A brilliant math professor has a peculiar problem: ever since a traumatic head injury in a car accident in 1975, he has lived with only eighty minutes of short-term memory. That’s the story of Yōko Ogawa‘s The Housekeeper and the Professor. We’ve already posted links to the podcast and video from our September 16, 2025 event. Here are David Schwartz’s photos from the popular event.

His brain is like a tape that begins to erase itself every eighty minutes. An astute young housekeeper is hired to care for him. Her 10-year-old son becomes intrigued by the mysteries of math and befriends him. And every morning, as the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to each other anew, a strange and beautiful relationship blossoms between them. the Professor’s mind is still alive with elegant equations from the past. And the numbers, in all of their articulate order, reveal a sheltering and poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her young son.

Listen to the Stanford discussion on September 16, 2025, at the podcast on the Stanford Humanities Center link below. Or go to the YouTube video at the bottom of this post.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/10th564WqFIHg1sXWRi8BiTvaIeXXuy9I/view?usp=drive_link

Listen to the Stanford discussion on September 16, 2025, at the podcast on the Stanford Humanities Center link above. Or go to the youtube video at the bottom of this page.

Photos top to bottom: Indra Levy, Robert Pogue Harrison, Lernik Asserian and Rosaley Gai,

Youtube video here: https://youtu.be/OUAVGJ0BDgc