Friday, December 2, 2022
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Field Dream
In memory of Wu Guanzhong, Chinese artist who died in Beijing on Friday—
"Once Knecht confessed to his teacher that he wished to learn enough to be able to incorporate the system of the I Ching into the Glass Bead Game. Elder Brother laughed. 'Go ahead and try,' he exclaimed. 'You'll see how it turns out. Anyone can create a pretty little bamboo garden in the world. But I doubt that the gardener would succeed in incorporating the world in his bamboo grove.'"
— Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game, translated by Richard and Clara Winston
"The Chinese painter Wu Tao-tzu was famous because he could paint nature in a unique realistic way that was able to deceive all who viewed the picture. At the end of his life he painted his last work and invited all his friends and admirers to its presentation. They saw a wonderful landscape with a romantic path, starting in the foreground between flowers and moving through meadows to high mountains in the background, where it disappeared in an evening fog. He explained that this picture summed up all his life’s work and at the end of his short talk he jumped into the painting and onto the path, walked to the background and disappeared forever."
— Jürgen Teichmann. Teichmann notes that "the German poet Hermann Hesse tells a variation of this anecdote, according to his own personal view, as found in his 'Kurzgefasster Lebenslauf,' 1925."
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Who Wants to Be a Mathematician?
— A followup to yesterday's note on mathematics as a post-Communist activity
From Log24 on May 20, 2008—
The Dictatorship of Talent, by David Brooks in The New York Times of December 4, 2007:
“When you talk to Americans, you find that they have all these weird notions about Chinese communism. You try to tell them that China isn’t a communist country anymore. It’s got a different system: meritocratic paternalism. You joke: Imagine the Ivy League taking over the shell of the Communist Party and deciding not to change the name. Imagine the Harvard Alumni Association with an army.”
The New York Times this morning—
BEIJING (AP) — China threw open the gates of its secretive Central Party School on Wednesday, offering foreign journalists a rare but carefully scripted peek at the leafy campus where the country's Communist elite are trained.
The tour is part of a drive by the Communist government to show it's becoming more open and transparent…
The tour was also part of activities marking the 89th anniversary this week of the founding of China's Communist Party.
The American Mathematical Society's top news item today—
"Data collected this March by the AMS from approximately sixty mathematics departments in the U.S. shows that the number of open full-time academic positions requiring a Ph.D. in 2010 is down 57% in two years."
Party on.
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Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Kind of Bleu
Click for a Global Partners story.
Related material:
"We want to promote the vitality of mathematics
by playing an increasingly active role in political affairs."
— Princeton Class Notes, Jan. 27, 1999, remark by Felix E. Browder,
then president-elect of the American Mathematical Society (AMS).
See also web pages on Browder's brothers
William (also an AMS president, 1989-1990)
and Andrew and their father Earl.
Earl was General Secretary of
the Communist Party USA from 1930 to 1944.
Princeton Class Notes on the Browders— "The senior Browder 'discouraged me and my two brothers from taking an active part in politics, but strongly encouraged our intellectual interests.' That all three brothers became mathematicians– the others are Princeton professor William Browder '58 (a former president of the AMS) and Brown professor Andrew Browder– is an outcome for which Felix Browder 'can offer no rational explanation.'"
"As a trusted partner, we do more than consult and train.
We add a new dimension to our client’s thinking…."
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