June 16, 2006
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For Bloomsday 2006:
Hero of His Own Story
“The philosophic college should spare a detective for me.”
— Stephen Hero. Epigraph to Chapter 2, “Dedalus and the Beauty Maze,” in Joyce and Aquinas, by William T. Noon, S. J., Yale University Press, 1957 (in the Yale paperback edition of 1963, page 18)
“Dorothy Sayers makes a great deal of sense when she points out in her highly instructive and readable book The Mind of the Maker
that ‘to complain that man measures God by his own measure is a waste
of time; man measures everything by his own experience; he has no other
yardstick.’”— William T. Noon, S. J., Joyce and Aquinas (in the Yale paperback edition of 1963, page 106)
Related material:
- Dorothy Sayers and Jill Paton Walsh
- Jill Paton Walsh‘s detective novel A Piece of Justice (1995):
“The
mathematics of tilings and quilting play background roles in this
mystery in which a graduate student attempts to write a biography of
the (fictitious) mathematician Gideon Summerfield. Summerfield is about
to posthumously receive the prestigious (and, I should point out, also
fictitious) Waymark Prize in mathematics…but it soon becomes clear
that someone with evil intentions does not want the student’s book to
be published!By all accounts this is a well written
mystery…the second by the author with college nurse Imogen Quy
playing the role of the detective.”– Mathematical Fiction by Alex Kasman, College of Charleston
- Quilt Geometry, by Steven H. Cullinane
Comments (1)
You know I come here just to torture myself, right?
The Amish would be proud.