The birthday of one of our departmental colleagues was celebrated today, March 22, 2016. We were a day late, and the principal was away. His parents were present, but he himself had been imprisoned without bail since March 14.
The charge against Kıvanç and two others is spreading terrorist propaganda,
as reported by Academic Freedom Monitor, Human Rights Watch and Nature. Continue reading
Ayşe was still in Ankara, but I had seen rumors on Twitter that tulips were already blooming in Emirgan Korusu. The bulbs were being dowsed with ice water, lest the flowers be overblown for the Tulip Festival in April. Anyway, I wanted to get away from the crowds of Şişli and Beyoğlu. The morning was mostly sunny. Thus on Saturday, March 12, 2016, I headed out to Emirgan, repeating the trip that we had made the previous April.
This is about a weekend in the islands, and contemporary art.
The Fourteenth Istanbul Biennial (September 5 to November 1, 2015) had exhibits or installations all over Istanbul, and several of these were on Büyükada, the Big Island, which is Πρίγκηπος in Greek. The Big Island is the last of the four islands visited by the ferry from the mainland. For easier access, Ayşe and I stayed on the second island, Burgazada, the night of Friday, October 23, 2015. We caught the ferry from there to Büyükada on Saturday morning. We visited all of the venues of the Biennial on the island. Illustrating this article are photographs from some of these venues.
I supply some information about the artworks from the Biennal guidebook (which can be downloaded as a pdf file). This was the information that we had at the time of visiting. It turns out that there is more information on the web, sometimes a lot more. Some of the works, at least, do not stand very well on their own. One needs to be told what one is looking at. Without this, one may still look and figure that what one is seeing is meaningful to the artist; but that may be all. In this, the works in the Biennial differ from the photographs and paintings of Emine Ceylan (born 1955), which last month (February, 2016) were on display at my university’s Tophane-i Amire Culture and Art Center. I give one example, from an album of my photos from the exhibit:
Emine Ceylan (title and date unknown to me)
This seems not to be the kind of thing that the big names in art today are interested in doing.
I wrote the polemic below as a comment on Facebook, in both senses. I was responding to a Johnnie friend’s comment, “David Pierce loathes fb as a forum for real discussion.” “Johnnies” are alumnae and alumni of St John’s College, the one with campuses in Annapolis and Santa Fe. My own view of our College is expressed in an article called simply St John’s College
published in the De Morgan Journal in 2012. Since then, I have written about the College in the present blog, Continue reading
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
Skip to Michael Attaleiates on Alparslan after the Battle of Manzikert
Published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788, Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire tells the story of a thousand years and more, from before the founding of Constantinople in 330 till after its loss in 1453. Gibbon can be ridiculed for his title: a millenium is a long time to be in decline. The three thick volumes of the Penguin edition took me a long time to read, if not quite as long as Gibbon took to write. I was living in Ankara at the time, but I enjoyed being able to read Gibbon’s work also while visiting the three old imperial capitals: Istanbul, Rome, and Milan.
Gibbon’s Decline and Fall on my shelves
(which are arranged according to date of birth of author)
Here are assorted photographs, from recent months, along with my reasons for taking them.
In a tweet there was a photograph of a crowd of excited people, all brandishing cellphones, except for this one old woman.
The setting was gorgeous. We were atop a hotel (and former convent) opposite the compound of the Italian Consulate—the Italian Embassy, in Ottoman times, before Mustafa Kemal founded the Turkish Republic and moved the capital to Ankara. We looked out over old trees. The street just below us was closed to cars; off to the right it became a stairway and a narrow passage up to İstiklâl Caddesi. Beyond the trees of the Consulate were the Golden Horn and Seraglio Point, with the Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmara beyond. As night fell, electric lights illuminated the Seraglio itself—Topkapı Palace—along with the Hagia Sophia.
Continue reading
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
While living in a group house in Washington in the 1990s, commuting by bicycle to the University of Maryland for my graduate studies in mathematics, I joined a discussion group of readers of the Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine. I suppose the group met as frequently as the magazine was published, though it could have been twice a month: I do not clearly recall. Neither do I recall just how I became involved with the group, though it must have been through a professor in my department who was a member.
Polytropy 