Log24

"Plato acknowledges how khora  challenges our normal categories
 of rational understanding. He suggests that we might best approach it
 through a kind of dream  consciousness."
  —Richard Kearney, quoted here yesterday afternoon

"You make me feel like I'm living a teenage dream."
 — Song at last night's Grammy awards

Richard Kiley in "Blackboard Jungle" (1955)
Note the directive on the blackboard.

Quoted here last year on this date—

Alexandre Borovik's Mathematics Under the Microscope  (American Mathematical Society, 2010)—

"Once I mentioned to Gelfand that I read his Functions and Graphs ; in response, he rather sceptically asked me what I had learned from the book. He was delighted to hear my answer: 'The general principle of always looking at the simplest possible example.'….

So, let us look at the principle in more detail:

Always test a mathematical theory on the simplest possible example…

This is a banality, of course. Everyone knows it; therefore, almost no one follows it."

Related material— Geometry Simplified and A Simple Reflection Group of Order 168.

"Great indeed is the riddle of the universe.
 Beautiful indeed is the source of truth."

– Shing-Tung Yau, Chairman,
Department of Mathematics, Harvard University

"Always keep a diamond in your mind."

– King Solomon at the Paradiso

Image from stoneship.org