Rorschach Philology

Six years ago, Fox News (and imitators) ran a most ill-founded story in a genre that we may term Allah-sightings.

The underbelly of a plane was streaked, thus:

Mene, mene, tekel  upharsin

Omigosh!  Arabic writing!  Terrorists on the tarmac!  How did they get access to the airplane!!  At whom shall we point the finger of blame!!!

BLUF:  Bogus.  The streaks on the airplane are not writing of any sort, let alone a terrorist message in Arabic.  (Our post on the matter, and on the underlying problem of the semiotic ambiguity of abstract images, can be viewed  here.)

Later, someone imagined that, by tilting your head a certain way, a decorative swipe on a certain brand of sneakers looked rather like … you guessed it,  “Allah”.  Only this time, it hadn’t been placed there by jihadis;  rather, by Islamophobes, since shoes are well-known to be held in low esteem in circum-Mediterranean Islamic lands.  Hullabaloo on social media.  Fortunately that story died before it could become a staple of the jihadi media, else we might have faced further killings such as those that followed the Danish-cartoons scandal.
Here you can read about that episode:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/nike-to-trash-trainers-that-offended-islam-1257776.html

Again:  Bogus. Judge for yourself:

And now we are being told, by such gullible outlets as the BBC and the New York Times, that (in the words of the headline in National Geographic),

    Viking Funeral Clothes Reveal Surprising Arabic Lettering

Namely, once again, that ubiquitous "Allah".  Along with (as a bonus) "Ali", another simple graph that is little more than an extended swoop.
The proper response to such a claim (by a Swedish “textile archaeologist”, not a linguist) is to present the evidence, and weigh it.  But that would be merely one step in the arduous progress of empirical science.  Instead, to pump up their headlines, the media assume the truth of that unproven assertion, reporting the claims in factive mood, as “Why Are These Viking Burial Clothes Inscribed with Arabic Script? “(History) and “Why did Vikings have 'Allah' embroidered into funeral clothes?” (BBC).   At the same level:  Has Eric the Red stopped beating his wife?

What is really going on this that the clothing is decorated with an abstract geometrical blocky design, part of which reminded the textile specialist of something she’d seen somewhere in Arabic script -- specifically, the early variety known as Kufic script -- or rather, a decorative blocky variant of Kufic. 

Now, it is unquestionably the case that Arabic scripts have been used for calligraphy, typically depicting brief Koranic quotations.   Great ingenuity was devoted to some of these, so that the results  in some cases  resembled those Hispanic-American “tags” which only the initiated could make any sense of, or the similarly cryptic Hippie-era posters for San Francisco rock concerts.

Poster for a SF Shiite mosque
known as the “Fillmore West”.
Notice the “Allah” hidden in the picture.

The fabric pattern in question, however, is extremely simple, and likely merely generic.  Thus:

For an example of genuine Kufic-block-script-(influenced) design, cf. this:

And sure, if you select a bit here and a bit there, there is a sort of resemblance -- as there could hardly fail to be  in sketches so schematic.  Actually, even at that, the match is not close, so that the Swedes conceded that, to read the thing as “Allah”, you had to read it in a mirror.   Which would seem to be a sort of Black-Mass version of the holy name, like Satanists chanting the Credo backwards.  Hardly evidence of Islamic influence.

(For many examples of  subjectively-similar or suggestive designs, simply google-image "fret motifs".  You will find  to your surprise  that Islamic influence extended even to the Aztecs and the ancient Greeks!)

[Note btw, that that serious-looking graphic with the mirror and all, is by no means a photo of any part of the actual tattered garments.  Rather, it is an idealization of a piece of the garment, which then in turn is given subjective interpretation.  Thus, there are actually two layers of "Rorschach" here.]

Medieval Islamic abstract decorative designs, whether linguistic-influenced or not, are quite lovely, and have been influential in many sister cultures.    As to whether these Viking funeral garments were directly or indirectly influenced by these, I can have no opinion, not being an art historian.   

Certainly it is within the bounds of historical possibility that there was contact, since the Vikings were great seafarers, and the Arabs  great wayfarers; they intersected, in particular, during the time of the Moors in Spain.  (Raid on Seville, 844 A.D.)

 
But as a student of linguistic sociology, I detect a few clues as to why, despite but a slender stalk of empirical support, this story has legs.  By the same NY Times reporter  (though in this case, she is rather more guarded, having run her rough-draft past some skeptics)  came this recent article:

    A Female Viking Warrior? Tomb Study Yields Clues

[Note:  In the PC Guardian's  article,

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/oct/13/viking-burial-clothes-woven-with-allah-unveiled-by-swedish-university

in a picture purporting to show a "re-enactment" of Viking combat, the only warrior with face visible is ... a woman.]

And, even more telling, this spin

   White Supremacists Flustered by Viking Discovery

(Someone bring Steve Bannon his smelling-salts.)

The pattern of journalistic dots, though as sketchy as those on the Viking garments, at least suggests why so empirically underbuttressed a claim  would be embraced for a comforting narrative.

[Footnote for the Arabic-literate]  Even with that mirror-image sleight of hand, there isn’t really a match.  The Viking design shows three horizontal strokes, all of them connected; whereas in Arabic, the initial alif is non-connecting.  And the blob that struck the Swedes as resembling the final hā’  of Allāh  would be upside-down.  So, if the design had been intended to spell Allah, it was a (double) misspelling, and thus blasphemous.

Seeing Allāh in that clothing  is like spotting Orion in a skyful of stars.   And from there to such gormless headlines as “Were some Vikings Muslim?” (National Post), and even speculations as to whether they were indeed Shiites (based upon another supposed sighting of the simple design for "Ali"), is like concluding that the skies proclaim the truth of the Olympic religion.

For a wide-ranging survey of Arabic language and stylistics, check out this:

The Semantics of Form in Arabic

[Footnote 19 October 2017]  A day or so after this post went up, another Arabist went up on Twitter to scoff at the Swedish claims, making some of the same points (e.g. about non-connecting alif), but adding a new one based on timelines.  For, whereas Kufic script is ancient, the subvariety of ‘square’ or blocky Kufic, supposedly postdates the Vikings’ floruit by centuries.

A nice idea, but there’s a hitch.  For, the design was constrained by medium in which it was worked (whether made by Vikings, or merely captured by them), a thin strip of stiff fabric:  the weave imposes its own rectilinear preferences.   Just as Babylonian clay tablets virtually dictated the geometry of cuneiform, so this hem would itself bring forth or invent `square Kufic’, pour les besoins de la cause, independent of any prior existence of the style  or imitation thereof.

[Sociopolitical footnote:  It is perhaps no accident that this fond fantasy was emitted out of Sweden.  As is well known, that nation has, in recent years, been wondering whether it has perhaps bitten off rather more than it can chew, so far as imported demographics.  However, it has long been politically impermissible in Sweden to remark publically on the elephant in the room.  So the sparring goes on  in code  and behind cover.] 

Who knew that Vikings were so controversial?  For a quite aggrieved-sounding feminist article from that same drearily reliable Guardian, try this:

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/sep/15/how-the-female-viking-warrior-was-written-out-of-history

That article's headline is conclusively proven by a passage in the Protocols of the Elders of Patriarchy, where historians of old were caught bwa-ha-ha'ing as they inked out all such records.

~

Appendix on Steganography

A genuine case of a name hidden in designs, is that of the stellar cartoonist Al Hirschfeld, who used to work-in the name of his daughter  NINA (all-caps), in drawing after drawing.  Here is one with the hidden items highlighted:

Notice that, as was the case with the Arabic spelling of Allah and `Ali, the ease with which the name Nina can be secreted away as part of a larger design, is dependent on its simple form;  if his daughter’s name had been Murgatroyd, Hirschfeld would have been out of luck.

After signing his name in a lower corner, he would usually append a small Arabic (Arabic!) numeral, showing the number of times the name was hidden in that particular drawing.  Here, for example, in a (rather cruel) portrait of Katherine Hepburn, we are challenged to find three occurrences:

 

And in this tour de force, the name “NINA” appears no fewer than thirteen thousand times.:

 

Can you spot them all?  Set aside the rest of your life, full-time, to accomplish this necessary task.

 

~

An earlier instance  of steganographic eisegesis:

Ancillary to the great Hollywood witch-hunt, a satellite inquisition in 1951  was mounted against ‘subversive modern art’ at the (old) County Museum in Exposition Park.

A group called Sanity in art  swore they detected maps of secret defense fortifications  sequestered in abstract paintings, and one painter … was accused … of incorporating propaganda in the form of a thinly disguised hammer-and-sickle within a seascape.

-- Mike Davis, City of Quartz (1990), p. 63

NORAD installation, Cheyenne Mountain (artist’s impression)

For more along these lines, try
=> Rorschach Morphology

 

[Update] XXX-clusive!

Tomb find indicates prehistoric dinosaur may have been Jewish

 [Update 25 II 2018] The latest example   of seeing something that isn't there, and getting the world spun-up:
http://www.sacbee.com/news/nation-world/national/article201604224.html


 

The roots of LOL

Back in the days of Sputnik, before the Internet and social media, we children used but few social acronymic sigilla.  One indelible in memory was SWAK, which stood for “Sealed With A Kiss”:  you put it on the back of the envelope (over where you would have licked the flap) of a letter to your girl- or boyfriend.   But its acronymic status was accidental -- it was not part of any acronymic army, such as we have in today’s busy world of BRB and TYT -- and functioned much like (what would later become) such sublinguistic symbols as the happy-face.  Indeed, those same envelopes often had, subscripted to the stamps, the amazingly kid-witty formula entreating speedy delivery:

Postman postman -- Don’t D-lay!
Do D cha-cha  all D way!

Today’s acronymic armamentarium is incomparably greater, in extent and sometimes even in structure.  As, when  to LOL  there effectively accrete  a comparative and a superlative (à la  good/better/best):   ROFL;  LMAO.

~

Such reflections were occasioned by a passage in James Gleick’s entertaining survey, The Information (2011), as he recounts that earlier splendid invention, telegraphy, which anticipated the Internet in quasi-instantaneously connecting (eventually) everyone to anyone else.   Initially simply for economy (since the sender paid by the word), later also for comsec,  telegraph-fans came up with such LOL&SWAK-like acronyms as

GMLT (give my love to…)
YMIR  (your message is received)

and even

     WYEGFEF

which, as you possibly guessed  but more likely not, stood for   “Will you exchange gold for eastern funds”.    And with that, afficionados were well on their way to the construction of extensive subject-specific codebooks, and thence, generalizing, to subject-neutral cryptography.

~

It is remarkable, what pleasure a certain cast of mind takes, in coming up with artificial languages and coding-systems.   Some are systematic, are meant to be practical, and are very ambitious, spanning the whole of natural language:  Leibniz’s characteristica universalis, or Volapük and its congeners.  Others are practical but limited to a given domain, like shipping-codes.   And still others are just for fun:  Netspeak, and LOLcats lingo.  (Strenuous fun, though: the entire Bible has been translated into LOLcats, Old Testament and New.)   Mankind hasn’t had so much fun  since Adam named the animals.


Bonus:  mini-emojis (a minimal-pair):

In a novel by Kingsley Amis, I Like It Here (1958), a woman signs-off her love-letter thus:

             yum yum yum yum

                                        Barbie

      x (bitey one)            X (open mouth one)

A Simple Substitution Cipher

Hey kids, here's a fun one!

Ciphertext:

“Von Ribbentrop  dotes on  Molotov.”

[Cryptanalysis:  This string was formed by substituting “Von Ribbentrop” for Trump, and “Molotov” for Putin, in the plaintext.

C if U can make sense of this !]

Endnote for the expert:

The above-instanced cryptosystem is an example of what is technically known as a Caesar cipher:  so named because it alliterates  and sounds kewl.

Steganographic Monostich

.

Encrypted Monostich

jfjR(77)^K^^L<pfpf>ⁿ22- _b23 ##2O2O₂MPG917

Non-Acronym of the day: “Jason”

The saga of Jason and the Argonauts  has spun off some delightful dubbings.  One, the “Argo” escapade, we discussed here.   Another was the secret elite group of physicists called Jason.  

An intrepid historian of science  ran down the true etymology, after an initial (indeed, “initials”) red-herring:

I asked my husband’s physicist-colleagues  “What’s Jason?” and collected the following:  Jason is an acronym fof July-August-September-October-November, the months this group of academic physicists   met secretly to solve the problems  the Defense Department couldn’t.

-- Ann Finkbeiner, The Jasons (2006), p.  xii

That suggestion quickly dissolves  in the universal solvent of Common Sense:

These stories I didn’t believe.  An acronym for months sounded silly.  [But more tellingly:] Academics couldn’t meet that long during the school year because they had institutional responsibilities.

-- id.

Another false-lead was the assertion that Jason was named after one of the members’ family dog.   Not.  The true story she tells on pages 39-40:  the wife of one of the members chose it, after the Greek myth -- most appropriate for a group that was going after the scientific equivalent of Golden Fleece.

The author adds some linguistic details:

“Jason is both a collective and a proper noun:  if you belong to Jason, you are a Jason.” (p. xiv)

Jason is usually capitalized [completely],  JASON, as though it were an acronym.  I have no idea why -- maybe because, written like a name [with only the first letter a capital], it might be taken to be a personal name.  I shall not capitalize it.

(p. xxviii)

Another reason it was initially written all-caps is that DoD and the IC often so style cover-terms.

~

The choice of Jason as a group name  is typical of the playfulness of physicists.  When DoD does the dubbing, the result is likely to be humdrum. As,

The task force was called the Defense Communications Planning Group, or DCPG, a name chosen for its meaninglessness.  (p. 77)

When a secret project does get a lexical designation, this may be chosen precisely to throw off anyone to whom the term might get leaked.  Thus, the Manhattan Project:  so named because it had nothing to do with Manhatten, and indeed was centered at locations far from any city.  One of the things they worked on (my Dad did, for one) was called “Tube-alloy”, a nicely misleading alias for uranium (which is an element, not an alloy).

Pellicular Wikipedia

To fans of “Blindspot”, it has by now become apparent, that those tattoos (like some Inca inscriptions)  purport to explain absolutely everything,  Present Past or (especially) Future:  like Wiki -- or rather, like Borges’s  Universal Library.  All that is known, or might ever be known,  imprinted upon her skin.

To the cold, hard core of “Memento” fans, that is disappointing.  But to the rest of Walmartamerica, that is good news.  So -- Here is how YOU can employ those iconographic indicators  to your own benefit.  Take it from me, my smiling wife Veronica and our faithful dog Spot!  Just in the past three days, we brought in  this:

* Puzzled husband:  “Someone’s been swiping tomatoes from our garden again!”

Loyal wife: “ A steganographic exploitation of the inkblot blocking the singed skin hidden beneath the bandaid on Jane’s left buttock reveals:  The perpetrator is none other than the neighborhood raccoon!”

P. H:  “Ha-ha!  That furry rascal!”

* Puzzled husband:  “Omigosh, what shall we do?  Tomorrow’s our big picnic, and the weatherman is predicting thunderstorms !!”

Loyal wife: “A previously overlooked inscription  on the inside  of Jane’s eyelid  contains a cipher which, run through our Tordella supercomputers, breaks out to “21 Oct 2015”; which, according to the Old Style (Julian) calendar, breaks out to tomorrow!  And the graphic equates to an ideogram for the Egyptian sun-god Ra!  So:  It’s gonna be a bright, bright, sunshiney day !!”

P.H.:  “Woo-hoo!  Packing the mayo !!!”

* Puzzled husband:  “Gosh, honey, I’ve looked everywhere!  Wherever can I have left my carkeys ???”
Loyal wife: “A p-adic attack on the recursively-enciphered left-armpit image from Jane reveals … (long technical discussion deleted) ….they're  in the right pocket of your gray overcoat!”

Advances in Cryptography

Late-breaking news  that has all the town talking:

These researchers have discovered the perfect password that’s also easy to remember!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2015/10/22/these-researchers-have-discovered-the-perfect-password-thats-also-easy-to-remember/

For security reasons, the WaPo has declined to reveal the actual password.  But with the thoroughness which readers have come to expect from the World of Doctor Justice ™ (headquarters:  Geneva),  we offer it to you now.  It is:

SWORDFISH

[Memorize this password -- Do not write it down!
After reading this post,  destroy the computer you read it on.
There!  Now you're secure.]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0Gwe5gKgjo

 

~  The World of Dr Justice ~

~~  Science U Can Trust  ™ ~~

For further cryptanalytic intricacies, click here.

Cryptographic Challenge !

The fate of the planet may hinge upon this.

Can you crack the code?

Extraterrestrial invasion plans ?

Deadly curse from the pharaoh’s tomb ??

Something brewing at the Center of the Earth ???

~

[Update 4 December 2014]

A solution has just been submitted -- but in an indecipherable language;  or perhaps it is itself in code.  FWIW, we reproduce the text tel quel, exactly as received by the watch officer at our Geneva headquarters, ca. 0102Z :

L’histoire commence le 24 mai 1863 à Hambourg et plus exactement dans la rue Königstrasse, où est située la maison du Pr Lidenbrock. Le professeur, amateur de vieux livres, a acheté le manuscrit original d'une saga islandaise, Heimskringla, écrite par Snorri Sturluson au XIIe siècle. Il y découvre un parchemin codé, rédigé en caractères runiques islandais. Lidenbrock se passionne aussitôt pour ce cryptogramme et tyrannise toute la maison tant qu'il lui résiste. Axel, d'abord peu enthousiaste, se prend peu à peu au jeu et finit par découvrir la clé du message par un coup de chance. Le parchemin se révèle être un message d'un certain Arne Saknussemm, un alchimiste islandais du XVIe siècle, rédigé en latin mais écrit en runes. Celui-ci affirme avoir découvert un passage qui l'aurait mené jusqu'au centre de la Terre, via l'un des cratères d'un volcan éteint d'Islande, le Sneffels (l'actuel Snæfellsjökull).

The crack cryptographic team

at the World of Dr Justice,

unriddling the puzzle

with advanced methods

 

[Update 5 December 2014]

We are pleased to report that the complete solution has now been supplied -- oddly enough, by a little girl in pigtails with a physics text under her arm, and delivered another of our “black site” installations, one so secret that we ourselves are unaware of its existence.  The mysterious cipher, composed of twisting little stick-figures, in a variety of improbable postures, turns out to be none other than that of the Dancing Men, first encountered, and broken, by our good friend and colleague Mr Sherlock Holmes!  Cryptologically, the matter is thus completely resolved.

As for what the hidden message says … Unfortunately, here our spade is turned.  Fully deciphered, the plaintext reads:

F Y** CN RD THS,  U CN BCM * KR*PT*L*NG*ST & MK BG BK$$$

-- a string of apparently meaningless symbols that seem to mean absolutely nothing at all.   At yet, the decoding is correct:  simply, the wisdom that it encodes is not proportionate to our understanding.

Alexander Grothendieck

From the graceful pen of Edward Frenkel  comes this appreciation of the prodigious mathematician Alexander Grothendieck:

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/25/science/the-lives-of-alexander-grothendieck-a-mathematical-visionary.html

Frenkel’s summary of Grothendieck’s approach  is phrased in distinctly Platonistic terms:

Grothendieck’s genius was to recognize that there is a “being” hiding behind a given algebraic equation (or a system of equations) called a scheme. The spaces of solutions are mere projections, or shadows of this scheme.

That formulation goes beyond the basic assumptions of mathematical Realism, adding a quasi-personalistic, quasi-spiritual metaphorical dimension.   We might epigrammatize the matter thus:  bare-bones Realism (embraced by most mathematicians as a lower bound) is to the view attributed to Grothendieck, somewhat as deism is to theism.

Frenkel concretely illustrates this (neo-)Platonistic / Plotinean stance of  seeing the relatively concrete and familiar, as but a pale and lesser projection of some higher, transcendent, but paradoxically more solid Reality (which dwells in Platonic heaven, sipping some higher-dimensional nectar), in his justly celebrated book for the layman:

Imagine a world in which natural numbers are replaced by vector spaces;  that is, instead of number 1  we have a line, instead of number 2  we have a plane… Addition of numbers is replaced by the direct sum of vector spaces,  multiplication by their tensor product.  The number 3 is a mere shadow of the 3-dimensional space, reflecting only one attribute of this space, its dimensionality.

-- Edward Frenkel, Love & Math (2013), p. 155

That insight is superficially reminiscent of Bertrand Russell’s definition of, say, the integer three as being not basic, but the rather the (infinite) set of all triads { {Moe, Larry, and Curley}; {Huey, Dewey, and Louie}; {the Andrews Sisters}; ..}  Russell’s move always struck me as, at best, an obscurum per obscurius (or even a clarum per obscurius);  at worst, a parlour-trick.    Frenkel’s suggestion likely goes much deeper -- indeed, to a depth I am in no position to assess.

Finally, without the structural richness of Frenkel’s proposal, but perhaps more accessibly, this from a pair of noted philosophers-of-science:

The abstract objects of thought  such as “numbers” [or] “perfectly straight lines” .. are real parts of nature, even though they do not exist as particular things, but as the relations or transformations of such particulars.

Morris Cohen & Ernest Nagel,  An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method (1934), p. 372

~

Frenkel reminds us that Grothendieck, dramatically and notoriously, Threw It All Away, resigning his institute and seceding from the mathematical world, upon learning of its defense funding.   Frenkel points indeed to the possibility that even a subject so “gloriously useless” (as it was seen back in G.H. Hardy’s day) as number theory, can have crucial cryptographic applications which, in turn, invite subversion by the intelligence community.   He states, indeed, that such subversion did take place, at the hands of a three-letter Agency too numinous to name, in the case of Elliptic Curve Cryptography.  Yet ironically, that very field was pioneered by a theoretician politically of the far left, Neal Koblitz.  (I knew him slightly when we were both math majors and antiwar activists at Harvard, and recall him fondly here.)

[ A parallel:   For a highly entertaining, though painful, account of Simon Norton,  once Conway’s collaborator, but who likewise Threw It All Away, see the book by Alex Masters, The Genius in my Basement  (2011) ]

I never met Grothendieck, nor so much as approached the foothills of his cloud-surmounting summits;  but my introduction to mathematics did come via one of Grothendieck’s students, Robin Hartshorne, here portrayed:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/12/adventures-in-algebraic-geometry.html

We touch upon Grothendieck tangentially in several essays;  here they are:

worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/search/label/Alexander%20Grothendieck

[Another parallel:  Grothendieck’s abrupt withdrawal from mathematics, and his sometimes surly subsequent comments on its practicioners, recalls that more recent self-reclusion of the Russian topologist Grigori Perelman, who quit his institute in 2005, with the remark that “I have been disappointed in mathematics and I want to try something else.”   Now, to anyone who grasps the subject, disappointment with mathematics is almost inconceivable -- it’s like being disappointed with the Universe, or with penguins, or with life itself.   Other statements he has made suggest that his quarrel is not with math per se  but with certain mathematicians.

For a poignant glimpse of the daily routine of this semi-recluse, try this:

http://www.lepoint.fr/monde/le-genie-qui-s-est-retire-du-monde-30-09-2010-1246189_24.php  ]

~

In other cryptographic news … This week’s New Yorker has a review by Anthony Lane of “The Imitation Game”, which takes us back to the WWII code-breakers at Bletchley Park, with mathematician Alan Turing at the center.   With his welcome skeptical eye, Lane punctures the movie’s superstar approach to the material:

No word is breathed, for instance, of the Polish cryptographers who did much of the heavy lifting on the project  before Turing came on the scene.  As for the cracking of codes, it is shrunk to single, Oh-my-God epiphany, triggered by a comment in a pub.

That last motif is strikingly reminiscent of the trumped-up Eureka moment ascribed to Gauss in the movie “Die Vermessung der Welt” (which we reviewed here), whose insights into differential geometry were supposedly engendered -- in a flash, on the spot -- by a buxom mädchen handing him an apple from the knowledge-tree.

Another warning-sign:   The role of Turing’s  Comely Female Sidekick (de rigueur in Hollywood these days) is played by Keira Knightley, an overactress whose pornographic approach to proximity to great men of science, in the movie “A Dangerous Method”, we earlier had occasion to denounce.

~

[Late-evening update]  And now, fellow devotees of that supreme queen of the noösphere, math -- now that we have all stuffed our tummies with turkey, and are sprawled upon the couch:  as we are probably not just now engaged in settling the Hodge Conjecture (and making but scant progress if we are), let us rather refresh the neurons with a bit of mathematical merriment:

How Now, Round Cow

~

Sotie : 

le mathématicien  et la conspiration Riemann

Борис Березовский

~

[Update, 30 November 2014]  Further thoughts.

(1) Integers as shadows

That epigram, that petite phrase,  “The number 3 is a mere shadow of the 3-dimensional space”, continues to intrigue.  Further thoughts on the subject here:

From Finitude to Infinity

The point being that Frenkel/Grothendieck are here proceeding in the less-familiar opposite direction.

(2) “Goodbye to All That”

The catchphrase “I Threw it All Away” is from Bob Dylan.   An earlier more familiar expression is “Goodbye to All That”, the title of a memoir by the poet Robert Graves.

To fascinate a public beyond the circle of connoisseurs, a mathematician (or physicist, or chess-player) needs to sport some quirk, some handle onto which the layman can hang his attention.  That is massively true of Turing, first because of his role in the thrillingly clandestine -- and militarily crucial -- cryptographic factory at Bletchley park;  and more recently -- and less relevantly, from any mathematical standpoint -- by reason of his personal predilections (held in common with such extra-scientific figures as Ἀντίνοος and the Baron de Charlus) which at present have reached an apogee of public celebrity.   On a more modest scale (no blockbuster biographies, no movies) the careers of Emmy Noether or Ada Lovelace come to mind.

For anyone not a member of the identity-groups in question, such chance affiliations are mathematically and philosophically boring.   But not so a figure like Groethendieck, who reached intellectual levels that most of the rest of us can only pant and sigh for -- then threw it all away, in a contemptuous gesture.   For that is a challenge to all of us, whatever our private identities;  it calls into question the very value of the ‘it’ for which we so painfully and vainly strive.

A well-known example from chess:  Bobby Fischer, who withdrew from the sport at the top of his game.

Or, in the sixteenth century, the pioneering anatomist Vesalius, who, having published the book that settled his fame forever, and still a young man, left the field and became a simple physician to a valetudinarian Emperor.

A grey-area variant of this motif is found in the case of Simon Norton.   True, he voluntarily withdrew from the field;  but in view of his later pointless eccentricities, we cannot avoid the suspicion by then he had largely Lost It.

That variant motif forms the spine of Rebecca Goldstein’s fascinating mathematico-philosophical novel,  The Mind-Body Problem.

And while Goldstein manages to craft a good read out of the tragedy, in the typical case of gradually fading powers, it is just sad.  Thus Lagrange, and other victims of Oligophrenia mathematica tardiva,  chronicled in the appendix to this essay:

De Stultitiâ

 

Other examples of burnout:  

Newton had a nervous breakdown a few years after publishing his Principia, and never did real science again.

Russell seems to have fried many of his math neurons in the course of writing his Principia (memo to prodigies:  Don’t try to write a Tenth Symphony, and don’t write a book called Principia).   He did much interesting philosophical work after that, but mostly with other areas of his capacious brain.

Somewhat in the spirit of the Stith-Thompson index of folkloric motifs, to I Threw It All Away (TaleType #1729a), we add:

* Taken all away (#1729b):    Persecution took them out of the game, at the height of their powers: Galois (permanently) and, for those who considered that he was hounded to death, Turing.  Temporarily: André Weil and Neil Koblitz (during their imprisonment -- though both managed to use their ‘time inside’ more profitably mathematically  than most of us do with all the free time in the world).

* Would throw it all away, if had to do it over again (#1729c):

Wolfgang Pauli in 1925:
"At the moment, physics is again terribly confused.  In any case, it is difficult for me, and I wish I had been a movie comedian or something of the sort, and had never heard of physics."

Schrödinger, to Niels Bohr:

“If all this damned quantum jumping were really here to stay, then I should be sorry I ever got involved with quantum physics.”

[quoted in: -- Roger Penrose,  The Road to Reality (2004), p. 516]

More such anecdotes here:

http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2012/06/on-truth-and-beauty-golden-oldies.html

* Should throw it all away, if that’s how they feel (#1729d):  String theorists who have wound up at the dead-end of the Landscape picture.  (“The reductionist voyage that has taken physics so far  has come to an end.  Since that is what they believe, I can’t understand why they don’t take up something else -- macramé, for example.”  More here.)