Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0017709, Wed, 18 Feb 2009 03:19:25 +0000

Subject
SIGHTINGS
Date
Body
1. http://mags.acm.org/queue/200901/

This is a self-sighting from my Jan 2009 ACM column where I discuss VN¹s
³proof by rhyme.² It¹s in para 2 which will spare you reading too many
irrelevancies!

2. Current Sunday Times colour supplement: VN¹s ³Natasha² (first appearance
in a UK publication)
The intro quotes Dmitri¹s praise for this early sign of his father¹s genius.

3. From Frank Kaplan¹s wonderful but technically challenging THE NOTHING
THAT IS ­ A Natural History of ZERO (Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 1999 [so
apologies if it¹s already been noticed])

P 18: If you favor the explanation that the Œ0¹ was devised by the Greeks
without refereance to their alphabet, its arbitrariness is lessened by
noticing how often nature supplies us with circular hollows, from an open
mouth to the faintly outlined dark of the moon, from craters to wounds.
³Skulls and seeds and all good things are round,² wrote Nabokov. However,
the sign for zero evolved, there was always some sort of fancy bar over it
...

P 208: We have gotten all the rational numbers ‹ and a knockout insight as
well ‹ from 0 to 1. But the question remains, could we get them all from
zero solus? We could, were we able to make 0 yield 1, since then we would
simply proceed as above. This was the dream of whatever monk it was who
wrote the Salem Codex in the twelfth century:

Every number arises from One, and this in turn from Zero. In this lies a
great and sacred mystery ... He creates all out of nothing, preserves and
rules it: omnia ex nihilo creat, conservat et gubernat.

Now hold on just a damned minute, as Jimmie Stewart would have said. Adelard
of Bath, you remember ‹ also twelfth century ‹ had a student N. O¹Creat. But
are we dealing, instead with some elaborate medieval joke here, a deep pun:
the sorcerer¹s apprentice nihilo creat turning into N. O¹Creat? Was the
spirit of Nabokov cavorting with Adelard of Bath?

... With a little ingenuity not God but we humans can do it [derive 1 from
0]
------ end citation -----

Recalling VN¹s statement quoted recently by Jansy that ONE is the only real
number, and everything else comes from addition, you may see some
contradictions afoot. Was Kaplan aware of VN¹s assertion: VN the
poet/wordmaster but not, on this occasion, the mathematician able to see the
beauty of 0 playing the prime role he assigns to 1? Was VN aware of the
Salem Codex? The irony will escape the many non-mathematicians on our list,
I fear.

Stan Kelly-Bootle







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