The Saunterer

Michael Atiyah on why mathematics is successful in the physical sciences

    Michael Atiyah explains:

If one views the brain in its evolutionary context then the mysterious success of mathematics in the physical sciences is at least partially explained. The brain evolved in order to deal with the physical world, so it should not be too surprising that it has developed a language, mathematics, that is well suited for the purpose.

    (Quoted from page 243 of Is God a Mathematician?, by Mario Livio. Simon & Schuster, 2009.)
    For a brief biography of Michael Atiyah, click here. For a brief biography of Mario Livio, click here.

James Martin on how we are destroying Earth

    James Martin lists these sad numbers:

Every year, because of our misuse of the Earth’s resources, we lose 100 million acres of farmland and 24 billion tons of topsoil, and we create 15 million acres of new desert around the world. An inch of good topsoil can take a thousand years to form, but when people destroy windbreaks by cutting down trees, the topsoil can be washed or blown away in months.
    (From The Meaning of the 21st Century: A Vital Blueprint for Ensuring Our Future, by James Martin. Berkley Publishing Group, 2007. We Sauntered upon it not there but on page 19 of Global Climate Change and the Road to Extinction: The Legal and Planning Response, by James A. Kushner. Carolina Academic Press. 2009.)
    For a brief biography of James Martin, click here. For information on the James Martin 21st-Century School at the University of Oxford, click here. For a brief biography of James A. Kushner, click here.

Germaine de Staël on young women building their lives around their beauty

    Germaine de Staël put the idea in a short story, “The Reasons Why Léontine de Ternan Decided to Become a Nun”:

I was once a very beautiful woman, and I am now fifty years old. These two absolutely ordinary facts have been the cause of everything I have ever felt in life.

    (Quoted from “The Great de Staël,” by Richard Holmes. The New York Review of Books, May 28, 2009.)
    For a brief biography of Germaine de Staël, click here. For a brief biography of Richard Holmes, click here.

Hastings Rashdall on the worth of lawyers

    There’s something good to be said for lawyers, and Hastings Rashdall tells it:

Law was the leading faculty in by far the greater number of medieval universities: for a very large proportion of university students the study of arts, in so far as they pursued it at all, took the place of a modern school rather than of a modern university. From a broad political and social point of view one of the most important results of the universities was the creation, or at least the enormously increased power and importance, of the lawyer-class. Great as are the evils which society still owes to lawyers, the lawyer-class has always been a civilizing agency. Their power represents at least the triumph of reason and education over caprice and brute force. Lawyers have moderated or regulated despotism even when they have proved its most willing tools: just as in modern democratic communities their prominence must be looked upon as an important conservative check upon democracy.
    (Quoted from page 708 of The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, by Hastings Rashdall. The Clarendon Press, 1895.)
    For a brief biography of Hastings Rashdall, click here.

Leonardo da Vinci on how to become a greater painter

    Learn by copying great art, and your imagination will grow only to the standard of that art; learn by painting nature, and your imagination will grow to a greater standard. Leonardo da Vinci explains:

    Hence the painter will produce pictures of small merit if he takes for his standard the pictures of others. But if he will study from natural objects he will bear good fruit; as was seen in the paintings after the Romans who always imitated each other, and so their art declined from age to age. After these came Giotto the Florentine who - not content with imitating the works of Cimabue; his master - being born in the mountains and in a solitude inhabited only by goats and such beasts, and being guided by nature to his art, began by drawing on the rocks the movements of the goats of which he was keeper. And thus he began to draw all the animals which were to be found in the country, and in such wise that after much study he excelled not only all the masters of his time but all those of many bygone ages.
    Afterwards this art declined again, because everyone imitated the pictures that were already done; thus it went on from century to century until Tomaso, of Florence, nicknamed Masaccio, showed by his perfect works how those who take for their standard any one but nature - the mistress of all masters - weary themselves in vain. (Quoted from p. 660, Vol. I, of The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci, by Jean Paul Richter. London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington. 1883.)
    For a brief biography of Leonardo da Vinci, click here. For images of Leonardo da Vinci’s art, click here. For a brief biography of Jean Paul Richter, click here.

W. K. Clifford's no-nonsense epitaph

    Epictetus shunned all nonsense, so it was fitting that W. K. Clifford chose his epitaph from Epictetus:

I was not, and was conceived; I loved, and did a little work; I am not, and grieve not.
    (This according to page xx of Timothy J. Madigan’s introduction to The Ethics of Belief and Other Essays, by W. K Clifford. Prometheus Books, 1999.)
    For a brief biography of William Kingdon Clifford, click here. For a brief biography of Epictetus, click here.

How universities got their peaceful demeanor

    From our library Saunterings of the recent spring months we discovered that starting in the middle ages, universities exercised behavior control on their students. Hear Hastings Rashdall:

College statutes are not unnaturally full of prohibitions directed against musical or other noises calculated to disturb the studies of others. Some few German statutes condescend so far to human infirmity as to permit at seasonable hours musical instruments, ‘provided they are musical’. As to the keeping of dogs, hawks, ferrets, ‘unclean beasts or birds’, the practice was viewed by the college disciplinarian with a traditional horror which (as regards dogs) still lingers in the breasts of the deans and porters of Oxford and Cambridge. As the grim sixteenth century is reached, the prohibitions against all ‘profane games, immodest runnings, and horrid shoutings’, become increasingly sweeping. (Quoted from page 421 of Volume III of The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, by Hastings Rashdall. 1936.)
    For a brief biography of Hastings Rashdall, click here.

Terence Mann on baseball’s most special specialty

    In the movie, Field of Dreams, Terence Mann says to Ray:

The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, it’s a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good and it could be again. (Lead-off lines of chapter 1, Take Me Out to the Ball Game, by Amy Whorf McGuiggan. University of Nebraska Press, 2009.)
    For more on Field of Dreams, click here.

Arnold Schoenberg on art for art’s sake

    Unless art is composed for art’s sake, believed Arnold Schoenberg, it shouldn’t be called art:
    No artist, no poet, no philosopher and no musician whose thinking occurs in the highest sphere would degenerate into vulgarity in order to comply with a slogan such as “Art for All”. Because if it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art. . . . One thinks only for the sake of one’s idea.
    And thus art can only be created for its own sake. An idea is born; it must be molded, formulated, developed, elaborated, carried through and pursued to its very end.
    Because there is only “l’art pour l’art”, art for the sake of art alone.
(Quoted from page 124 of Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg, by Arnold Schoenberg. Leonard Stein(ed.), Leo Black (tr.) University of California Press,1985.)
    For a brief biography of Arnold Schoenberg, click here.

Henry Jacoby on rage against bureaucracy

    In his book, The Bureaucratization of the World (University of California Press, 1976) Henry Jacoby wrote:

There is a latent ressentiment against all forms of bureaucracy - not only against that of the state. It is a type of ressentiment which grows stronger as the bureaucratic forces become more anonymous and impregnable, as they are increasingly removed from the realm of give and take. (Quoted from page 165 of Statistical Panic: Cultural Politics and Poetics of the Emotions, by Kathleen Woodward. Duke University Press, 2009.)

    For a brief biography of Kathleen Woodward, click here.