The Turning
Readers who have an Amazon.com account may view book pages relevant to the previous entry. See page 77 of The Way We Think, by Fauconnier and Turner (Amazon search term = Meno). This page discusses both the Pythagorean theorem and Plato's diamond figure in the Meno, but fails to "blend" these two topics. See also page 53 of The History of Mathematics, by Roger Cooke (first edition), where these two topics are in fact blended (Amazon search term = Pythagorean). The illustration below is drawn from the Cooke book.
Cooke demonstrates how the Pythagorean theorem might have been derived by "blending" Plato's diamond (left) with the idea of moving the diamond's corners (right).
The previous entry dealt with a conference on mathematics and narrative. Above is an example I like of mathematics…. Here is an example I like of narrative:
Kate felt quite dizzy. She didn't know exactly what it was
that had just happened, but she felt pretty damn certain that
it was the sort of experience that her mother would not have
approved of on a first date.
"Is this all part of what we have to do to go to Asgard?"
she said. "Or are you just fooling around?"
"We will go to Asgard...now," he said.
At that moment he raised his hand as if to pluck an apple,
but instead of plucking he made a tiny, sharp turning movement.
The effect was as if he had twisted the entire world through a
billionth part of a billionth part of a degree. Everything
shifted, was for a moment minutely out of focus, and then
snapped back again as a suddenly different world.
— Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
And here is a blend of the concepts "Asgard" and "conference":
"Asgard
During the Interuniverse Society conference,
a bridge was opened to Valhalla…."
Bifrost
In Norse myth, the rainbow bridge
that connected Earth to Asgard,
home of the gods. It was extended
to Tellus Tertius during the
Interuniverse Society conference"
— From A Heinlein Concordance
— Front page picture from a
local morning newspaper published
today, Wednesday, May 25, 2005
"How much story do you want?"