Dear S.K-B

After a mathematical correction for the description of the Sudoku (inaptly contrasted with  cross-words) in which you showed that it is a game using symbols, not numbers, you proceeded to the centonian quilt in agriculture to plant flowers on  gigantic chess-board!  You explained that Math involves "relationships" (  "The underlying, majestic unity of mathematics (whether you call it math or maths!) is pattern/relationship).
Your arguments led me to imagine that chess-games may be more than strategic constructions which are causally determined or that belong to a mechanical
order.  They require a play with "relationships" that extends beyond mathematical formulae to demand a subjective, human, intervention to
flourish. 
 
The same would also apply to Vladimir Nabokov's complex use of words. It became clear to me how it is not necessary nor sufficient to
transpose letters in a word to conclude that one is then building anagrams and so mechanically and transliterate "Mad Ruka" from poor Adam Krug's name,
as J. Morgan has suggested...

Jacques Lacan in 1945 wrote "Le Temps logique et l'assertion de certitude antecipée" ( available in his "Écrits" collection) where he developed "a new sophism" to illustrate the importance of subjectivity and a person's "I" to act to solve a logical problem. In it three prisoners were shown five disks( three were white and two black) and told that one of them would be set free if he could show he knew what color was in the disk then attached to his back. The prison director selected only the white disks, and proceded to the task... I'm a disaster with numbers and math, but I think those interested should look into Lacan's short exposition.
 
Jansy
 
 
----- Original Message -----
From: Stan Kelly-Bootle
To: NABOKV-L@LISTSERV.UCSB.EDU
Sent: Thursday, June 29, 2006 10:32 AM
Subject: Re: [NABOKV-L] verboleptic who dreamed up Humbert ...

On 18/6/06 00:57, "Sandy P. Klein" <spklein52@HOTMAIL.COM> wrote:

...when you've got crossword puzzles, and a smart new movie to celebrate them
By RICHARD CORLISS <javascript:void(0)>  
 
The latest fad is Sudoku, a number game in a box, In less than two years, the puzzle has won a popularity that verges on the epidemic. It now appears daily in newspapers on all six inhabited continents and has spawned hundreds of magazines, not to mention dozens of books that elbow traditional puzzle volumes off the Barnes & Noble shelves.

...---... When Humbert Humbert sadly apostrophized his absent inamorata by crying, "Oh my Lolita, I have only words to play with!", he was selling words short. Vladimir Nabokov, the verboleptic who dreamed up Humbert, surely knew this, as do his readers: Lolita is the wordplay lover's favorite novel. Numbers have their power; they can be squared, cubed, extended to infinity. But they can't match the universe of ideas and feelings that come into being when letters collide. Words create worlds. ...---...

Hate to spoil Richard C’s theorizing, but the basic SuDoku is a logical/symbolic not a numerical puzzle.  (See my “Anything SuDoku I Can Do Better,” ACM Queue Magazine,  Dec 2005). The puzzle uses the numbers 1-9 as a convenience — any 9 distinct symbols can be used. There is (no surprise) a WorldCupSoccer variant called Sven Doku (after the English coach Sven-Goran Eriksson) which uses symbols related to Sven’s active sex life! We need to distinguish Magic Squares from Latin Squares. The former are numeric, the latter symbolic. AND, dear ListMeisters, there are several Nabokovian resonances. Euler, who solved many of the Latin Square problems, is buried in St Petersburg (I’ve made the pilgrimage).
Jansy: many connections with your QUILTS! Not just fancy patterns — practical agricultural applications — dividing fields so that certain combinations of crops/fertilizers/chemicals occupy non-adjacent squares. (I recall VN describing ‘quilted’ fields somewhere in the Butterflies anthology). We mathematicians cringe un peu when false dichotomies are made between “numbers” and “words.”
The underlying, majestic unity of mathematics (whether you call it math or maths!) is pattern/relationship.

Stan Kelly-Bootle  

Search the Nabokv-L archive at UCSB

Contact the Editors

All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.

Visit Zembla

View Nabokv-L Policies

Search the Nabokv-L archive at UCSB

Contact the Editors

All private editorial communications, without exception, are read by both co-editors.

Visit Zembla

View Nabokv-L Policies