"Emphasis will be placed on discovery through conjecture and
experimentation."

-- Elena Mantovan, pre-2007 undated Harvard syllabus for Quantitative Reasoning 28, "The Magic of Numbers"

"The lunatic, the lover, and the poet, said Shakespeare, are of
imagination all compact. He forgot the mathematician.... Those who win
through to the end of The Magic of Numbers will be for the rest of their lives in touch with the accessible mystery of things."

-- Review, Harvard Magazine, Jan/Feb 2004

"Lear becomes almost lyrical. 'When thou dost
ask me blessing, I'll kneel down/ And pray, and sing, and tell old
tales, and laugh/ At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues/ Talk
of court news; and we'll talk with them too/ Who loses and who wins;
who's in, who's out-- And take upon's the mystery of things/ As if we
were God's spies.' That is a remarkable, haunting passage."

-- Father James V. Schall, Society of Jesus, Georgetown Hoya, undated column (perhaps, the URL indicates, from All Hallows' Eve, 2006)

The New York Times,
Thursday, September 13, 2007--

Burt Hasen, a New York
painter who drew inspiration from his experience working with maps as a
military technician during World War II, died on Friday [September 7, 2007] in Manhattan.
He was 85 and lived in Lower Manhattan....

During the war he served in the Air Force in the Pacific, where his
duties involved close study of aerial maps, an activity that lastingly
influenced his work. His densely worked canvases often had an overhead
perspective....Toward the end of his life,
many of his seemingly abstract paintings were based directly, and in
detail, on maps....

In 2006 Mr. Hasen, his wife and the other tenants of a five-story
building at 7 Dutch Street near the South Street Seaport made news when
they organized against their landlord’s attempt to evict them from the
rent-regulated lofts they had occupied for more than 30 years. They
subsequently had their leases renewed.

"For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross."
-- Gravity's Rainbow