continued
From Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, a fictional Communist on propaganda:
“It is necessary to hammer every sentence into the masses by repetition and simplification. What is presented as right must shine like gold; what is presented as wrong must be black as pitch.”
Thanks for this quotation to Kati Marton, author of The Great Escape: Nine Jews Who Fled Hitler and Changed the World (Simon & Schuster, paperback edition Nov. 6, 2007). One of Marton’s nine was Koestler.
From another book related to this exodus:
“Riesz was one of the most elegant mathematical writers in the world, known for his precise, concise, and clear expositions. He was one of the originators of the theory of function spaces– an analysis which is geometrical in nature.”
— Stanislaw Ulam, Adventures of a Mathematician
And from Gian-Carlo Rota, a friend of Ulam:
“Riesz’s example is well worth following today.”
Related material: Misunderstanding in the Theory of Design and Geometry for Jews.
For a different approach to ethnicity and the number nine that is also “geometrical in nature,” see The Pope in Plato’s Cave and the four entries preceding it, as well as A Study in Art Education.