Further One-liners (III)

A selection of bite-size chewy goodness, from our various essays.  Click to read the whole thing:

It was Laplace’s great achievement  to prove stability by sheer mathematical means – as noble a use of the imaginative faculty  as ever graced the Sistine Chapel, and by no means a snub to theWatchmaker. 

How humble is the humble wood-

chuck, always striving to be good!

Yielding to massive popular demand (no really, several people), we here reprint a description of one of the most important developments in the noosphere of the last fifty years (along with the settling of the Poincaré Conjecture and the discovery of Dark Energy):  the Lolcats Phenomenon.

Do noëtic events (the “supranatural”) likewise cohere into some larger system?  (We don’t strictly know, and intuitions have broken both ways:  the existentialists glumly nursing their absinthe, and Christians ecstatically tasting of the Communion wine.)

The big story of mathematics over the past fifty to a hundred years is in the growth in density of reticulation among the various fields, quite apart from the increased internal richness of each field in itself.  What were initially far-flung enterprises  turn out to be able to take in one another’s washing.  It is not clear, however, that such mutual assistance pacts must be functorial.

All our major experiences of life – our loves, our sorrows, our proofs of the Riemann Hypothesis --  are carried out  quite independently of string theory…