"The rock cannot be broken.
It is the truth."
-- Wallace Stevens,
"Credences of Summer,"
Spellbound, and
Quotes on Mathematics,
collected by
Peter Cameron.
Mel Brooks is 80.
(See midnight on
Midsummer's Eve.)
"Like Gone with the Wind
on mescaline"
-- a description of Savannah
Noon
in the Garden of
Good and Evil:
Related material
from December 2005:
Intelligence/Counterintelligence,
Prequel on St. Cecilia's Day,
Intelligence/Counterintelligence
Continued
In memory of
Irving Kaplansky,
who died on
Sunday, June 25, 2006
"Only by the form,
the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness."
-- T. S. Eliot
Kaplansky received his doctorate in mathematics at Harvard in 1941 as the first Ph.D. student of Saunders Mac Lane.
From the April 25, 2005, Harvard Crimson:
Ex-Math Prof Mac Lane, 95, Dies
Gade University
Professor of Mathematics Barry Mazur, a friend of the late Mac Lane,
recalled that [a Mac Lane paper of 1945] had at first been rejected from a lower-caliber
mathematical journal because the editor thought that it was "more
devoid of content" than any other he had read."Saunders wrote
back and said, 'That's the point,'" Mazur said. "And in some ways
that's the genius of it. It's the barest, most Beckett-like vocabulary
that incorporates the theory and nothing else."He likened it
to a sparse grammar of nouns and verbs and a limited vocabulary that is
presented "in such a deft way that it will help you understand any
language you wish to understand and any language will fit into it."
A sparse grammar of lines from Charles Sanders Peirce (Harvard College, class of 1859):
Related entry: Binary Geometry.
"Mr. Stuart was named Lionel Simon when he was born in Manhattan, the
son of a salesman and a secretary. His father committed suicide when
the boy was 6."
Plato, Pegasus, and
the Evening Star,
and
See also two varieties of Hell,
from the New York Times on
Nov. 25, 2005, and yesterday.
A Little Extra Reading
In memory of
Mary Martin McLaughlin,
a scholar of Heloise and Abelard.
McLaughlin died on June 8, 2006.
"Following the parade, a speech is given by Charles Williams, based on his book The Place of the Lion.
Williams explains the true meaning of the word 'realism' in both
philosophy and theology. His guard of honor, bayonets gleaming, is led
by William of Ockham."
A review by John D. Burlinson of Charles Williams's novel The Place of the Lion:
"... a little extra reading regarding Abelard's take on 'universals' might
add a little extra spice-- since Abelard is the subject of the
heroine's ... doctoral dissertation. I'd suggest the
article 'The Medieval Problem of Universals' in the online Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy."
Michael L. Czapkay, a student of philosophical theology at Oxford:
"The development of logic in the schools and universities
of western Europe between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries constituted
a significant contribution to the history of philosophy. But no less
significant was the influence of this development of logic on medieval
theology. It provided the necessary conceptual apparatus for the
systematization of theology. Abelard, Ockham, and Thomas Aquinas are
paradigm cases of the extent to which logic played an active role in the
systematic formulation of Christian theology. In fact, at certain points,
for instance in modal logic, logical concepts were intimately related to
theological problems, such as God's knowledge of future contingent
truths."
The Medieval Problem of Universals, by Fordham's Gyula Klima, 2004:
"... for Abelard, a status is an object of the divine mind,
whereby God preconceives the state of his creation from
eternity."
(based on Weyl's Symmetry):
"... for then we would know
Chess and Bingo
Chess: See Log24, Midsummer Day, 2003. Happy mate change, Nicole.
Bingo: See a journal entry from seven years ago, On Linguistic Creation. Happy birthday, Willard Van Orman Quine.
Related material:
June 20, 2006
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