May 21, 2007
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Euclid, Peirce, L’Engle:
No Royal RoadsA more recent royal reference:
“‘Yau
wants to be the king of geometry,’ Michael Anderson, a geometer at
Stony Brook, said. ‘He believes that everything should issue from him,
that he should have oversight. He doesn’t like people encroaching on
his territory.’” –Sylvia Nasar and David Gruber in The New Yorker, issue dated Aug. 28, 2006Wikipedia, Cultural references to the Royal Road:
“Euclid is said to have replied to King Ptolemy’s request for an easier way of learning mathematics that ‘there is no royal road to geometry.’ Charles S. Peirce,
in his ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’ (1878), says ‘There is no royal
road to logic, and really valuable ideas can only be had at the price
of close attention.’”
Related material:Day Without Logic
(March 8, 2007)
and
The Geometry of Logic
(March 10, 2007):
There may be
no royal roads to
geometry or logic,
but…“There is such a thing
as a tesseract.”
– Madeleine L’Engle,
A Wrinkle in Time
