as day 7 of struggling through my profile writing assignment comes to a conclusion, it occurs to me that there's a reason most journalists don't write about math. Mountains of Pi being the obvious exception, there's just no easy way to make it accessible, let alone understandable, without cute-ifying it.
it's interesting to me that mathematics has become such a rarefied field, and that applied mathematicians are viewed as the bastard stepchildren of the true theorist types. before he got his act together, gauss spent his days trying to measure the curvature of the earth by surveying as much as he could. some other guy - i'm blanking here - who came up with something electrical that was both useful and elegant was originally totally absorbed by the twitching of frog legs. and it took until the last twenty years or so for mathematical biology in its modern sense to gain true cultural traction.
maybe that's not so interesting. i wish we had a xmas tree this year, that would have been nice.
listened to some messiaen today. the concentration camp cd - not sold yet. now moving on to the birdsong-inspired trilogy... so far not hearing so much the sparrows and the robins as a sequence of single, mildly dissonant chords.
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