the best imitation of myself

The cat and dog fight like—well, you know. Turns out it's not just a figure of speech.

Together malelia_honu and I blew off yoga on Tuesday and instead went shopping at Old Navy, where we each bought several items at wildly discounted prices. I watched House after dinner. ( reactions to Cursed )

I read Dira Sudis's Last Rites a while ago, but I just went back to it for a re-read now that things make more sense. You couldn't ask for a better follow-up to this episode.

And then I finished Fermat's Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World's Greatest Mathematical Problem. It's just what it says, the history of Fermat's Last Theorem and why (and how) it took 350 years to solve. They yadda-yadda-yaddad over most of the actual math, especially toward the end (which I can't help feeling a little put-out about, no matter that I wouldn't even begin to understand it), but it's a good story. In some ways it's a horrifying story: the lives of so many mathematicians seem tenuous at best and the tragedy of time is everywhere in abundant evidence. They often died young, or lived in turbulent times, or lived at the wrong time. Wiles himself finally expressed, explicitly, the danger of a linear, unidirectional timeline:

Having tried every tool and technique in the published literature, [Wiles] had found that they were all inadequate. "I really believed that I was on the right track, but that did not mean that I would necessarily reach my goal. It could be that the methods needed to solve this particular problem may simply be beyond present-day mathematics. Perhaps the methods I needed to complete the proof would not be invented for a hundred years. So even if I was on the right track, I could be living in the wrong century." (237)

Isn't that terrifying? The odds of achieving self-actualization are infinitesimal in this world. Galois was a "respectable but not outstanding" student until he encountered mathematics at the age of sixteen; he was twice refused admittance to the École Polytechnique because of the "abruptness and lack of explanation in the oral examination"; he was caught up in the tumultuous politics of 1820s and '30s France and died in a duel at the age of twenty. Leonhard Euler's father was determined that his son should pursue a career in the Church—and he did, until their friends the Bernoullis intervened and persuaded the father that his son "had been born to calculate, not to preach."

What's so haunting isn't that Euler almost became a clergyman to fulfill his father's wishes instead of a mathematician who would later be referred to as "analysis incarnate" and of whom "the French academician François Arago said, 'Euler calculated without apparent effort as men breathe, or as eagles sustain themselves in the wind'"—but that for every touch-and-go story like his that ends happily, there must be countless other stories that end with the hapless protagonist going into his father's business without a word of complaint; or dying in infancy; or being too poor for school or books; or being born into a nomadic tribe, or before the advent of Pythagoras and the entire field of mathematics. The tragedy of time is that in the fifteenth century Leonardo da Vinci was able to design a helicopter that would have flown—what could he have done today? That kind of thing can keep me up at night.

( More snippets from the book. )

That was all Tuesday; today was Wednesday, but I didn't do much with it. My mother and I ran errands, we made our own version of these shrimp pouches for dinner, and we started the seventh season of M*A*S*H*: BJ's moustache is truly hideous, but his initials stand for anything you want!

And if you're still here, leave a one-word comment that you think best describes me. It can only be one word. No more. Then copy & paste this in your journal so that I may leave a word about you.