Subject
Nabokoviana--Re: Nabokov and Mathematics (fwd)
From
Date
Body
From: "Jerry Friedman, Northern N. M. Community College"
<jfriedman@nnm.cc.nm.us>
I can't add anything to Brian Boyd's citations, but here is a
quotation that might be relevant. It's from "The Lost Cafe", a
reminiscence of the mathematician Stan Ulam, by his "influencee"
Gian-Carlo Rota, professor of Applied Mathematics and Philosophy at
MIT. The passage begins the short section on Ulam's possibly more
eminent and stranger friend John von Neumann.
"Of all escapes from reality, mathematics is the most successful
ever. It is a fantasy that becomes all the more addictive because it
works back to improve the same reality we are trying to evade. All
other escapes--love, drugs, hobbies, whatever--are epehemeral by
comparison. The mathematician's feeling of triumph, as he forces the
world to obey the laws his imagination has freely created, feeds on
its own success. The world is permanently changed by the workings of
his mind, and the certainty that his creations will endure renews his
confidence as no other pursuit. The mathematician becomes totally
committed, a monster like Nabokov's chess player, who eventually sees
all life as subordinate to the game of chess.
"Many of us remember the feeling of ecstasy we experienced when
we first read von Neumann's series of papers on rings of operators
in Hilbert space. It is a paradise from which no one will ever
dislodge us (as Hilbert said of Cantor's set theory)...."
(Published in _Los Alamos Science_ special issue of 1987, which
was reprinted by Cambridge University Press as _From Cardinals to
Chaos: Reflections on the Life and Legacy of Stanislaw Ulam_. The
editor was Necia Grant Cooper. "The Lost Cafe" is also a chapter of
Rota's autobiographical _Indiscrete Thoughts_, Boston: Birkhauser,
1997.)
Jerry Friedman
>From Eric Edward Katz (eekatz@pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu)
>
>The discussion of John Nash reminds me of a question I've been meaning to
>pose to the list: where in his works does Nabokov make references to
>mathematics and what was the extent of his knowledge of math?
> There is an excellent description of Luzhin's study of (projective)
>geometry in _The Defense_. The narrator of _Ultima Thule_ comments
>sarcastically to Falter that his great secret is hidden in the word
>"heterologous." This is a reference to the Richard paradox:
>Take all words. Call those that describe themselves (like adjectival)
>homologous, those that don't, heterologous. Then, how would the word
>"heterologous" be classified? Nabokov's facetious use of the paradox is
>even appropriate.
> Doesn't Nabokov somewhere refer to the "poetry of pure mathematics"?
>That leads me to wonder if he read G.H. Hardy's _A Mathematician's
>Apology_. In it Hardy expresses a theory of aesthetics ("A
>mathematician,
>like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns") and a disdain for the
>practical that Nabokov would have appreciated. Incidentally, Hardy and
>Nabokov may have been at Cambridge at the same time (Hardy as a prof),
>but it's absurd to ask if they ever met.
>
>Sincerely,
>Eric Edward Katz
>
>(Eric Edward Katz is a mathematics major at Ohio State University)
>
<jfriedman@nnm.cc.nm.us>
I can't add anything to Brian Boyd's citations, but here is a
quotation that might be relevant. It's from "The Lost Cafe", a
reminiscence of the mathematician Stan Ulam, by his "influencee"
Gian-Carlo Rota, professor of Applied Mathematics and Philosophy at
MIT. The passage begins the short section on Ulam's possibly more
eminent and stranger friend John von Neumann.
"Of all escapes from reality, mathematics is the most successful
ever. It is a fantasy that becomes all the more addictive because it
works back to improve the same reality we are trying to evade. All
other escapes--love, drugs, hobbies, whatever--are epehemeral by
comparison. The mathematician's feeling of triumph, as he forces the
world to obey the laws his imagination has freely created, feeds on
its own success. The world is permanently changed by the workings of
his mind, and the certainty that his creations will endure renews his
confidence as no other pursuit. The mathematician becomes totally
committed, a monster like Nabokov's chess player, who eventually sees
all life as subordinate to the game of chess.
"Many of us remember the feeling of ecstasy we experienced when
we first read von Neumann's series of papers on rings of operators
in Hilbert space. It is a paradise from which no one will ever
dislodge us (as Hilbert said of Cantor's set theory)...."
(Published in _Los Alamos Science_ special issue of 1987, which
was reprinted by Cambridge University Press as _From Cardinals to
Chaos: Reflections on the Life and Legacy of Stanislaw Ulam_. The
editor was Necia Grant Cooper. "The Lost Cafe" is also a chapter of
Rota's autobiographical _Indiscrete Thoughts_, Boston: Birkhauser,
1997.)
Jerry Friedman
>From Eric Edward Katz (eekatz@pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu)
>
>The discussion of John Nash reminds me of a question I've been meaning to
>pose to the list: where in his works does Nabokov make references to
>mathematics and what was the extent of his knowledge of math?
> There is an excellent description of Luzhin's study of (projective)
>geometry in _The Defense_. The narrator of _Ultima Thule_ comments
>sarcastically to Falter that his great secret is hidden in the word
>"heterologous." This is a reference to the Richard paradox:
>Take all words. Call those that describe themselves (like adjectival)
>homologous, those that don't, heterologous. Then, how would the word
>"heterologous" be classified? Nabokov's facetious use of the paradox is
>even appropriate.
> Doesn't Nabokov somewhere refer to the "poetry of pure mathematics"?
>That leads me to wonder if he read G.H. Hardy's _A Mathematician's
>Apology_. In it Hardy expresses a theory of aesthetics ("A
>mathematician,
>like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns") and a disdain for the
>practical that Nabokov would have appreciated. Incidentally, Hardy and
>Nabokov may have been at Cambridge at the same time (Hardy as a prof),
>but it's absurd to ask if they ever met.
>
>Sincerely,
>Eric Edward Katz
>
>(Eric Edward Katz is a mathematics major at Ohio State University)
>