Thanks to a Harvard math major for the following V. I. Arnold quote
in a weblog post yesterday titled "Abstraction and Generality"—
"… the author has attempted to adhere to the principle of
minimal generality, according to which every idea should first
be clearly understood in the simplest situation;*
only then can the method developed be extended to
more complicated cases.
— Vladimir I. Arnold, Lectures on Partial Differential Equations
(Russian edition 1997; English translation 2004),
Preface to the second Russian edition
Thanks also to the math major for his closing post today.
* For instance… Natalie Angier's New Year's meditation
on a Buddha Field—
"… the multiverse as envisioned in Tibetan Buddhism,
'a vast system of 1059 [sic ; corrected to 10^59 on Jan. 3]
universes, that together are called a Buddha Field,' said
Jonathan C. Gold, who studies Buddhist philosophy at
Princeton."
— versus a search in this journal for "Japanese character" that yields…
Japanese character
for "field"