Polytropy

This directory has the following sections.

• Prose
• Poetry
• Mathematics
• Categories
• Series
• Courses
• Writing of others

The links in the sections are sometimes to posts of this blog, but mostly to pages and media (especially pdf files).

Posts, pages, and media are what this blog has, because it uses the WordPress.org content management system, by virtue of being hosted by WordPress.com. You are now reading a post, as you can tell from its having an initial publication date both in its address and somewhere at the end of its body. The contents of any post can always be edited. I shall be editing this post in order to make available, or highlight, pages, verbal media (namely pdf files) and some series and categories of posts.

In principle, all of my posts can be seen at polytropy.com, in reverse chronological order. I have them listed in forward order, by year, on my About page. As I explain there, I try to keep track of posts with tags and categories. Moreover, if one post revisits a theme of another post, I try to link to that post. Every post shows (at the bottom) which other posts are linked to it.

A dream, never to be realized, would be to have all of my ideas as well-organized as in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

I don’t know how the random visitor can find my pages, although search engines find at least some of them. Much less do I know how one would find my media, although the media allowed by WordPress now include pdf files. I have uploaded a number of these, and created a number of pages.

It would be possible to have all top-level pages included automatically in the menu which now forms a horizontal list at the top of each post and page.

The directory proper now begins.

Prose

• The About page mentioned above

• “The Armeno-Turkish Alphabet” (I think this needs more work)

• Discrete Logarithms: Mathematics and Art

• “Karadeniz” (more on the 2018 trip summarized in “Eastern Black Sea Yayla Tour”)

• “A Season on a Farm” (the “season” was the summer and fall of 1988)

• “Van 2003” (an example of travel writing that I used to put on a page hosted by my department, before I had this blog)

Poetry

Poetry, in the broad etymological sense of something made; call it conceptual art, or whatever you like, but it’s all referred to in the post “Discrete Logarithms”:

• a Turkish translation of Claude Closky, “first thousand numbers classified in alphabetical order”

• The Roman numerals in alphabetical order

• Discrete Logarithms: Mathematics and Art

Mathematics

• “Cartesianism” (the pdf file described in “An Exercise in Analytic Geometry”)

• A proof of Dirichlet’s theorem on primes in arithmetic progressions, in pdf and html format (as discussed in “LaTeX to HTML”)

• “Classification of regular polytopes (pdf file)

Categories

Pages describing (as well as listing) categories of posts

• History

• Mathematics

• Nesin Mathematics Village

• On Chapman’s Homer’s Iliad

• Philosophy

Series

There are series of posts about particular works of prose and poetry. I could make each one into a category, but so far I have not. One post in the series may serve as an index, or else a page may serve.

• Collingwood, The New Leviathan (January 2014 to February 2019)

• Homer

  • Iliad in Chapman’s translation (April 2017 to September 2019)

  • Odyssey (begun November, 2019)

• Pascal, Pensées (all of them; February 16 to June 8, 2021)

• Chaucer, Canterbury Tales (a selection; July 5 to September 14, 2021)

• Plato, Republic (begun August 15, 2021)

Courses

For my courses I normally prepare pages on my department’s server; but since I cannot access this from home, I may also use the blog.

• Kümeler Kuramı (“Set theory,” including my attempts to summarize in html the contents of a course in axiomatic set theory for which I have also written a full text in LaTeX. For the summary of fall 2019, I had not yet discovered the usefulness of pandoc as described in “LaTeX to HTML”)

• Analitik Geometri Özeti (“summary of analytic geometry,” for a course in spring 2020; as the Covid-19 lockdown took hold, the page just became the course page)

• Ordinal Analiz (“ordinal analysis,” that is, set theory with emphasis on the ordinals as a structure analogous to the linearly ordered set of real numbers studied in so-called real analysis; the post “Ordinals” also takes up the analogy; I made the page for a course in Şirince, in case I wanted to change the page while I was there, though in the event I didn’t; notes from the second week, in English, are on a departmental page, along with the syllabus for a summer course in 2020 that was cancelled)

• Öklid (Resources for the course Öklid geometrisine giriş, “introduction to Euclidean geometry,” fall 2020)

• Topoloji (homepage for a graduate topology course, fall 2020, with links to weekly notes in English. The notes are mostly in pdf format, for A6 paper in landscape orientation; but one week I used html)

• Ayşe Berkman’ın yedek sayfasıdır (for her spring 2020 course during the lockdown)

Writing of others

Sometimes annotated by me:

• Charlotte Brontë, Villette, quotations and commentary:

  • October 21, 2018, 92 pages
  • June 30, 2022, 93 pages

• Kenneth Gale Crawford (my maternal grandfather), The Crawford Saga: For the Information of Progeny and Progeny’s Progeny.

• R. G. Collingwood

  • “Causation” from An Essay on Metaphysics (as described in the post “On Causation”)

  • chapters, including “Monks and Morals,” on a visit to Santorini in The First Mate’s Log

• John Donne, “The Undertaking” (to accompany the post that I wrote about it)

• Adam Garfinkle, “The Erosion of Deep Literacy” (referred to in “Reading shallow and deep”)

• John Goldthwaite, pages on C. S. Lewis and Narnia from The Natural History of Make-Believe (referred to in “Return to Narnia”)

• Euphemia Lofton Haynes, “Mathematics—Symbolic Logic” (supporting “What Mathematics Is”)

• Homer, Iliad (some of the books, in Chapman’s translation, to go with my commentaries on this)

• Somerset Maugham, “Romance,” from On a Chinese Screen (accompanying my own “Romance” and showing how Maugham plagiarized Herbert Giles)

• Plutarch, “Life of Timoleon”

• Poetry sent me in a lockdown “poem exchange”

• Raymond Smullyan, “Is God a Taoist?”

• Papers about Thoreau, mentioned near the beginning of the post “Feminist Epistemology” of January, 2021:

  1. Laura Dassow Walls, “Walden as Feminist Manifesto,” 1993. 8 pages

  2. Alice de Montigny, “I Discover Thoreau,” 1992. 3 pages

• Arnold Toynbee, “A Turning Point in History” (referred to in “What It Takes”)

• Herman Wouk on psychoanalysis (Chapter 42, “A Game of Ping-pong,” of Marjorie Morningstar)