The whole meaning of the
Universe is contained in the
Koran.
The whole meaning of the Koran, is contained
in any Sura thereof.
The whole meaning of any Sura, may
be confidently derived, from the deepest meaning, of any individual ayah of the same.
And that (for them that
understand), from any one word within.
And -- that
-- from any letter therein.
And … that … from but … the merest (least) [minimal]
diacritical
point thereon …..
-- Received Muslim wisdom
To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your
hand
And Eternity in an hour.
-- Wm. Blake
The period at the end of this
sentence looks, from afar, like a
connected, dimension-0 manifold
-- Timothy Gowers, ed., The
Princeton Companion to Mathematics (2008), p. 398
[Note to connoisseurs:
Notice that there is actually no period at the end of that sentence …]
The general idea expressed in the first two meditations was classically denoted by the phrase ex pede Herculem (i.e., given knowledge of proportions, you could 'project' the full statue from the ruin remains of just a foot).
A more startling analogue from mathematics: the "Reflection Principle" in Set Theory.
-- I fear lest the promising compound subject of the title of this post, may have misled many into explecting that the trio in question would jointly walk into a bar. Alas! I have as yet no continuation for that promising premise -- a fact lamented here:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2013/12/a-mathematician-and-theologian-walk.html
For a walk-into-a-bar joke, replete with religious mysticism:
http://worldofdrjustice.blogspot.com/2011/08/woodchuck-priest-and-qadi-walk-into-bar.html
For the contemplation of the afterlife by mathematicians,
try this:
As for theologians, well, they’re well beyond that.
