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Thursday, July 14, 2016

Midnight Special

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:00 am

(Continued)

"Poincaré said that science is no more a collection of facts than a house is a collection of bricks. The facts have to be ordered or structured, they have to fit a theory, a construct (often mathematical) in the human mind.

… Mathematics may be art, but to the general public it is a black art, more akin to magic and mystery. This presents a constant challenge to the mathematical community: to explain how art fits into our subject and what we mean by beauty.

In attempting to bridge this divide I have always found that architecture is the best of the arts to compare with mathematics. The analogy between the two subjects is not hard to describe and enables abstract ideas to be exemplified by bricks and mortar, in the spirit of the Poincaré quotation I used earlier."

— Sir Michael Atiyah, "The Art of Mathematics"
     in the AMS Notices , January 2010

A post  from this  journal later in 2010 —

The above post's date — May 20, 2010 — was
the date of death for mathematician Walter Rudin.

The above post from that date has a link to the
Heinlein story "And He Built a Crooked House."
A not-so-crooked house —

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