He was a man who believed in the elegance of forgetting. Not memory loss, but conditional independence : the future should depend only on the present, not the past. It was the central tenet of his life’s work—the Markov chain. And for twenty-three years, he had applied it to everything: the movement of gas molecules, the rise and fall of stock prices, the shuffling of a deck of cards. Even to himself.
This was the Norris method: a man as a memoryless process. It was clean. It was mathematical. It was, he believed, the only rational way to live. markov chain norris
To his astonishment, she laughed—a small, broken sound. “You’re such an asshole, Dad.” He was a man who believed in the elegance of forgetting
After twenty minutes, her eyes opened. She looked at him without surprise. And for twenty-three years, he had applied it