of the previous entry's concept of
a "critical mass" of weblog entries,
a concept reflected in
the saying
"You can't win the lottery
if you don't buy a ticket."
Mathematics and Narrative:
A Two-Part Invention
Here are today's
numbers from the
Keystone State:
of those numbers:
The second sentence, in bold type, was added on 8/21 by yours truly. No deep learning or original thought was required to make this important improvement in the article; the sentence was simply copied from the then-current version of the article on Grigori Perelman (who has, it seems, proved the geometrization conjecture).
This may serve as an example of the "mathematics" part of the above phrase "Mathematics and Narrative" — a phrase which served, with associated links, as the Log24 entry for 8/21.
7/23 — Narrative:
This quotation appeared in the Log24 entry for 7/23, "Dance of the Numbers." What Dyson calls a "story" or "drama" is in fact mathematics. (Dyson calls the "steps" in the story "works of art," so it is clear that Dyson (a former student of G. H. Hardy) is discussing mathematical steps, not paragraphs in someone's account– perhaps a work of art, perhaps not– of mathematical history.) I personally regard the rhetorical trick of calling the steps leading to a mathematical result a "story" as contemptible vulgarization, but Dyson, as someone whose work (pdf) led to the particular result he is discussing, is entitled to dramatize it as he pleases.
For related material on mathematics, narrative, and vulgarization, click here.
The art of interpretation (applied above to a lottery) is relevant to narrative and perhaps also, in some sense, to the arts of mathematical research and exposition (if not to mathematics itself). This art is called hermeneutics.
For more on the subject, see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Hans-Georg Gadamer, "the decisive figure in the development of twentieth-century hermeneutics."
"Foreword" in Gian-Carlo Rota,
Indiscrete Thoughts,
Boston: Birkhäuser Verlag,
1996, xiii-xvii, and
"Gadamer's Theory of Hermeneutics" in
The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer,
edited by Lewis E. Hahn,
The Library of Living Philosophers, Vol. 24,
Chicago: Open Court Publishers,
1997, 223-34.
