Category Archives: Nesin Mathematics Village

Free Sevan Nişanyan

April 8, 2016 – 6:02 pm

Note added July 17, 2018: Sevan Nişanyan is now free, in the sense of having escaped from prison—an open prison—and from Turkey. The story is told well in an article by Lauren Frayer on NPR, September 28, 2017. Alev Scott visited Sevan on the Greek island of Samos and wrote about it in the Times Literary Supplement, July 4, 2018; the article is behind a paywall, but there’s a free version. The friends and colleagues mentioned at the beginning of my own essay are not currently under detention, though trials of them and others continue. My essay remains as an expression of the value of freedom of speech.

We want freedom for our friends and colleagues who are being held in pre-trial detention for their supposed support of terrorism through advocating peace.

İlyastepe, Şirince, May 2013

İlyastepe, Şirince, May 2013

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

Nesin Matematik Köyü, Ocak (January) 2016

January 26, 2016 – 6:33 pm

DSC05976

My first visit to the Nesin Mathematics Village was in the summer of 2007. My first course there was in the summer of 2008. I have been back every summer since, sometimes more than once. Now I have visited for the first time in winter. I am in awe. The photographs here are supposed to give you an idea why. Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Also posted in Mathematics, Nature, Turkey | Tagged , , , | Comments (6)

Thoreau by the Aegean

August 29, 2015 – 7:35 am

In a session of the 1986–7 senior laboratory at St John’s College in Santa Fe, for reasons that I do not recall, our tutor asked us students whether we had any heroes: for it was said that young people of the day no longer had heroes. None of the students at the table named a hero. I myself refrained from telling how I had once named a hero, when asked to do so in a high-school French class. This hero was the Buddha.

In recent times, I have listed my favorite writers as Somerset Maugham, Robert Pirsig, and R.G. Collingwood. I might add Charlotte Brontë and Mary Midgley to the list. I cannot add the Buddha, because he is not a writer. If my list were of writers and thinkers, I still could not add the Buddha: I cannot know him or any other thinker well enough, except through his own writing. But now I would add Henry David Thoreau. Continue reading →

By David Pierce | Also posted in Collingwood, Maugham, Midgley, Nature, Pirsig, Thoreau | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (4)

Teos

May 19, 2015 – 10:41 am

This is about a visit to the ruins of the ancient Ionian city of Teos. These ruins are in what is now the district of Seferihisar, in the province of İzmir, on the Aegean coast of Turkey. On the web there is a lot of information about the site. There is a 28-page illustrated guidebook in Turkish and English (pdf file). However, Ayşe and I did not consult any of this information before visiting. What we had was George Bean, Aegean Turkey (London: Ernest Benn, 2d edition, 1979). Bean himself died in 1977. Once we were at the site of Teos, we learned something of its layout from the posted map.

I am going to describe our visit to the site; and yet one great pleasure of our visit was its unexpectedness. We had come to the area for a short beach holiday before Antalya Algebra Days XVII, which would be held not in Antalya, but at the Nesin Mathematics Village, further down the coast from Teos in the hills above Ephesus. In Istanbul, packing my things for our trip, I finally remembered to check Bean’s book to see what was in the area we would visit. Bean had a number of pages about Teos, along with some enthusiastic words; so I found room for the book in my backpack.

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Archeology, History, Tourism, Turkey | Tagged , , , | Comments (2)

Bosphorus Sky

December 19, 2014 – 4:14 pm

This is about the morning of Thursday, December 18, 2014, a morning I spent by the Bosphorus, thinking mostly about poetry, and photographing the sky.

Seagulls against clouds and a brighter sea

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Archimedes, Bosphorus, Collingwood, Descartes, Education, History, Istanbul, Language, Mathematics, Nature, Philosophy, Poetry, Principles of Art, Psychology, Tourism, Turkey, Turkish | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (7)

The Parabola

October 8, 2014 – 11:19 am

I do not now recall my specific inspiration; but in January of 2012, sitting at home in Istanbul, I cut up a cardboard box in order to make a model of a parabola quâ conic section.

January 14, 2012

January 14, 2012


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By David Pierce | Also posted in Conic Sections, Exposition, History, Mathematics | Tagged , , | Comments (1)

Şirince 2014

July 19, 2014 – 7:01 am

This is about our second visit to the Nesin Mathematical Village in Şirince this year. The first visit was to attend the Summer School Around Valuation Theory, May 22–26. Now we have come back to teach, as usual, in the Turkish Mathematical Society Undergraduate and Graduate Summer School. This time we are teaching not just one week, but two: July 14–27. My own course, as several times in the past, is on nonstandard analysis. Each course meets every day but Thursday, two hours a day.

The Math Village only increases in beauty every year, as I mean to suggest by posting a few photographs below.

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By David Pierce | Also posted in Education, Mathematics, Turkey | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (10)