I rarely put up links for their own sake, but this one made me laugh out loud (for the first time in a few weeks).

Contains, as it surely must, several rather revelatory reflections about the nature of mathematical collaboration and approval. The author, William Thurston, is a Fields Medallist and Professor of Mathematics at Cornell University.

The elementary rule of three

From The Economist, March 14th, 2009:

For over an hour, Chiranjeevi, or “the immortal one”, as the actor has been known for three decades, addressed the multitude on March 10th. Except for one dreadful hush, the clamour of an estimated 400,000 was unceasing. When he attacked the corruption of AP’s ruling Congress party, it rose. When he accused the state’s main opposition Telugu Desam Party (TDP) of neglecting the poor during its previous rule, it soared. When Chiranjeevi promised to scatter both parties in AP’s state election and India’s general one, which will be held simultaneously next month, the din was tremendous.

From Terry Eagleton's review of Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion:

What, one wonders, are Dawkins’s views on the epistemological differences between Aquinas and Duns Scotus? Has he read Eriugena on subjectivity, Rahner on grace or Moltmann on hope? Has he even heard of them?

From William Thurston's On Proof and Progress in Mathematics:

This inner motivation might lead us to think that we do mathematics solely for its own sake. That’s not true: the social setting is extremely important. We are inspired by other people, we seek appreciation by other people, and we like to help other people solve their mathematical problems.

Eagleton on Spivak

Like most questions of style, Spivak’s obscurantism is not just a question of style. Its duff ear for tone and rhythm, its careless way with verbal texture, its theoretical soundbites (‘Derrida has staged the homo-eroticity of European philosophy in the left-hand column of Glas’), spring quite as much from the commodified language of the US as they do from some devious attempt to undermine it. A sentence which begins ‘At 26, graphing himself into the seat of Aufhebung, Marx sees the necessity for this critical enterprise’ combines the vocabulary of Hegel with the syntax of Hello! Spivak’s language, lurching as it does from the high-toned to the streetwise, belongs to a culture where there is less and less middle ground between the portentous and the homespun, the rhetorical and the racy. One whiff of irony or humour would prove fatal to its self-regarding solemnity. In the course of this book, Spivak writes with great theoretical brilliance on Charlotte Brontë and Mary Shelley, Jean Rhys and Mahasweta Devi; but she pays almost no attention to their language, form or style. Like the old-fashioned literary scholarship it despises, the most avant-garde literary theory turns out to be a form of good old-fashioned content analysis.

Why not feel?