Above: Professor Emeritus Tom Apostol and Maria Suzuki discuss office business at Project MATHEMATICS! Suzuki’s reformulation of a famous problem in number theory is set for publication in the January 2000 issue of the American Mathematical Monthly.

Over the phone, Maria Suzuki blithely describes herself as a "Pasadena housewife," and then laughs. The former full-time homemaker with the bicultural name who answers the telephones and handles the secretarial chores at Caltech’s Project MATHEMATICS! obviously marches to her own drummer. Before seeking outside employment last year to support her two school-aged daughters’ education, Suzuki spent 12 years as a stay-at-home mom, during which time she also published a prize-winning short story, edited a medical journal, earned a brown belt in karate, and became webmaster for the Caltech Women’s Club. Her latest extracurricular accomplishment is a brief postulation, "Alternate Formulations of the Twin Prime Problem," scheduled for publication in the January 2000 issue of the American Mathematical Monthly.

The three-page "note," as such short papers are called by mathematicians, gives a new twist to one of the outstanding problems in number theory: whether twin prime numbers occur indefinitely. (A prime number is divisible only by itself and one; twin primes are sets of prime numbers separated by a single integer, such as 5 and 7, or 71 and 73.) Suzuki has reformulated the problem in a manner that does not involve primes. It’s only one of the numerical conundrums Suzuki has pondered since she developed a sudden interest in mathematics several years ago, when she was a young mother in need of a mental respite from the constant demands of housework and parenting.

"To preserve my sense of self, I kept a lot of technical magazines around, which I read with one hand while rinsing diapers with the other," Suzuki says. Her growing preoccupation with math led her to rise before the children in order to work on problems, and to fill boxes with pages of scribbled notes that she would hide when her mother-in-law came to visit. "I was a typical math crank," she laughs, "the kind who bothers professors."

"Typical" hardly describes Suzuki. The daughter of a mechanical engineer father and schoolteacher mother, she majored in biology at McGill University in Montreal but, after a short stint as a lab technician, decided the field was not for her.

In 1986 she moved to Tokyo to marry Shigeru Suzuki, an engineer now working at JPL, and, the following year, gave birth to their first daughter. Working at home, Suzuki began editing an English-language journal for gastroenterologists. During her five-year stay in Japan, she also worked as a programmer for a Japanese software company, cowrote part of an unfinished science-fiction novel, and won a prize in a short-story contest with her first attempt at short fiction.

Suzuki continued to be a stay-at-home mom after she and her husband returned to the United States in 1990, at the same time taking up the practice of karate with Caltech’s legendary karate master, Tsutomu Ohshima, who retired in 1994. Her friendships with other karate students put her in contact with the mathematics department and eventually with Tom Apostol, professor of mathematics, emeritus, and director of Project MATHEMATICS!, which produced computer-animated educational mathematics videos during the past decade and is now preparing interactive educational material for the Internet. In the summer of 1998, after Suzuki had decided to look for full-time employment, the position of secretary at Project MATHEMATICS! opened up. Tom Apostol offered Suzuki the job and she accepted.

Initially, the mathematician was wary of the new staffer’s enthusiasm for the twin prime problem.

"My first thought was that she was going off the deep end," he says. "A lot of amateurs who claim to have discovered solutions to famous unsolved mathematical problems turn out to be crackpots." Suzuki’s lack of formal training complicated her attempts to explain her ideas to Apostol, but she eventually convinced him that her approach was both interesting and promising. So the man who literally wrote the book on number theory (Introduction to Analytic Number Theory, 1976) shaped Suzuki’s ideas into the elegant two and one-half-page distillation slated to appear in the prestigious mathematics journal next January. Apostol did not want to be listed as a coauthor, although in an endnote Suzuki thanks him and Caltech Visiting Associate in Mathematics Farshid Hajir, who earlier had helped refine her original equations, for their assistance in preparing the article

"She was the primary originator of the idea. I don’t want anything to detract from that," Apostol says. "I was glad when something came out of it. Having advanced degrees in hand doesn’t increase your ability to think about mathematics–amateurs can still get good ideas."

For her part, Suzuki feels it was her status as an amateur mathematician that made the paper possible in the first place. "Perhaps because of rather inaccurate stereotyping, nobody expects a housewife–or a secretary, for that matter–to be interested in problems in number theory, so you have a marvelous freedom to work on notoriously intractable math problems, if that’s what floats your boat," she says. "If you don’t solve them–big deal! You have no professional reputation at stake."

Over the past year, Suzuki’s duties at Project MATHEMATICS! have expanded to include Java programming and Web-site production. Although her children are older now, she has no plans for graduate study. "I’m more interested in developing ideas than in doing the course work," she says. "I feel I’ve been lucky, because I’ve had a lot of experiences that somebody on a rigid career path doesn’t have time to pursue."

And 10 years from now?

"I’m looking forward to that place," Suzuki says. "But I like to live as much as possible in the present, and this feels like the perfect place to be right now."

Marcy Drexler