neverendingbooks

Category: books

  • the topos of unconsciousness

    Since wednesday, as mentioned last time, the book by Alain Connes and Patrick Gauthier-Lafaye: “A l’ombre de Grothendieck et de Lacan, un topos sur l’inconscient” is available in the better bookshops. There’s no need to introduce Alain Connes on this blog. Patrick Gauthier-Lafaye is a French psychiatrist and psycho-analyst, working in Strassbourg. The book is […]

  • Hexboards and Heytings

    A couple of days ago, Peter Rowlett posted on The Aperiodical: Introducing hexboard – a LaTeX package for drawing games of Hex. Hex is a strategic game with two players (Red and Blue) taking turns placing a stone of their color onto any empty space. A player wins when they successfully connect their sides together…

  • Chevalley’s circle of friends

    Last week, Danielle Couty ArXiVed her paper Friendly views on Claude Chevalley (in French). From the abstract: “We propose to follow the itinerary of Claude Chevalley during the last twenty years of his life, through the words of Jacques Roubaud, Denis Guedj and Alexander Grothendieck. Our perspective is that of their testimonies filled with friendship.”…

  • Grothendieck stuff

    January 13th, Gallimard published Grothendieck’s text Recoltes et Semailles in a fancy box containing two books. Here’s a G-translation of Gallimard’s blurb: “Considered the mathematical genius of the second half of the 20th century, Alexandre Grothendieck is the author of Récoltes et semailles, a kind of “monster” of more than a thousand pages, according to…

  • Lockdown reading : SNORT

    In this series I’ll mention some books I found entertaining, stimulating or comforting during these Corona times. Read them at your own risk. This must have been the third time I’ve read The genius in by basement – The biography of a happy man by Alexander masters. I first read it when it came out…

  • Finnegans Wake’s geometry lesson

    The literary sensation that spring of 1939 no doubt was the publication of Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. On May 4th 1939 FW was published simultaneously by Faber and Faber in London and by Viking Press in New York, after seventeen years of composition. In 1928-29, Joyce started publishing individual chapters from FW, then known…

  • Ghost metro stations

    In the strange logic of subways I’ve used a small part of the Parisian metro-map to illustrate some of the bi-Heyting operations on directed graphs. Little did I know that this metro-map gives only a partial picture of the underground network. The Parisian metro has several ghost stations, that is, stations that have been closed…

  • Lockdown reading : Bacon

    In this series I’ll mention some books I found entertaining, stimulating or comforting during these Corona times. Read them at your own risk. In an attempt to raise the level of this series, I tried to get through the latest hype in high-brow literature: The Death of Francis Bacon by Max Porter. It’s an extremely…

  • Lockdown reading : Centenal

    In this series I’ll mention some books I found entertaining, stimulating or comforting during these Corona times. Read them at your own risk. The Centenal Cycle is a trilogy written by Malka Older. A Centenal is the basic political unit of a future micro-democracy. It is a neighbourhood consisting of 100.000 people which can vote…

  • Lockdown reading : Penumbra

    In this series I’ll mention some books I found entertaining, stimulating or comforting during these Corona times. Read them at your own risk. It’s difficult to admit, but Amazon’s blurb lured me into reading Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan: “With irresistible brio and dazzling intelligence, Robin Sloan has crafted a literary adventure story…