Log24

For Bloomsday 2006:

Hero of His Own Story

"The philosophic college should spare a detective for me."

— Stephen Hero.  Epigraph to Chapter 2, "Dedalus and the
Beauty Maze," in Joyce and Aquinas, by William T. Noon, S. J.,
Yale University Press, 1957 (in the Yale paperback edition of
1963, page 18)

"Dorothy Sayers makes a great deal of sense when she points out
in her highly instructive and readable book The Mind of the Maker
that 'to complain that man measures God by his own measure is
a waste of time; man measures everything by his own experience;
he has no other yardstick.'"

— William T. Noon, S. J., Joyce and Aquinas (in the Yale paperback
edition of 1963, page 106)

Related material:

• Dorothy Sayers and Jill Paton Walsh
• Jill Paton Walsh's detective novel A Piece of Justice (1995):
  "The mathematics of tilings and quilting play background
  roles in this mystery in which a graduate student attempts
  to write a biography of the (fictitious) mathematician
  Gideon Summerfield. Summerfield is about to posthumously
  receive the prestigious (and, I should point out, also fictitious)
  Waymark Prize in mathematics…but it soon becomes clear
  that someone with evil intentions does not want the student's
  book to be published!By all accounts this is a well written mystery…
  the second by the author with college nurse Imogen Quy playing
  the role of the detective."— Mathematical Fiction by Alex Kasman,
  College of Charleston

• Quilt Geometry, by Steven H. Cullinane

— St. Thomas Aquinas