A different "Intelligencer" logo —
See my own remarks in the mathematical Intelligencer.
Thursday, May 4, 2023
For Blacklist Fans: The Intelligencers
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Friday, October 14, 2022
Sunday, December 31, 2017
Ich, Du, etc., etc.
Recent posts involving the English pronoun IT referred to
classic tales of horror by Madeleine L'Engle and Stephen King.
Those posts suggest some further remarks by Martin Buber:
THE WORLD IS TWOFOLD for man
in accordance with his twofold attitude.
The attitude of man is twofold
in accordance with the two basic words he can speak.
The basic words are not single words but word pairs.
One basic word is the word pair I-You.
The other basic word is the word pair I-It;
but this basic word is not changed when
He or She takes the place of It.
Thus the I of man is also twofold.
For the I of the basic word I-You is different from
that in the basic word I-It.
— Buber, Martin. I and Thou, Trans. Kaufmann
(p. 53). Kindle Edition.
Four German pronouns from the above passage
by Martin Buber lead to six pronoun pairs:
ich-du, ich-es, ich-sie, du-es, du-sie, es-sie.
This is in accordance with some 1974 remarks by
Marie-Louise von Franz —
The following passage by Buber may confuse readers of
L'Engle and King with its use, in translation, of "it" instead of
the original German "sie" ("she," corresponding to "die Welt") —
Here, for comparison, are the original German and the translation.
As for "that you in which the lines of relation, though parallel,
intersect," and "intimations of eternity," see Log24 posts on
the concept "line at infinity" as well as "Lost Horizon."
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Saturday, December 30, 2017
A Dream
Say You, Say Me
Lionel Richie
. . . .
"I had a dream,
I had an awesome dream
People in the park
playing games in the dark
And what they played
was a masquerade
And from behind walls of doubt
a voice was crying out"
. . . .
"Something else was behind this . . .
because it makes no sense.”
— The author reviewed in today's previous post,
as quoted yesterday in The Boston Globe
Say you, say me, say IT . . .
A comment on Sean Kelly's Christmas Morning column on "aliveness"
in the New York Times philosophy series The Stone —
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Wednesday, December 27, 2017
On Fiction and Mathematics
"There is always an awareness in her fiction
of the subjectivity of perception, and
the kaleidoscopic permutations
that memory can work on reality."
This is from a New York Times article subtitled
"Alice Munro, Nobel Winner, Mines the Inner Lives
of Girls and Women" …
The New York Times article was linked to by Marjorie Senechal
in a Huffington Post article of All Saints' Day 2013.
Further material on kaleidoscopic permutations —
See the Log24 post Symmetry of May 3, 2016.
For further material on mining, see Diamond-Mine:
"SEE HEAR READ" — Walt Disney Productions
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Tuesday, December 26, 2017
Raiders of the Lost Stone
Two Students of Structure
A comment on Sean Kelly's Christmas Morning column on "aliveness"
in the New York Times philosophy series The Stone —
Diana Senechal's 1999 doctoral thesis at Yale was titled
"Diabolical Structures in the Poetics of Nikolai Gogol."
Her mother, Marjorie Senechal, has written extensively on symmetry
and served as editor-in-chief of The Mathematical Intelligencer .
From a 2013 memoir by Marjorie Senechal —
|
"While I was in Holland my enterprising student assistant at Smith had found, in Soviet Physics – Crystallography, an article by N. N. Sheftal' on tetrahedral penetration twins. She gave it to me on my return. It was just what I was looking for. The twins Sheftal' described had evidently begun as (111) contact twins, with the two crystallites rotated 60o with respect to one another. As they grew, he suggested, each crystal overgrew the edges of the other and proceeded to spread across the adjacent facet. When all was said and done, they looked like they'd grown through each other, but the reality was over-and-around. Brilliant! I thought. Could I apply this to cubes? No, evidently not. Cube facets are all (100) planes. But . . . these crystals might not have been cubes in their earliest stages, when twinning occurred! I wrote a paper on "The mechanism of certain growth twins of the penetration type" and sent it to Martin Buerger, editor of Neues Jarbuch für Mineralogie. This was before the Wrinch symposium; I had never met him. Buerger rejected it by return mail, mostly on the grounds that I hadn't quoted any of Buerger's many papers on twinning. And so I learned about turf wars in twin domains. In fact I hadn't read his papers but I quickly did. I added a reference to one of them, the paper was published, and we became friends.[5]
After reading Professor Sheftal's paper I wrote to him in Moscow; a warm and encouraging correspondence ensued, and we wrote a paper together long distance.[6] Then I heard about the scientific exchanges between the Academies of Science of the USSR and USA. I applied to spend a year at the Shubnikov Institute for Crystallography, where Sheftal' worked. I would, I proposed, study crystal growth with him, and color symmetry with Koptsik. To my delight, I was accepted for an 11-month stay. Of course the children, now 11 and 14, would come too and attend Russian schools and learn Russian; they'd managed in Holland, hadn't they? Diana, my older daughter, was as delighted as I was. We had gone to Holland on a Russian boat, and she had fallen in love with the language. (Today she holds a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literature from Yale.) . . . . |
Philosophy professors and those whose only interest in mathematics
is as a path to the occult may consult the Log24 posts tagged Tsimtsum.
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Thursday, February 12, 2015
Dead Reckoning
Continued from yesterday.
The passage on Claude Chevalley quoted here
yesterday in the post Dead Reckoning was, it turns out,
also quoted by Peter Galison in his essay "Structure of Crystal,
Bucket of Dust" in Circles Disturbed: The Interplay of
Mathematics and Narrative (Princeton University Press, 2012,
ed. by Apostolos Doxiadis and Barry Mazur).
Galison gives a reference to his source:
"From 'Claude Chevalley Described by His Daughter (1988),'
in Michèle Chouchan, Nicolas Bourbaki: Faits et légendes
(Paris: Éditions du Choix, 1995), 36–40, translated and cited
in Marjorie Senechal, 'The Continuing Silence of Bourbaki:
An Interview with Pierre Cartier, June 18, 1997,'
Mathematical Intelligencer 1 (1998): 22–28."
Galison's essay compares Chevalley with the physicist
John Archibald Wheeler. His final paragraph —
"Perhaps, then, it should not surprise us too much if,
as Wheeler approaches the beginning-end of all things,
there is a bucket of Borelian dust. Out of this filth,
through the proposition machine of quantum mechanics
comes pregeometry; pregeometry makes geometry;
geometry gives rise to matter and the physical laws
and constants of the universe. At once close to and far
from the crystalline story that Bourbaki invoked,
Wheeler’s genesis puts one in mind of Genesis 3:19:
'In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou
return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken:
for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.'"
See also posts tagged Wheeler.
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Tuesday, June 22, 2010
Mathematics and Narrative, continued
"By groping toward the light we are made to realize
how deep the darkness is around us."
— Arthur Koestler, The Call Girls: A Tragi-Comedy,
Random House, 1973, page 118
A 1973 review of Koestler's book—
"Koestler's 'call girls,' summoned here and there
by this university and that foundation
to perform their expert tricks, are the butts
of some chilling satire."
Examples of Light—
Felix Christian Klein (1849- June 22, 1925) and Évariste Galois (1811-1832)
Klein on Galois—
"… in France just about 1830 a new star of undreamt-of brilliance— or rather a meteor, soon to be extinguished— lighted the sky of pure mathematics: Évariste Galois."
— Felix Klein, Development of Mathematics in the 19th Century, translated by Michael Ackerman. Brookline, Mass., Math Sci Press, 1979. Page 80.
"… um 1830 herum in Frankreich als ein neuer Stern von ungeahntem Glanze am Himmel der reinen Mathematik aufleuchtet, um freilich, einem Meteor gleich, sehr bald zu verlöschen: Évariste Galois."
— Felix Klein, Vorlesungen Über Die Entwicklung Der Mathematick Im 19. Jahrhundert. New York, Chelsea Publishing Co., 1967. (Vol. I, originally published in Berlin in 1926.) Page 88.
Examples of Darkness—
Martin Gardner on Galois—
"Galois was a thoroughly obnoxious nerd,
suffering from what today would be called
a 'personality disorder.' His anger was
paranoid and unremitting."
Gardner was reviewing a recent book about Galois by one Amir Alexander.
Alexander himself has written some reviews relevant to the Koestler book above.
See Alexander on—
The 2005 Mykonos conference on Mathematics and Narrative
A series of workshops at Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation between 2003 and 2006. "The meetings brought together professional mathematicians (and other mathematical scientists) with authors, poets, artists, playwrights, and film-makers to work together on mathematically-inspired literary works."
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