April 8, 2006

  • Story

    There is one story
       and one story only

    That will prove
       worth your telling....

    -- Robert Graves,
      "To Juan at the Winter Solstice"

       "To many,
    mathematicians have come to resemble an esoteric sect, whose members
    alone have access to secret otherworldly mysteries.
        All
    of us who came to Mykonos believed that this is an unfortunate
    situation. Mathematics is an inseparable part of human culture, and
    should be viewed and treated as such. Our underlying assumption was
    that mathematical reasoning had something important in common with that
    quintessential human activity – story-telling. But what this means, and
    what kind of connections can be drawn between the two, remained to be
    sorted out."

    -- Amir Alexander on
    last summer's Mykonos meeting

    Flashback to
    Harrison Ford's birthday
    a year earlier:



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    "He's a Mad Scientist and
    I'm his Beautiful Daughter."

    -- Deety in Heinlein's
    The Number of the Beast.

    "If you have ever loved a book
    so much that you began to
    believe that
    it continued on
    in its own world
    even after you put it down,
    this book
    could be for you."

    -- Jodi Russell, review of
    Number of the Beast

    These last two quotations
    are from

    Story Theory and
    the Number of the Beast    ,

    by Steven H. Cullinane on
    December 21, 2001.

    Related material:

    See Lucky(?) Numbers,
    yesterday's Pennsylvania lottery,
    and  the previous entry.