Alexey: Ha §ã§Ý§Ñ§Óy! Your discovery of links between LATH and Mikhail Mikhailovich Zoshchenko do merit a reward, and if my current email negotiations with the Royal Nigerian Bank bear fruit, I promise to express my gratitude with a hard-monetary gesture. Your clever anagrammatical games, however, do little to advance Nabokovian understanding and scholarship. Indeed, our enjoyment of VN’s own wordplays may well suffer from seeing how easy it is to juggle characters! You magnify the pointlessness by introducing the trick of adding then subtracting selected characters to achieve the desired equation. You must know that computers have taken all the mystical, gemiatric “fun” out of such manipulations: see, especially, Don Knuth’s latest volume in his Art of Computing series, devoted to Combinatorics where N-letter Word Golf problems succumb to a few mouse-clicks. The creativity has moved from trial-and-error manual juggling to the clever sods who program these divine algorithms. I single out Knuth (quod googlet) because he has pioneered “literary” programming, in the sense that good code should have the attributes we associate with good writing. You (after due apprenticeship!) can (re-)read the text of well-structured programs (none of that goto-infected “spaghetti” code seen in barbaric Basic) with Nabokovian delight.
An analogy worth pondering: suppose the VN-list received regular examples of reader-devised cryptic crosswords and chess-problems, rather than reader-devised anagrams and wordplays? I claim the former might provide more insights into VN’s remarkable mind. Both Cryptic Crosswords and Chess problems can gain much help from computers (both setting and solving) but retain an irreducible human-creativity challenge. E.g., after many years of analysis and computer-scrutiny by Kasparov and others, Raymone Keene reports a startling move that would have changed the classic Capablanca-Reshevsky game.
Re-Grigoriy Perelman: his story (scandale!) was aired on this list a few years ago. It’s well-nigh impossible for non-mathematicians to fathom his glorious achievement (proof of Poincaré Conjecture for 3-dimensional spheres). I studied under Stephen Smale (who proved the Poincaré Conjecture in 1961 for dimensions greater than 3*!!) and under René Thom (who threw spanners into earlier non-proofs for dimension 3!!) yet cannot claim to follow all the diabolical subtleties of Perelman’s proof (published first in outline then refined with the detail needed to convince his peers). It took the experts some time to verify, and then for the Fields Medal and $1 million Clay Prize to be awarded. And declined! It’s no secret that many mathematicians were peed off by Perelman’s rejection of these honours, not so much the giving up of the cash rewards, but the implied insult to a community. Perelman’s proof rested on the previous hard-won results of many mathematicians. Rather than Newton’s modest claim of standing on giants’ shoulders, Perelman’s rejection seems more like ungratefully treading on giants’ toes! Still, weirdly “beautiful minds” are well-known in the arts and sciences! We mortals forgive John Nash, Alexander Grothendieck (Alexey: he makes Perelman seem boringly normal!), Kurt Go:del, Paul Dirac, Wolfgang Pauli, more.
Stan Kelly-Bootle
* The earthly-surface spheres we are used to are 2-dimensional manifolds embedded in our familiar 3-dimensional space. The 3-dimensional sphere embedded in 4-dimensions is tougher to visualize, yet represents a plausible model for the very cosmos we INHABIT! That the conjecture was proved first for even higher dimensions (4-d spheres embedded in 5 dimensions, etc) must puzzle outsiders! Cases d = 0, 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7 .... trivial or proven, but why should d = 3 turn out to have been so intractable until Grigoriy? It’s a moot point to what extent VN appreciated the mathematical, as opposed to the mystical, properties of these higher dimensions. See VN’s struggle with Einstein’s (3+1)-d spacetime in The Quill and the Scalpel: Nabokov's Art and the Worlds of Science (Stephen Blackwell).
On 25/03/2010 08:32, "Alexey Sklyarenko" <skylark05@MAIL.RU> wrote:
Pity that no one has offered me a million-dollar prize for my "discoveries" (whatever they are worth). This would allow me to pay for the Internet services and write to Nabokv-L till the end of my days.
On the other hand, I know that Perelman (a genius and a freak in his own right) is not particularly happy to be so popular with the media.
Alexey Sklyarenko