Subject
Re: Dostoevski and psychoanalysis
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Alexey: Ha славy! Your discovery of links between LATH and Mikhail
Mikhailovich Zoshchenko do merit a reward, and if my current email
negotiations with the Royal Nigerian Bank bear fruit, I promise to express
my gratitude with a hard-monetary gesture. Your clever anagrammatical games,
however, do little to advance Nabokovian understanding and scholarship.
Indeed, our enjoyment of VN’s own wordplays may well suffer from seeing how
easy it is to juggle characters! You magnify the pointlessness by
introducing the trick of adding then subtracting selected characters to
achieve the desired equation. You must know that computers have taken all
the mystical, gemiatric “fun” out of such manipulations: see, especially,
Don Knuth’s latest volume in his Art of Computing series, devoted to
Combinatorics where N-letter Word Golf problems succumb to a few
mouse-clicks. The creativity has moved from trial-and-error manual juggling
to the clever sods who program these divine algorithms. I single out Knuth
(quod googlet) because he has pioneered “literary” programming, in the sense
that good code should have the attributes we associate with good writing.
You (after due apprenticeship!) can (re-)read the text of well-structured
programs (none of that goto-infected “spaghetti” code seen in barbaric
Basic) with Nabokovian delight.
An analogy worth pondering: suppose the VN-list received regular examples of
reader-devised cryptic crosswords and chess-problems, rather than
reader-devised anagrams and wordplays? I claim the former might provide more
insights into VN’s remarkable mind. Both Cryptic Crosswords and Chess
problems can gain much help from computers (both setting and solving) but
retain an irreducible human-creativity challenge. E.g., after many years of
analysis and computer-scrutiny by Kasparov and others, Raymone Keene reports
a startling move that would have changed the classic Capablanca-Reshevsky
game.
Re-Grigoriy Perelman: his story (scandale!) was aired on this list a few
years ago. It’s well-nigh impossible for non-mathematicians to fathom his
glorious achievement (proof of Poincaré Conjecture for 3-dimensional
spheres). I studied under Stephen Smale (who proved the Poincaré Conjecture
in 1961 for dimensions greater than 3*!!) and under René Thom (who threw
spanners into earlier non-proofs for dimension 3!!) yet cannot claim to
follow all the diabolical subtleties of Perelman’s proof (published first in
outline then refined with the detail needed to convince his peers). It took
the experts some time to verify, and then for the Fields Medal and $1
million Clay Prize to be awarded. And declined! It’s no secret that many
mathematicians were peed off by Perelman’s rejection of these honours, not
so much the giving up of the cash rewards, but the implied insult to a
community. Perelman’s proof rested on the previous hard-won results of many
mathematicians. Rather than Newton’s modest claim of standing on giants’
shoulders, Perelman’s rejection seems more like ungratefully treading on
giants’ toes! Still, weirdly “beautiful minds” are well-known in the arts
and sciences! We mortals forgive John Nash, Alexander Grothendieck (Alexey:
he makes Perelman seem boringly normal!), Kurt Go:del, Paul Dirac, Wolfgang
Pauli, more.
Stan Kelly-Bootle
* The earthly-surface spheres we are used to are 2-dimensional manifolds
embedded in our familiar 3-dimensional space. The 3-dimensional sphere
embedded in 4-dimensions is tougher to visualize, yet represents a plausible
model for the very cosmos we INHABIT! That the conjecture was proved first
for even higher dimensions (4-d spheres embedded in 5 dimensions, etc) must
puzzle outsiders! Cases d = 0, 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7 .... trivial or proven, but
why should d = 3 turn out to have been so intractable until Grigoriy? It’s a
moot point to what extent VN appreciated the mathematical, as opposed to the
mystical, properties of these higher dimensions. See VN’s struggle with
Einstein’s (3+1)-d spacetime in The Quill and the Scalpel: Nabokov's Art and
the Worlds of Science (Stephen Blackwell).
On 25/03/2010 08:32, "Alexey Sklyarenko" <skylark05@MAIL.RU> wrote:
> Pity that no one has offered me a million-dollar prize for my "discoveries"
> (whatever they are worth). This would allow me to pay for the Internet
> services and write to Nabokv-L till the end of my days.
> On the other hand, I know that Perelman (a genius and a freak in his own
> right) is not particularly happy to be so popular with the media.
>
> Alexey Sklyarenko
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Mikhailovich Zoshchenko do merit a reward, and if my current email
negotiations with the Royal Nigerian Bank bear fruit, I promise to express
my gratitude with a hard-monetary gesture. Your clever anagrammatical games,
however, do little to advance Nabokovian understanding and scholarship.
Indeed, our enjoyment of VN’s own wordplays may well suffer from seeing how
easy it is to juggle characters! You magnify the pointlessness by
introducing the trick of adding then subtracting selected characters to
achieve the desired equation. You must know that computers have taken all
the mystical, gemiatric “fun” out of such manipulations: see, especially,
Don Knuth’s latest volume in his Art of Computing series, devoted to
Combinatorics where N-letter Word Golf problems succumb to a few
mouse-clicks. The creativity has moved from trial-and-error manual juggling
to the clever sods who program these divine algorithms. I single out Knuth
(quod googlet) because he has pioneered “literary” programming, in the sense
that good code should have the attributes we associate with good writing.
You (after due apprenticeship!) can (re-)read the text of well-structured
programs (none of that goto-infected “spaghetti” code seen in barbaric
Basic) with Nabokovian delight.
An analogy worth pondering: suppose the VN-list received regular examples of
reader-devised cryptic crosswords and chess-problems, rather than
reader-devised anagrams and wordplays? I claim the former might provide more
insights into VN’s remarkable mind. Both Cryptic Crosswords and Chess
problems can gain much help from computers (both setting and solving) but
retain an irreducible human-creativity challenge. E.g., after many years of
analysis and computer-scrutiny by Kasparov and others, Raymone Keene reports
a startling move that would have changed the classic Capablanca-Reshevsky
game.
Re-Grigoriy Perelman: his story (scandale!) was aired on this list a few
years ago. It’s well-nigh impossible for non-mathematicians to fathom his
glorious achievement (proof of Poincaré Conjecture for 3-dimensional
spheres). I studied under Stephen Smale (who proved the Poincaré Conjecture
in 1961 for dimensions greater than 3*!!) and under René Thom (who threw
spanners into earlier non-proofs for dimension 3!!) yet cannot claim to
follow all the diabolical subtleties of Perelman’s proof (published first in
outline then refined with the detail needed to convince his peers). It took
the experts some time to verify, and then for the Fields Medal and $1
million Clay Prize to be awarded. And declined! It’s no secret that many
mathematicians were peed off by Perelman’s rejection of these honours, not
so much the giving up of the cash rewards, but the implied insult to a
community. Perelman’s proof rested on the previous hard-won results of many
mathematicians. Rather than Newton’s modest claim of standing on giants’
shoulders, Perelman’s rejection seems more like ungratefully treading on
giants’ toes! Still, weirdly “beautiful minds” are well-known in the arts
and sciences! We mortals forgive John Nash, Alexander Grothendieck (Alexey:
he makes Perelman seem boringly normal!), Kurt Go:del, Paul Dirac, Wolfgang
Pauli, more.
Stan Kelly-Bootle
* The earthly-surface spheres we are used to are 2-dimensional manifolds
embedded in our familiar 3-dimensional space. The 3-dimensional sphere
embedded in 4-dimensions is tougher to visualize, yet represents a plausible
model for the very cosmos we INHABIT! That the conjecture was proved first
for even higher dimensions (4-d spheres embedded in 5 dimensions, etc) must
puzzle outsiders! Cases d = 0, 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7 .... trivial or proven, but
why should d = 3 turn out to have been so intractable until Grigoriy? It’s a
moot point to what extent VN appreciated the mathematical, as opposed to the
mystical, properties of these higher dimensions. See VN’s struggle with
Einstein’s (3+1)-d spacetime in The Quill and the Scalpel: Nabokov's Art and
the Worlds of Science (Stephen Blackwell).
On 25/03/2010 08:32, "Alexey Sklyarenko" <skylark05@MAIL.RU> wrote:
> Pity that no one has offered me a million-dollar prize for my "discoveries"
> (whatever they are worth). This would allow me to pay for the Internet
> services and write to Nabokv-L till the end of my days.
> On the other hand, I know that Perelman (a genius and a freak in his own
> right) is not particularly happy to be so popular with the media.
>
> Alexey Sklyarenko
Search archive with Google:
http://www.google.com/advanced_search?q=site:listserv.ucsb.edu&HL=en
Contact the Editors: mailto:nabokv-l@utk.edu,nabokv-l@holycross.edu
Visit Zembla: http://www.libraries.psu.edu/nabokov/zembla.htm
View Nabokv-L policies: http://web.utk.edu/~sblackwe/EDNote.htm
Visit "Nabokov Online Journal:" http://www.nabokovonline.com
Manage subscription options: http://listserv.ucsb.edu/