Category Archives: Nesin Mathematics Village

Edirne

May 6, 2017 – 6:35 am

This is about a May Day trip from the third Ottoman capital to the second. In the former, the government has been suppressing May Day demonstrations in Taksim Square since 2013. That year, the suppression may have helped provoke the Gezi Park protests, as I suggested in “May Day One Month Late.” I reported on the following year’s suppression in “Madness, Stupidity, or Evil?” This year (2017), labor unions held a legal May Day demonstration in Bakırköy, further west in European Istanbul, as reported by the Anadolu Agency (which as far as I know is owned by the Turkish state). My wife and I just got out of town.


Selimiye Mosque, 2017.04.30

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By David Pierce | Also posted in History, Tourism, Turkey | Tagged , , , | Comments (4)

Writing, Typography, and Nature

January 22, 2017 – 7:21 am

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.

From below, a wooded hill, with buildings near the crest
Nesin Mathematics Village from the east
Wednesday, January 18, 2017

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Fowler, question and answer, Strunk and White, Thoreau | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (3)

Şirince January 2017

January 17, 2017 – 12:47 pm

Having enjoyed spending a January week at the Nesin Mathematics Village in 2016, this year I came back for two weeks. My spouse will join me for the second week. Meanwhile, here are some photographs from this amazing place. Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Also posted in Mathematics, Nature, Turkey | Tagged | Comments (3)

Thales of Miletus

December 24, 2016 – 11:01 am

This is about Thales of Miletus and what it means to study him. I am moved to ask what history is in the first place. It is a study of the freedom in which we face our conditions. Thales had his way of understanding the world, and we may benefit from trying to learn it.

“The Thaleses of the future are meeting in Didim, September 24, 2016”

“The Thaleses of the future are meeting in Didim,
September 24, 2016”

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Archeology, Collingwood, Education, Euclid, Freedom, History, Leo Strauss, Mathematics, New Leviathan, Philosophy, Philosophy of History, Principles of Art, Tourism, Turkey | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (27)

How to Learn about People

November 13, 2016 – 4:19 am

A chance encounter with a Medieval definition of God, used as the title of a sculpture, leads to an ancient plane tree and to more consideration of what can go wrong with public opinion polls.

Ancient plane tree of Bayır, Marmaris Peninsula, September 9, 2010
Ancient plane tree of Bayır, Marmaris Peninsula, September 9, 2010

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Archeology, Aristotle, “ceases to be a mind”, “God is a circle …”, Collingwood, Philosophy, Psychology, Turkey | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (8)

All You Need Is Love

August 2, 2016 – 3:45 pm

Note added May 31, 2018: Here are some meditations on education from the summer of 2016, when Donald Trump was threatening to become President of the United States. Education cannot be forced on unwilling students. Neither need students know just what they are accepting; they may be enticed or beguiled into learning. Whether they have learned cannot be directly tested. I include some memories of racism (as an observer, not a victim) and of my own liberal education.

Note added May 22, 2023: I return to this post, precisely because of that assertion that testing does not show directly whether students have learned. As I have learned recently through a friend, Emily Bender said something similar on Medium last year, in response to Steven Johnson in “A.I. Is Mastering Language. Should We Trust What It Says?” (New York Times Magazine, April 15, 2022):

First, large language models have been making steady improvements, year after year, on standardized reading comprehension tests.

Bender’s response is “On NYT Magazine on AI: Resist the Urge to be Impressed” (April 18, 2022):

just because the tests were designed to test for reading comprehension by people, and even if we assume that they do a good job of measuring that, doesn’t mean that comparable scores by machines on the same tests entail that machines are doing something comparable …

Bender goes on to talk about “construct validity.”

Would education solve the world’s problems? A meaningfully positive answer would imply that the appropriate education could actually be supplied to us, or enough of us; and yet education is not a drug that can be administered willy-nilly.

Tables for art entrance exam, MSGSÜ, 2016.08.02
Tables for art entrance exam, MSGSÜ, 2016.08.02

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Education, Facebook, Pirsig, West Virginia | Tagged , , | Comments (9)

Thinking & Feeling

July 20, 2016 – 2:16 pm

This essay is written as a distraction from current events, though I make some reference to them. I am prompted by questions of analogy provoked by

  1. the similes of Homer and
  2. a recent theater review in Harper’s that mentions the parables of Jesus.

With sea in the background, on the sand of a beach sits Chapman’s Homer: The Iliad, the cover featuring a 16th-century Flemish tapestry (framed by a circle), Scene from Roman History, showing a number of men, the one in the middle armored; a horse is in the foreground

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Archeology, Collingwood, coup, Education, Harper’s, History, Homer, Language, Mathematics, Maugham, Midgley, Nature, Philosophy, Philosophy of History, Principles of Art | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (11)

War Continues

July 16, 2016 – 6:30 pm

Earthquakes have aftershocks. In 2011 in Van, after the quake of October 23, a Japanese relief worker called Atsushi Miyazaki was killed when his hotel collapsed under the force of the quake of November 9.

Playground, play equipment, and bare trees behind a sign naming the park and describing the namesake in Turkish

Bust of Atsushi Miyazaki, smiling, next to water feature
Atsushi Miyazaki Parkı
Sarıyer, Istanbul
Thursday, February 9, 2023
We had moved to the area
the previous fall

Along with everybody we know, my spouse and I survived the coup attempt in Turkey yesterday (July 15, 2016). Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Also posted in coup, History, Turkey | Tagged , | Comments (11)

Life in Wartime

June 29, 2016 – 12:22 pm

Turkey has given me a lot. My spouse would be enough; but life in Turkey offers various pleasures, and—for me at least—time to enjoy them. Hard work may be considered a virtue in the United States. Not so in Turkey. I am still driven to do things here, but perhaps only in the way that Thoreau was driven. He was driven to do what he wanted to do. One thing he wanted to do was write as follows.

I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, I may almost say, as to attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form of servitude called Negro Slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that enslave both North and South. It is hard to have a Southern overseer; it is worse to have a Northern one; but worst of all when you are the slave-driver of yourself. Talk of a divinity in man! Look at the teamster on the highway, wending to market by day or night; does any divinity stir within him? His highest duty to fodder and water his horses!

For how many Americans is the highest duty to go to work to pay for the car that they drive to work?

Thoreau’s journal on the beach
Thoreau’s Journal
in the abridgement by Damion Searls
Profesörler Sitesi, Altınova, Balıkesir, Türkiye
Friday, August 28, 2015
See “Thoreau by the Aegean” of the following day

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By David Pierce | Also posted in coup, Facebook, Istanbul, Thoreau, Turkey | Tagged | Comments (6)

Surgery & Recovery

June 13, 2016 – 12:34 pm

On June 7, 2016, I underwent surgical repair of an inguinal hernia. I did not know what to expect. I did not know that I did not know: I did not consider that there was anything in particular to be prepared for. But there was.

Clock tower of Şişli Etfal hospital, from the fourth floor
Clock tower of Şişli Etfal hospital
from the fourth floor

The surgery itself was not such a big deal. It was a fascinating experience, but not one that I found myself wishing I had known more about ahead of time. Recovery has turned out to be something else. If a medical website says of recovery, “You may experience some discomfort,” it is practically lying. Discomfort was what I experienced, waiting in a chair, or on a gurney, for the surgery to take place. What I experienced afterwards was searing pain, at least in getting out of bed, with the rather insistent help of a nurse.

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Istanbul, Pirsig, Turkey | Tagged , | Comments (6)