Log24

“The great Confucius guided China spiritually for over 2,000 years.
The main doctrine is ' 仁 ' pronounced 'ren', meaning two people,
i.e., human relationship. Modern science has been highly competitive.
I think an injection of the human element will make our subject more
healthy and enjoyable." 

— Geometer Shiing-Shen Chern in a Wikipedia article

See the "ren" character in Wiktionary.  See as well . . .

"The development of ren  ( 仁 )  in early Chinese philosophy,"
By Robin Elliott Curtis, U. of B.C. Master's thesis, 2016 —

Thus, we can conclude that several different forms of
the character ren , were in existence during the
Warring States period. This shows that etymological analyses
focusing exclusively on the combination of 人 and 二 are inadequate.
It should also serve as a warning against “character fetishization,”
or giving “exaggerated status to Chinese characters in the interpretation
of Chinese language, thought, and culture.” ⁴⁶

46  Edward McDonald 2009, p. 1194.

McDonald, Edward. 2009. “Getting over the Walls of
Discourse: 'Character Fetishization' in Chinese Studies.”
The Journal of Asian Studies  68 (4): 1189 – 1213.

Wikipedia article on Ren  in Confucianism:

"The core of everything" . . . Citation needed ?

https://www.shmoop.com/no-country-for-old-men/coin-symbol.html —

"You know the date on this coin?"

Related material —

This journal on March 7, 2014 —

From Klein’s 1893  Lectures on Mathematics —

“The varieties introduced by Wirtinger may be called 
  Kummer varieties….” — E. Spanier, 1956

From the "varieties introduced by Wirtinger" link above —

 .

The Princeton reference in the previous post suggests
a check of today's  online Daily Princetonian. This yields …

Related material:  Library of Hell.

"Visibilities are not forms of objects, nor even forms
that would show up under light, but rather forms of
luminosity which are created by the light itself and
allow a thing or object to exist only as a flash, sparkle
or shimmer."

— Deleuze, Foucault

Clap if you believe in Plotnitsky .

From his "Teaching" page —

(Continued from April 9)

*… Or a Spearhead?

(A sequel to yesterday's Orthodox Easter posts)

This morning's Google News —

The New York Times  on the late Günter Grass —

"Many of Mr. Grass’s books are phantasmagorical
mixtures of fact and fantasy, some of them inviting
comparison with the Latin American style known as
magical realism. His own name for this style was
'broadened reality.'"

From p. xii of the 2005 second edition of a book discussed
in yesterday's Orthodox Easter posts —

(Click image to enlarge.)

Early editions of The Heart of Mathematics  include 
Gary Larson's legendary Hell's Library "Far Side" cartoon. 
Books in Hell's Library include Big Book of Story Problems ,
More Story Problems , and Even More Story Problems .

— Adapted from a review of the 2000 first edition

See also Mathematics and Narrative in this journal.

See also "Derrida + Serpent" in this journal.

 Part 3 of 5  (See also Part 1 and Part 2) begins as follows…

"Incommensurable. It is a strange word. I wondered, why  did Kuhn choose it? What was the attraction? 

Here’s one clue. At the very end of 'The Road Since Structure,' a compendium of essays on Kuhn’s work, there is an interview with three Greek philosophers of science, Aristides Baltas, Kostas Gavroglu and Vassiliki Kindi. Kuhn provides a brief account of the historical origins of his idea. Here is the relevant segment of the interview.

T. KUHN: Look, 'incommensurability' is easy.

V. KINDI: You mean in mathematics?

T. KUHN: …When I was a bright high school mathematician and beginning to learn Calculus, somebody gave me—or maybe I asked for it because I’d heard about it—there was sort of a big two-volume Calculus book by, I can’t remember whom. And then I never really read it. I read the early parts of it. And early on it gives the proof of the irrationality of the square root of 2. And I thought it was beautiful. That was terribly exciting, and I learned what incommensurability was then and there. So, it was all ready for me, I mean, it was a metaphor but it got at nicely what I was after. So, that’s where I got it.

'It was all ready for me.' I thought, 'Wow.' The language was suggestive. I imagined √2 provocatively dressed, its lips rouged. But there was an unexpected surprise. The idea didn’t come from the physical sciences or philosophy or linguistics, but from mathematics ."

A footnote from Morris (no. 29)—

"Those who are familiar with the proof [of irrationality] certainly don’t want me to explain it here; likewise, those who are unfamiliar with it don’t want me to explain it here, either. There are many simple proofs in many histories of mathematics — E.T. Bell, Sir Thomas Heath, Morris Kline, etc., etc. Barry Mazur offers a proof in his book, 'Imagining Numbers (particularly the square root of minus fifteen),' New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2003, 26ff. And there are two proofs in his essay, 'How Did Theaetetus Prove His Theorem?', available on Mazur’s Harvard Web site."

There may, actually, be a few who do  want the proof. They may consult the sources Morris gives, or the excellent  description by G.H. Hardy in A Mathematician's Apology , or, perhaps best of all for present purposes, the proof as described in a "sort of a big two-volume Calculus book" (perhaps the one Kuhn mentioned)…  See page 6 and page 7 of  Volume One  of Richard Courant's classic Differential and Integral Calculus  (second edition, 1937, reprinted many times through 1970, and again in a Wiley Classics Library Edition in 1988).

From pbs.org:

“In 1940 Dunham and her company appeared in the black Broadway musical, ‘Cabin in the Sky,’ staged by George Balanchine, in which Dunham played the sultry siren Georgia Brown….”

From the Library of Congress:

“George Balanchine and Katherine Dunham were, in effect, co-choreographers of the dances in the show, at least for those in which she and her dancers appeared. When choreographing for dancers trained in techniques other than classical ballet, Balanchine’s habit was to respect their expertise and their personal style, to allow them as much creative input as they wished to make, and then to arrange their steps, combinations, and movements into a unified choreographic composition. Dunham found this method of collaboration quite agreeable, and she and Balanchine enjoyed a particularly amicable working relationship.

The story of Cabin in the Sky centers on Little Joe, a kindhearted but morally ambivalent Everyman, who is stabbed in a dispute over a crap game, dies and is bound for Hell, but is saved by his good wife’s prayers and given extra time on earth to qualify for admission to Heaven. Dooley Wilson played Little Joe….”

Buckley and Pinochet

Yesterday, William F. Buckley, Jr., author of God and Man at Yale, turned 80.

Here is an entry from yesterday, postponed until today so it would not intervene between yesterday’s related entries “Crossroads” and “For Constantine’s Angel.”

A related item…

According to “Today in History,” by the Associated Press, for Nov. 25, 2005,

If, in fact, Hell also has a library, let us pray that it contains, for Pinochet’s future edification, the collected works of Pablo Neruda.

Chinese Theatre, Part II:

Just Say NO

For more on the above “spider” symbol, see

ART WARS for Trotsky’s Birthday
(Oct. 26, 2003), Parts I and II

and the site from which
the above figure is taken,

Yin & Yang and the I Ching.

For some Chinese poetic justice, see

The Song of Saint Ezra,

Library of Paradise, and

Endings and Beginnings.

See, too, the Chinese character for “end”
used to sell the work of Ian Fleming:

Note, in Endings and Beginnings, the strong resemblance between this character and the name of the Chinese-American architect of the Robert Frost Library at Amherst College.  Then meditate on the following passage by Amherst graduate Stephen Mitchell:

“We dance round in a ring and suppose,
But the Secret sits in the middle
    and knows,”
Robert Frost wrote,
looking in from the outside.
Looking out from the inside,
    Chuang-tzu wrote,
“When we understand, we are at
    the center of the circle,
and there we sit while Yes and No
    chase each other
around the circumference.”

A view of the Robert Frost Library
from the inside is available in the entry

Library of Paradise

mentioned above.

See, too, my entry

Keats and the Web

of July 28, 2002.

A Face in the Crowd

Six Dead in Mississippi Shooting 

“I’m gonna buy myself a shotgun,
 one with a long shiny barrel”

— Jimmie Rodgers,
   “Father of Country Music,”
   “T for Texas” lyrics

Related material:

Jimmie Rodgers Museum, Meridian, MS

East Mississippi Insane Hospital, Meridian, MS

Location of East Mississippi Insane Hospital