Disjecta membra (XXII)

Lines placed in a bottle, and set out upon the sea …

At summer camp, they taught us just a handful of songs.   But they were good ones, and we sang them over and over, and they never left us, we sing them yet

The purely “human side” of mathematicians  is generally less interesting than that of country music stars.  A lot of mathematicians are pretty Asperger’s, frankly.

Among Harvard math-majors, back in my day (before your time -- don’t ask), the commitment to abstraction  was intense and unquestioned.   We had barely begun to shave -- and many of us had never been laid -- but we took to abstraction like -- like a duck to water, like a kitteh to cheezeburger, like Donald Trump  to a pile of manure. 

If you move mostly in Cantorian and Apostolic circles, you seldom come in contact with the actual  howling-gibbon lunacy that exists -- well, not really in the fields and forests outside the groves of Academe, but mostly within the Academy itself, in those parts that have fallen prey to multiculturalists, and are thus a lost cause.

Extending the appellation modernism  to mathematics … is like “shooting an arrow and then tracing a bull’s eye around it.”

A zoologist, a mathematician, and a positivist  are touring the hinterlands of Bohemia by train.  Through the window they spot, standing motionless at some distance, a purple cow….