# neverendingbooks

• ## Imagination and the Impossible

Two more sources I’d like to draw from for this fall’s maths for designers-course: 1. Geometry and the Imagination A fantastic collection of handouts for a two week summer workshop entitled ’Geometry and the Imagination’, led by John Conway, Peter Doyle, Jane Gilman and Bill Thurston at the Geometry Center in Minneapolis, June 1991, based […]

• ## Designer Maths

This fall, I’ll be teaching ‘Mathematics for Designers’ to first year students in Architecture. The past few weeks I’ve been looking around for topics to be included in such as course, relevant to architects/artists (not necessarily to engineers/mathematicians). One of the best texts I’ve found on this (perhaps in need of a slight update) is…

• ## phase transition

Today, our youngest daughter (aka PD2 on this blog) gave birth to a little boy, Gust. I’m in transition, trying to adjust to this new phase in our lives.

• ## 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…

• ## a monstrous unimodular lattice

An integral $n$-dimensional lattice $L$ is the set of all integral linear combinations $L = \mathbb{Z} \lambda_1 \oplus \dots \oplus \mathbb{Z} \lambda_n$ of base vectors $\{ \lambda_1,\dots,\lambda_n \}$ of $\mathbb{R}^n$, equipped with the usual (positive definite) inner product, satisfying $(\lambda, \mu ) \in \mathbb{Z} \quad \text{for all \lambda,\mu \in \mathbb{Z}.}$ But…

• ## Escher’s stairs

Stairways feature prominently in several drawings by Maurits Cornelis (“Mauk”) Escher, for example in this lithograph print Relativity from 1953. Relativity (M. C. Escher) – Photo Credit From its Wikipedia page: In the world of ‘Relativity’, there are three sources of gravity, each being orthogonal to the two others. Each inhabitant lives in one of…

• ## Bourbaki and Grothendieck-Serre

This time of year I’m usually in France, or at least I was before Covid. This might explain for my recent obsession with French math YouTube interviews. Today’s first one is about Bourbaki’s golden years, the period between WW2 and 1975. Alain Connes is trying to get some anecdotes from Jean-Pierre Serre, Pierre Cartier, and…

• ## 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…

• ## Princeton’s own Bourbaki

In the first half of 1937, Andre Weil visited Princeton and introduced some of the postdocs present (notably Ralph Boas, John Tukey, and Frank Smithies) to Poldavian lore and Bourbaki’s early work. In 1935, Bourbaki succeeded (via father Cartan) to get his paper “Sur un théorème de Carathéodory et la mesure dans les espaces topologiques”…

• ## Cambridge, spring 1939

One of the few certainties we have on the Bourbaki-Petard wedding invitation is that it was printed in, and distributed out of Cambridge in the spring of 1939, presumably around mid April. So, what was going on, mathematically, in and around Trinity and St. John’s College, at that time? Well, there was the birth of…