'Men of Mathematics 2' by E. T. Bell

You may not know it but we deal with maths everyday.  Reading this blog, for instance, requires maths for the algorithms that has lead you here and for the computer/ phone/ tablet to be made enabling such reading.  Yet the stories of the men who have pushed the boundaries of the subject that has transformed our world are not popularly known.  In comes E. T. Bell with 'Men of Mathematics 2' a book of short biographies of the major mathematicians from 1793 to 1918.

I read this book as folk tales of extraordinary people who set their minds to understanding the world through the application of mathematics, full of misfortune, humour and world changing discoveries.  Take Evariste Galois: a boy with a 'madness for maths' failed in his examinations due to the stupidity of his examiners, or as one put it 'A candidate of superior intelligence is lost with an examiner of inferior intelligence'. 

 He lived during the Revolution of 1830 and at a gathering of revolutionaries he stood up with a glass in one hand and a pocket knife in the other and declared 'To Louis Philippe'- the King whereupon the next day he was thrown in prison.  He died aged twenty-one and helped lay the foundation for quantum mechanics.  See, it's not all chalkboards and compasses.

 

Poincare said that 'Mathematical discoveries, small or great...are never born of spontaneous generation.  They always presuppose a soil seeded with preliminary knowledge and well prepared by labour, both conscious and unconscious' and this is what you feel from reading such a book, that the journey is ever continuing and one mathematician takes off from where another leaves.  There is no greatness without learning from the past.  The fact that it is not a solidary pursuit always starting from scratch speaks to how many different things were needed from many people in order to gain the knowledge we have now. 

Mathematics doesn't even have to be approached as a science.  Take Kronecker who 'was an artist who used mathematical formulae as his medium'.  It takes intense creativity to develop the insights needed to proceed and a love of abstract thinking that is like wordplay to numbers.  It's given me a much deeper appreciation of a neglected subject that should be more a part of popular culture.  

Now it's audience participation time! If you enjoyed this blog and my previous work than you can help support me in a few ways: - by being my patron on Patreon.com -give a one off donation with Buy Me a Coffee -Buy one of my literary books -Share this blog on your social media -Leave a comment, you can even recommend me book -Follow me I can't stress enough how much all this helps me and how in the long run it will help you, so if you can and you want to please support my free content so I can keep on producing my beloved blog. Live long and prosper.

'False Dawn' by John Gray

'The problems facing the world are not fully soluble' writes John Gray (not that one) in his prophetic book 'False Dawn' with the subtitle: Delusions of Global Capitalism.  Gray might be best known for his 'Straw Dogs' a book of aphorisms about the modern human state and general pessimistic outlook scorning both Christianity and Humanism. 

This book may not be a barrel of laughs but it has turned out to be true.  First published in 1998 Gray takes on free market ideology that has been dominant since the 80s.  It's proponents convince the public that the market is the natural state of affairs, to which Gray points out that it is not 'a gift of social evolution.  It is an end-product of social engineering and unyielding political will'.  And with disastrous results. 

What one figure has stuck to me is the divorce rate in the UK in 1992.  One divorce for every two marriages, comparable only to the US.  Unemployment and family breakdown rose after deregulating labour along with a burgeoning underclass unheard of in the rest of Europe.  The visible signs of social erosion after Thatcher are so striking that she was not wrong to claim that she changed everything in Britain.  Certainly it seems that more people are losing out after her than before.

When choice is god than what difference does it make if you are paying for a divorce or pay for a car?  Effectively it nullifies morality and value judgements.  What happens to the things that we can't use money to solve, like a liveable planet or friendship?  Do these become commodified and just a product we can buy and sell?  If I look around my town I can see that the markets aren't good for even businesses let alone creating beautiful surroundings.

I think the quote at the beginning of this blog is useful to think while reading this book.  Gray also says 'free market policies lost political legitimacy while at the same time altering the economy and society in ways that democratic choice cannot reverse'.  This is not utopian thinking but he suggests that what we are becoming is where anarchy is permeant.  In 2009 he wrote an updated foreword after the financial crisis of 2008 where he seems to be vindicated of his view as the correct one before anyone else even considered the question.  We cannot go back and our future is uncertain.  There will be no one way of correcting the situation, if it can be corrected.

A sober read and argued with detail it's the book you need to read to understand out economics today and to be able to at least understand how we got here.

Now it's audience participation time!  If you enjoyed this blog and my previous work than you can help support me in a few ways:

- by being my patron on Patreon.com

-give a one off donation with Buy Me a Coffee

-Buy one of my literary books

-Share this blog on your social media

-Leave a comment, you can even recommend me book

-Follow me

I can't stress enough how much all this helps me and how in the long run it will help you, so if you can and you want to please support my free content so I can keep on producing my beloved blog.

Live long and prosper.

Blog entry on Start Somewhere Project

I've written something for a blog that tries to inspire young artists.  I talk about my journey so far and my ideas about writing linking it with mental health.  Link is below.


Writing For Me is a Way of Being

'Only One Earth' by Barbara Ward and Rene Dubos

'Only One Earth' an unofficial report by Barbara Ward and Rene Dubos could hardly be more timely, yet it was written in 1972.  It's subtitle, 'The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet', makes clear the subject matter of the book.  How can industrialised and developing countries continue on with their high levels of living while surviving on a resource limited rock?

 It's urgency couldn't be more felt today with books like Naomi Klein's 'This Changes Everything', George Monbiot's 'Heat' and David Wallace-Wells' 'The Uninhabitable Earth' and the phenomenon of Greta Thunberg our impact on the Earth is well documented, well understood and catastrophic if nothing about it gets done.

This book struck me by being very well written in almost novelistic prose that catches not only the scientific instinct but the emphatic one too.  Our increasing mastery of our world that has grown since the seventeenth centaury has given us extraordinary comfort and well being but, as Monbiot would put it, it is a Faustian bargain where the cost of all our luxuries maybe too high for us to pay.

Though this book is not a doom-and-gloom fest.  It states the facts of our existence and gives a look at the stark future if we do not reduce consumption.  But because I am reading this in the year 2020 it does seem that we are further down the knife edge of living and I find that frightening.

Drawn on from the collective knowledge of forty countries this is truly a global book that tries to take the whole world in it's entirety while compiling the facts.  This makes sense as it was the first photograph of the Earth from the moon that was a catalyst for more environmental campaigning and political policies.

For the history of environmental writing this, for me, is a key book that puts all the data succinctly, comprehensively, and humanely.  Compelling and gripping  it may make you want to join Extinction Rebellion in the hopes of continuing life on this planet where we can experience new challenges and new adventures and for our grand children to experience.

We are bothers and sisters on this spaceship, or as Carl Sagan puts it 'a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam', this is our home and it's the only home we've ever known.

'Lives of the Artists' by Vasari

Every great writer needs a Boswell and in Vasari's 'Lives of the Artists' the Florentine artists have one.  The stories and exploits of great artists such as Giotto, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and others, about how they got their first starts and the anecdotes behind the great works, is told with insider appreciation of Vasari, himself a painter.  And there is much to wonder at here.

From the story of one painter getting captured by pirates only to be released when he paints such a wonderful painting of the slave owner, to Giotto's 'o' and da Vinci's empathy for caged birds, it makes you feel that those times were incredibly rich and fruitful, a time of humanising development and excellence.

I say a rich time because it wasn't all painting nice pictures, there was war too and then the mathematically minded artists turned engineers creating weapons and defensives to help with the combat.

In fact these artists were very scientifically literate, especially da Vinci who used his sketches as a way of trying to understand how the human body works.  The art they made was another expression of their creative scientific imaginations showing how the divide between the 'two cultures' was not always so and in fact their science helped invigorate their art and visa versa.

Their art was only possible with the patronage of the popes who wanted religious icons in their churches to bring a bit of colour and visual flair to the proceedings.  Their scope of what they could make was, perhaps, a bit narrow but it was a very potent focal point for them to focus in and delve deep in the great biblical subjects that inspired their culture.

These stories inspire me to create short dramas about each of the twenty artists listed as they are not stories that get retold much and yet to have such devotion to master a craft really does leave you in awe.

These artists changed the world for the better.  Thankfully Vasari has wonderfully capture the spirit of those times and left a tangible, if possibly inaccurate, book on the subject that artists in the future will no doubt turn to and draw inspiration from as they make their way through the world.

'Bully for Brontosaurus' by Stephen Jay Gould

'So much of science proceeds by telling stories- and we are especially vulnerable to constraints of this medium because we so rarely recognize what we are doing' so says Stephen Jay Gould in 'Bully for Brontosaurus' his fifth volume of collected essays in science popularisation which do tell good stories about the various aspects of evolution and considerations for the intellectual world. 

'Some people have seen me as a polymath, but I insist that I am a tradesman' the ever modest, ever humble Gould writes in the introduction implying the hard work involved in learning and the functionality of what is learned.  Certainly by reading him you get a deeper appreciation of just how Darwin has changed culture and how much of his theory seeps into everything.

For Gould Homo sapiens  is a 'tiny and accidental evolutionary twig' that conducts an 'interesting but dangerous experiment in consciousness' where 'the history of life is a tale of decimation and later stabilization of few surviving anatomies, not a story of steady expansion and progress'.  Yet this does not seem to dim his enthusiasm for being part of it, to experience it at all, a privilege to be enjoyed if we can be aware enough to.  His love for the subject is contagious as his interesting writing makes you interested in what he is writing about, popular without dumbing down or making concessions.  It is a masterclass in communication.

Making the case for enlightenment Gould is in a tough fight against anti-intellectualism: 

'We live in a profoundly non-intellectual culture, made all the worse by a passive hedonism abetted by the spread of wealth and the dissipation into countless electronic devices that impart the latest in entertainment and supposed information- all in short (and loud) doses of "easy learning"'.  

In trying by 'noting popular trends and trying to divert some of their energy into rivulets that might benefit learning and education' he gives a tour to a world of ideas, interesting in and of themselves that may prick curiosity and lead someone further down the road of understanding of the world and it's workings for those people who haven't only let the world work for them. 'We must rage against the dying of the light- and although Dylan Thomas spoke of bodily death in his famous line, we may also apply his words to the extinction of wonder in the mind, by pressures of conformity in an anti-intellectual culture'

He is a dispeller of misconceptions about science, 'science is a method for testing claims about the natural world, not an immutable compendium of absolute truths', and gives descriptions of scientists, 

'You might almost define a good scientist as a person with the horse sense to discern the largest answerable question- and to shun useless issues that sound grander', allowing readers a chance to change their perspective on how to view such matters that may give a greater clarity than previous prejudices afforded.

I've taken a lot of inspiration from Gould in writing my blogs; his friendliness, his kindness and his knowledge are all things that I aspire to personify in my writings.  It's been highly enjoyable to read about the evolution of the typewriter, the furore around Darwin and current culture as he makes it easy for me.  A dip-in book for those odd, loose moments hanging around the house that satisfies while being edifying.

The human race has been a very colourful experiment 'So why not keep this interesting thought experiment around, at least for another planetary second or two?'

'History of the World' by J. M. Roberts

In terms of the universe we have just arrived, yet in our short time we have travelled far  as J. M. Roberts looks back on human existence in 'History of the World'.  How can one write such a book where each epoch requires detailed study in it's own right and also for it to be coherent to read?  With a lot of editing I imagine.  Yet going into our past has been absorbing; civilisations rising and falling, wars and inventions, centuries of stability and stagnation and decades of combustible innovation.  To know where we are is to look back as a means of going forward.

Clocking in at 1109 pages it is a bible of history that contains almost everything from Ice Age man to the Cold War.  First written in 1976 it is a gargantuan of social evolution making you appreciate the differences in culture and sensing the historical forces that guide present life.  There are some great stories here.  The conquer Alexander the Great meeting the philosopher Diogenes, the conversion of the Indian leader Asoka from a war faring man to peaceful man, and the Egyptian King Menes diverting the river Nile by a levee.  So this is a very rich book and all will be made rich by reading it.

It is, after all, our heritage that we can comfortably read at a our leisure with curiosity, excitement, fear and wonder.  But of course this is the point of view of one British scholar, as encompassing of a view that might be, whose general thrust might be different from say a Japanese scholar or a Mexican one.  People who write histories of the world may be seen to be the machos of the intellectual world who decide to write not just one thing but everything.  This is 'Moby Dick', it's 'Ulysses', it's big and it has something to prove.

As incomplete as it must be it is nonetheless an engaging summary of human life.  Decidedly academic, unlike Andrew Marr's recent version which is a rollicking tale from a story spinning journalist and has more juicier, plumbable, quote to be seized with joy and re-told to your mates in the pub, it is very readable for the student of history as it does go into enough detail while giving a understandable overview.

It's the book I read when I can't sleep, a long almost chronological story of people who had lived, did things, and left it to us.  It's humbling to know that we now exist in relative comfort after hundreds of generations struggle against famine, war and poverty that those people kept going against the odds and worked together so that we may have this futuristic present, which for all it's problems is probably the time I would most like to live.  It's a great time to be alive because so many people have created things we can now take from and make our own thereby creating our own things for the future.

This is a book to be reading for the rest of your life; always finding something new in it that you hadn't noticed before, being in awe of time and it's progression, and thinking on those lives.