The Saunterer

Michael Atiyah on desirable qualities in mathematics

    With an analogy to valuing art, Michael Atiyah says:

We all know what we like in music, painting or poetry, but it is much harder to explain why we like it. The same is true in mathematics, which is, in part, an art form. We can identify a long list of desirable qualities: beauty, elegance, importance, originality, usefulness, depth, breadth, brevity, simplicity, clarity. However, a single work can hardly embody them all; in fact, some are mutually incompatible. Just as different qualities are appropriate in sonatas, quartets or symphonies, so mathematical compositions of varying types require different treatment. Architecture also provides a useful analogy. A cathedral, palace or castle calls for a very different treatment from an office block or private home. A building appeals to us because it has the right mix of attractive qualities for its purpose, but in the end, our aesthetic response is instinctive and subjective. The best critics frequently disagree.

    (Quoted from page 3 of The Proof is in the Pudding: The Changing Nature of Mathematical Proof, by Steven G. Krantz. Springer, 2011.)
    For a brief biography of Michael Atiyah, click here. For images of or relating to Michael Atiyah, click here.
    For a brief biography of Steven G. Krantz, click here. For images of or relating to Steven G. Krantz, click here.

Flannery O’Connor on God as a collaborator

    After reading this journal entry of Flannery O’Connor’s, we wonder if she believed in free will:

Dear God, tonight it is not disappointing because you have given me a story. Don’t let me ever think, dear God, that I was anything but the instrument for your story –- just like the typewriter was mine. Please let the story, dear God, in its revisions, be made too clear for any false & low interpretation because in it, I am not trying to disparage anybody’s religion although when it was coming out, I didn’t know exactly what I was trying to do or what it was going to mean. I don’t know now if it is consistent. Please don’t let me have to scrap the story because it turns out to mean more wrong than right –- or any wrong. I want it to mean that the good in man sometimes shows through his commercialism but that it is not the fault of the commercialism that it does.

    (Quoted from page 11 of A Prayer Journal, by Flannery O’Connor. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013.)
    For a brief biography of Flannery O’Connor, click here. For images of or relating to Flannery O’Connor, click here.

Mark Twain on telling people how to live their lives

    Keep to your own business is his assertion, of which the following leaves no doubt:

    I don't want any of your statistics; I took your whole batch and lit my pipe with it. I hate your kind of people. You are always ciphering out how much a man's health is injured, and how much his intellect is impaired, and how many pitiful dollars and cents he wastes in the course of ninety-two years' indulgence in the fatal practice of smoking; and in the equally fatal practice of drinking coffee; and in playing billiards occasionally; and in taking a glass of wine at dinner, etc. etc. And you are always figuring out how many women have been burned to death because of the dangerous fashion of wearing expansive hoops, etc. etc. You never see more than one side of the question. You are blind to the fact that most old men in America smoke and drink coffee, although, according to your theory, they ought to have died young. . . . And you never try to find out how much solid comfort, relaxation, and enjoyment a man derives from smoking in the course of a lifetime (which is worth ten times the money he would save by letting it alone), nor the appalling aggregate of happiness lost in a lifetime by your kind of people from not smoking. Of course you can save money by denying yourself all those little vicious enjoyments for fifty years; but then what can you do with it? What use can you put it to? Money can't save your infinitesimal soul. All the use that money can be put to is to purchase comfort and enjoyment in this life; therefore, as you are an enemy to comfort and enjoyment where is the use of accumulating cash? It won't do for you to say that you can use it to better purpose in furnishing a good table, and in charities, and in supporting tract societies, because you know yourself that you people who have no petty vices are never known to give away a cent, and that you stint yourselves so in the matter of food that you are always feeble and hungry. . . . What is the use of your saving money that is so utterly worthless to you? In a word, why don't you go off somewhere and die, and not be always trying to seduce people into becoming as ornery and unlovable as you are yourselves, by your villainous "moral statistics"?

    (Quoted from page 67 of Sketches, New and Old, by Mark Twain. American Publishing Company, N. Y. 1893.)
    For a brief biography of Mark Twain, click here. For images of or relating to Mark Twain, click here.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh on marching to your own drummer

    While in college, Anne Morrow wrote this in her diary:

    It seems to me-–a simple enough thought-–but just realized that if you really and sincerely and passionately want to do something (and wholeheartedly, with the whole of your sincerest self) it is by doing that that you will be most useful, will be giving the most, will be of most individual value. I am sure Colonel Lindbergh never fussed or gave a thought to where he would be most useful or where he could give the most. He just went ahead and did what he wanted terribly to do-–what the whole of him wanted sincerely and in a selfless kind of passion to do.

    (Quoted from page 196 of The Life of the Creative Spirit, by H. Charles Romesburg. Xlibris, 2001.)
    For a brief biography of Anne Morrow Lindbergh, click here. For images of or relating to Anne Morrow Lindbergh, click here.

Margaret Sanger on the root cause of the world’s troubles

    We live in Utah where everyday we see the root cause. A graphic illustration of it once arrived in Margaret Sanger’s morning mail:

Dear Mrs. Sanger:
    Your book of “Woman and the New Race” received. But did not get what I most needed in it is some very important help. Now I would like to ask you to help me as soon as you can. I am a mother of 11 children, 10 living. Green, that is what I am, only 34 years old and am 3 months in a family way again. I have a man that thinks it’s my fault because we have children. I do confess it is.

    (Quoted from page 118 of A History of the Birth Control Movement in America, by Peter C. Engelman. Praeger, 2011.)
    For a brief biography of Margaret Sanger, click here. For images of or relating to Margaret Sanger, click here.
    For a brief biography of  Peter C. Engelman, click here. For images of or relating to Peter C. Engelman, click here.