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2+2=5: Reframing Literature through Mathematics
Yes, I'm on sabbatical, and yes, I'm teaching a class anyway. UF's Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere has a team-teaching initiative. My friend and colleague Eric Kligerman and I...
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Et in Arcadia Ego
Et in Arcadia Ego, by Nicolas Poussin Tom Stoppard's Arcadia: a play that alternates between 1809 and the present (well, 1993 present), begins with a mention of Fermat's Last Theorem (which had not...
View Article"Women Can't Write; Women Can't Paint"
How many times do you think Virginia Woolf heard that? Sexism was rampant enough in the early 20th century (luckily, we're past all that now, right?) that it was difficult for a woman to have a career...
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Zeno, Limits, and Arguing About Numbers
One of my favorite things about mathematics is that it's its own insular world in many ways (note the correct it's-its usage there; as an aside I think passing an it's/its, your/you're, and...
View ArticleThere Is An Infinite Amount of Hope, Just Not For Us
The fact is that every writer creates his own precursors. — Jorge Luis Borges, in Kafka and His Precursors Borges points out that Zeno's parable of Achilles and the tortoise, which neatly...
View ArticleFranz and Georg
As far as I know, Kafka and Cantor never met, and there is no reason to believe they did. Still, I can't help wondering if Franz knew about Georg's work, even though he claimed to have great...
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Borges y yo (y tú también)
Jorge Luis Borges, perhaps more than any other writer of his stature, weaves mathematics into the structure of his stories so completely that it can take an immense amount of analysis to unravel them....
View ArticleEpistemania
I remember sitting in eleventh grade English class one morning, second period after a late night flipping burgers at work, half-asleep with my head against the wall, discussing poetry. This would have...
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Drills and Needles
I swear it was a coincidence. We really didn't set out to show Darren Aronofsky's first film, \(\Pi\): Faith in Chaos so close to Pi Day; it just happened that way. If you've never seen it, you...
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Möbius Metaphor
A couple of hours before class last Thursday, I got a text from Eric asking if I could talk about the Möbius strip. He had this idea, not completely worked out at the time (seriously, like two hours...
View ArticleMr. Heisenberg Goes to Copenhagen
A 1941 meeting between Werner Heisenberg and Niels Bohr is the subject of Michael Frayn's Copenhagen. The link takes you to a PBS production of the play, starring James Bond Daniel Craig as Heisenberg....
View ArticleBut is it literature?
I once saw a video installation at an art gallery (full disclosure: I do not care for "video as art" so know that before reading on) which showed a fox running around a London art museum after hours....
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Embrace the Mystery
The final "text" for the course: the Coen Brothers' A Serious Man, the story of Larry Gopnick, a physics professor in 1967 Minnesota. It's pretty much the Book of Job for modern times--a series of...
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Gant, Caulfield, Wolfe, Salinger
When I was in sixth grade my class took an overnight field trip to Asheville, NC. This would have been the winter of 1980-81 and it included the obligatory visit to the Biltmore House, and, for some...
View ArticleWhile my accordion gently weeps
My son, Gus, got an accordion and he's home on spring break. Here's the audio from our duet performance of The Beatles' While My Guitar Gently Weeps, recorded via the voice memos app on my phone. I...
View ArticleAnother MVT sighting
This blog has lain fallow some three years now while I took a detour into writing for a commercial source. Now that that's done (it was great, but it was time to move on) it's time to plant some new...
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I learned a new word and it reminded me of Morse theory
Thalweg. Obviously German, built from thal, an outdated word meaning valley or dale, and weg, meaning way. So a thalweg is a "valley way," whatever that might mean.But if you've ever taken a hike then...
View ArticleAn infinite sum formula for pi
My fabulous podcast cohost, Evelyn Lamb, is competing in something called the Big Internet Mathoff. Her first entry is about the Wallis sieve and you can read it here. The summary is the following....
View ArticleIn memoriam: Peter Fletcher (1939-2019)
In 1987 I went off to Blacksburg, VA, to major in mathematics at Virginia Tech. My goal: to go on to a PhD and become a college professor. I had no idea that this was pretty ambitious for a...
View ArticleCarnival of Mathematics 180
In which this blog hosts the traveling carnival, founded by the fine folks at aperiodical.comThis is number 180 in the series, which I suppose means this has been going on for some 15 years. Tradition...
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