Prologue

The solution to the Happy Ending Problem, while noteworthy within its field (geometry) was not as interesting as the story which would develop around it some years later.

The full theorem was discovered and described by a young, relatively unknown undergraduate of Castle named Meredith Kabah. Her peers would describe her as being shy, isolated, and “having few known friends.” One of her acquaintances in the school’s chess club had doubts as to her even having any sort of family: “I think she might have been homeless, to be quite frank. Meredith’s tuition and expenses were covered by a full academic scholarship -- outside of that, as far as I could tell, she sort of lived on campus. In the library, mostly, but I think she might have been sleeping in the bell tower.” Despite being somewhat of an outcast, most of the testimony surrounding Meredith was in agreement of a certain intensity she seemed to have. One of her elective professors described it as “something in the eyes.”

The breakthrough came as a surprise to her faculty peers and instructors, who remember her as being “mostly indifferent” to mathematics, instead focussing much of her time entertaining “an unnatural preoccupation with the school’s chess club, and the game itself.” It was not until Meredith quit the chess club that her talents in the mathematics field would emerge. The paper which put forth the theorem came just four days after her official resignation, and was soon followed by five supplementary papers, all of excellent quality. Past this, however, things seemed to slow down. Meredith spent a few years doing graduate studies where she failed to produce anything of academic novelty or consideration. She would decide drop out of the field of mathematics all together to pursue writing instead.

Meredith released an autobiographical book a few years later entitled Memoirs where, much to the shock of academia, she confessed to not having thought up the theorem by herself, insisting instead that she was “shown” the answer psychically by an “inter-dimensional” entity which referred to itself as ‘The Janitor.’ This happened, as she describes, “an hour at a time over the course of three days where I was instructed on both the theory and what to write in accordance with it.” These claims of mediumship were described in Memoirs amongst a plethora of other equally fantastical ones, many to do with, drugs, ritual, and obscure metaphysics. Within the field of Mathematics most, if not all of this was either ignored, glossed over, or otherwise separated by some measure from continued academic discussion of the theorem. Philosophically the claims were dismissed all together as “language and historical pseudoscience misapplied.” Critics would accuse her claim(s) as “pure fiction,” citing her admiration towards the ‘trickery of the dark arts” as admission of guilt. Other critics claim that she is invoking a sort of “redundant metaphor,” and the story is to be taken more literally but in the context of spiritual humility.

The initial formulations of the theorem were engaged by George Szekeres and Esther Klein, which lead to their eventual marriage -- this is where the Happy Ending Problem gets its name. It is perhaps sad, then, that Meredith would complete the theorem only to never really know a family, marriage, or even a prolonged relationship with anything other than than a board game. Meredith would die a year after the publication of Memoirs, to the day, from a fast-acting brain tumor.

While perhaps not as interesting as the rest of her life, this foreword wishes to call note to the fact that Meredith’s publisher, four days after her death, received an unfinished “and slightly stained” manuscript of a story in which Meredith’s historical time at the college is loosely implicated. Along with the manuscript was a hand-written note from the person who sent it claiming to have “found the story in the garbage where I work.”