Note added February 10, 2019: I return to this rambling essay, two years later in the Math Village. The main points are as follows.
- Writing is of value, even if you never again read what you write.
- There is also value to reading again, as in the present case.
- A referee rejected a submitted article of mine in the history of mathematics because its order did not make sense – to that referee, though a fellow mathematician thought well of the article. A revision was eventually published as “On Commensurability and Symmetry.”
- In the preface to The Elements of Typographical Style, Robert Bringhurst wonders how he can write a rulebook when we are all free to be different. He thus sets up an antithesis, such as I would investigate later in “Antitheses.”
- From being simply a means of copying, typography has become a means of expression.
- Yet typography should not draw attention to itself, just as, according to Fowler in A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, pronunciation (notably of foreign words) should not.
- Through my own experience of typography with LaTeX [and HTML, as in this blog], I have developed some opinions differing from some others’.
- Bringhurst samples Thoreau,
- whose ridicule of letters sent by post applies today to electronic media, and
- who rightly bemoans how enjoying the woods is thought idle; cutting them down, productive.
- In Gödel, Escher, Bach, Douglas Hofstadter wonders how a message can be recognized by any intelligence. Bringhurst restricts the question to concern intelligences on this earth.
- In my youth, Hofstadter introduced me to Zen Flesh, Zen Bones, (edited by Reps and Senzaki), whose influence on me I consider.
- The Zen story about whether “this very mind is Buddha” suggests a further development of Collingwood’s “logic of question and answer.”
- Through looking at another translation, I consider how Reps and Senzaki turned Chinese into English.
- Rereading this blog led me back to Hofstadter.
Here are some meditations on some books read during a stay in the Nesin Mathematics Village, January, 2017. I originally posted this article from the Village; now, back in Istanbul, a few days into February, recovering from the flu that I started coming down with in the Village, I am correcting some errors and trying to clarify some obscurities.
Nesin Mathematics Village from the east
Wednesday, January 18, 2017
Polytropy 