Polytropy

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.