“The crystal was a sort of magnifying glass,
vastly enlarging the things inside the block.
Strange things they were, too.”
Monday, December 21, 2020
Re Volvo
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Saturday, July 9, 2022
Annals of Symbology
See as well Oct. 12, 2018 (and, more generally, Volvo) in this journal.
Related material:
It is not clear whether the above acronym
should be pronounced "psycho" or "sicko."
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Friday, July 28, 2017
Compare and Contrast
From an obituary in this afternoon's online New York Times —
"Mr. Morris published his autobiography,
Get the Picture: A Personal History of Photojournalism , in 1998."
The obit suggests a review of posts mentioning the film
"The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," starring Kristen Wiig.
See as well Wiig and the Louvre Banquet Hall in L.A. —
The book title Get the Picture above suggests a review of
a different Louvre picture, starring Audrey Hepburn —
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Thursday, July 27, 2017
Wednesday, July 26, 2017
Icon Parking
For the title, see Icon Parking in a search for 54th in this journal.
For related iconic remarks, click on either image below.
.
This post was suggested by the Dec. 30, 2016, date of the
death in Nuremberg of mathematician Wolf Barth. The first
image above is from a mathematics-related work by
John von Neumann discussed here on that date.
See also Wolf Barth in this journal for posts that largely
concern not the above Barth, but an artist of the same name.
For posts on the mathematician only, see Barth + Kummer.
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Tuesday, July 25, 2017
The Corner Trick
"At a visual level a trick is played" —
Or: Annie Hall Revisited —
Air date: January 5, 2017.
For other philosophical remarks from the first eight days of 2017, see
posts now tagged Conceptualist Minimalism.
Related material: See March 14, 2017, and the 2007 film Waitress .
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Monday, November 25, 2002
Monday November 25, 2002
Swashbucklers and Misfits
There are two theories of truth, according to a a book on the history of geometry —
The “Story Theory” and the “Diamond Theory.”
For those who prefer the story theory…
From a review by Brian Hayes of A Beautiful Mind:
“Mathematical genius is rare enough. Cloaked in madness, or wrapped in serious eccentricity, it’s the stuff legends are made of.
There are brilliant and productive mathematicians who go to the office from nine to five, play tennis on the weekend, and worry about fixing the gearbox in the Volvo. Not many of them become the subjects of popular biographies. Instead we read about the great swashbucklers and misfits of mathematics, whose stories combine genius with high romance or eccentricity.”
|
Russell Crowe, |
Marilyn |
Hollywood has recently given us a mathematical Russell Crowe. For a somewhat tougher sell, Marilyn Monroe as a mathematician, see “Insignificance,” 1985: “Marilyn Monroe on her hands and knees explains the theory of relativity to Albert Einstein.”
For a combination of misfit and swashbuckler in one Holy Name, see today’s earlier note, “The Artist’s Signature.”
See also my note of October 4, 2002, on Michelangelo, and the description of “the face of God” in this review.