Line upon Line

Follow Daniel Peterson on his column on Patheos called “Sic et Non.”

So, we’ve launched a free online series of film shorts that have been drawn from Undaunted.  Here, I call your attention to a brief comment about David Whitmer that we’ve extracted from an interview with Richard Lyman Bushman, the eminent historian of early America and the Restoration who is now the Gouverneur Morris Professor Emeritus of History at Columbia University, in New York City.  It runs only about a minute, so it’s not at all painful.

I invite you to watch the short video, to subscribe to the series, to share these brief messages with friends and family, and, where you can, to share them on social media.  If you do this, and if the people with whom you share them go on to share them yet further, they will begin to reach the audience that we seek for them.  It will be like the “miracle of compound interest.”  If we do really well, it will recall a famous legend — first related in AD 1256 by the great Muslim biographer and historian Ibn Khallikan — that is sometimes told about the invention of the game of chess:

When the game’s creator showed it to the emperor of India, the emperor was so captivated by it that he said to the man, “Name your reward!  Anything!”

To which the man replied, “Oh my lord, my wishes are simple. I only desire this: Give me one grain of wheat for the first square of the chessboard, two grains for the next square, four for the next, eight for the next, and so on, for all 64 squares, with each square having double the number of grains as the square before.”

The emperor agreed, amazed that the man had asked for so small a reward and, frankly, thinking him rather a fool (and himself rather lucky to get off so cheaply after his rash promise). After a week, though, his treasurer came to him with the urgent message that, if he continued with the promised payment, the reward would add up to an astronomical sum, far greater than all the wheat that could conceivably be produced in many, many centuries.

Do the math!  With sixty-four squares on a chessboard, if the number of grains doubles on each successive square, the sum of grains on all sixty-four squares will be 1 + 2 + 4 + 8 + … and so forth for the 64 squares. The total number of grains can be shown to be 2⁶⁴−1 or 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 (or, to put it in words: eighteen quintillion, four hundred forty-six quadrillion, seven hundred forty-four trillion, seventy-three billion, seven hundred nine million, five hundred fifty-one thousand, six hundred and fifteen, which is over 1.4 trillion metric tons, which (I’m told) is more than two thousand times the annual world production of wheat.

Or, to put it in scriptural terms:

Wherefore, be not weary in well-doing, for ye are laying the foundation of a great work. And out of small things proceedeth that which is great.  (Doctrine and Covenants 64:33)