia, someone else told him, New Zealand. He continued. He tracked down sheep in Zambia, in the Falkland Islands, in New York City. He always asked where the sheep had come from-afraid he'd inad­vertently count the same sheep twice. Finally, he realized that he had completed a very accurate census of the world's sheep. But by that time, many had been eaten, and many more had been born. He'd have to start over again. The thought tired him. He really needed a rest, but there was so much work to be done.

（一）躁 动

今有一人，数日夜不能寐，听人说“数羊”可助其入睡。但他不知道数羊是可以想象的。他以为要真得去数。所以他就出门找羊去了。

花了不少时间，在才在其国家的一个地区找见了一户养羊的人。他数了数人家的羊，一共17只。但他却没有丝毫睡意，反而因为数羊而更精神。他问人家附近谁还有羊让他数，那人告诉了他四五个附近的养羊者。他就开车去了，没花多少时间就数完了所有的羊。现在他已数到了143。最后一个和他说话的牧羊人说：“这一块没多少羊。如果你要找羊多的地方，你就到纳瓦霍人（北美最大的印第安部落）那里去，他们那儿的羊可多了。”他听了人家的建议。路上，他还得到了不少其他有羊的地方的信息：如牲畜场，苏格兰还有中东。他数过的羊超过了几百万。有人让他到澳大利亚和新西兰去数。他就继续数了下去。他数到了赞比亚、福克兰群岛，甚至还数到了纽约城。数羊开始时他总要先问一下这些羊的出处，以防因疏忽而数重了。最后，他意识到自己已经将全世界的羊数精确普查过了。但到这时，很多羊被吃掉了，而新生的羊就更多了。所以他又不得不重头再数。光想想这他就累了。他太需要休息了，可是还有那么多的羊要去数。

A Modern Pythagoras

A

mathematician read in a supermarket tabloid about the man who had counted all the world's sheep. Counting was trivial. Even sheep actu­arial calculations were trivial. He wanted to find the complete joint distribution function of all variables that would make it possible to comprehend the prob­able number of lambs being born at any given point of latitude and longitude with wool of any specified length and color and a bleat of a specific pitch when the market for lamb kidneys was at its seasonal peak. He didn't have any need for this information-his interest was pure in a purely mathematical way. Someone might someday find a practical use for his formula, but that was none of his concern as a pure mathematician. Practicality was vulgar. His concern was to find the mean absolute deviation, and perhaps the rate of change of acceleration in the growth of the sheep population, what his colleagues called "the jerk," that was implied when any of the variables were assigned divergent values. The actual sheep count was unimportant to him except as it had inspired him to formulate an interesting problem. Still, in order to contextualize his research, it might be useful to know how many sheep there were in the world at any given moment, so he called the sleepy fellow who had done the sheep census. When he told him what he wanted, and why, the sheep-itemizer said, "Count your own bloody sheep! You're the goddamn mathematician right?"

（二）现代的毕达哥拉斯

一数学家在超市的小报上看到了这个人数羊的新闻。数羊是个琐碎事。羊数的精算计数就更琐碎。数学家想知道的是数羊变量的联合分布函数。有了这个函数，当市场对于羊肾的需求达到季节顶峰时，人就可以控制在任意规定的经度和纬度，生出具有一定的羊毛长度、羊毛颜色和特定叫声的羊的数量。数学家对这个报道本身并无兴趣，他的兴趣纯粹在数学上。有朝一日，也许有人会把他的公式付诸于实践，但作为一个纯理论数学家，他对实践并不关心。讲实用太庸俗了。他想发现的是绝对平均差，或者是羊数增长的加速度变量。其同事讥之为“蠢蛋”，在数学上暗指任何一个指派为分歧值率的变量。事实上的数羊对他来说毫无意义，有意义的是这使他产生灵感，发现了一个有趣的数学公式。为了使其研究有背景，了解一下特定时间世界上羊的总数将是非常有用的。于是他给那位搞羊数普查的“睡不着”老兄打了个电话。当他在电话上说明自己的想法后，那位详细记载了羊数的老兄怒道：“你不会自己去数！你不就是个该死的数学家吗？”