Areas of Unrest

14 February 2001 - Infinity

QOTD: "Inaninimate objects are classified scientifically into three major categories: those that don't work, those that break down and those that get lost." - Russell Baker

Reading: Esther Friesner (editor), The Chick is in the Mail

Listening to: Pierre Bensusan, Nice Feeling

There is probably nothing stranger in the known universe than higher mathematics. Not long ago, Robert gave me a book about infinity and the continuum hypothesis and other exotic things related to Georg Cantor. One thing the book points out that is a lot of the mathematicians who've contemplated this stuff also had significant bouts of mental illness. As I told Robert, the real question is whether contemplating infinity drives people mad or whether people who are already mentally ill are attracted to abstract mathematics. Me, I've always had a hard time with infinity. While I understand the arguments that lead to concluding that, say, there are the same number of integers as there are of perfect squares, the whole notion of countably infinite sets is still so counterintuitive that it makes me uncomfortable. I am treating this as a sign of sanity.

By the way, I should mention that I am not in Boulder because the slight cold that I mentioned Sunday proved not to be quite so slight. I was certainly not in any shape to get on an airplane on Monday and I've stayed home from work the past few days, though I think I'm well enough now to go back tomorrow. It's not like I didn't want some time off, but I'd really prefer being healthy. The worst part of this particular cold is that every time I cough, my head hurts for just a second. It feels like a particular vein in my head is reacting to the pressure of the cough. Very weird and I don't think I've experienced that before.

Aside from reading about higher mathematics and contemplating what dread disease is associated with the cough-headache connection, I've spent my time at home watching videos, crocheting (working on a ripple afghan for my donation project), and dealing with a few of the odds and ends of paper cluttering up my living room. One of which turns up today's trivia, namely the first citation of the word "software." It turns out to be a mention in the January 1958 issue of American Mathematical Monthly in an article by John Tukey of Princeton. I was vaguely surprised that it wasn't earlier than that.

The paper stack also turned up the monthly museum newsletter which included an article about a collector of Japanese prints who limits his collection to fifty prints. Thus, if he sees one he wants, he has to decide if it's worth giving up one he already has. This strikes me as an interesting exercise about objects in general and I glanced over my bookshelves with it in mind. I deliberately excluded my folklore collection, which I consider professional reference. What struck me is that there probably aren't more than a dozen books I feel like I absolutely have to have. I dearly love my Richard Armour collection, for example, but I could live happily without even It All Started With Columbus. Of all the mysteries, the only authors even worth considering keeping are Dorothy L. Sayers, Edmund Crispin and Rex Stout, though lots of others have brought me pleasure over the years. Alice in Wonderland is a must, as are Moby Dick and A Journal of the Plague Year (I know - nobody else is as crazy about Daniel Defoe as I am), but it gets harder after that.

I don't want to go through the whole exercise here, and I don't really have any intention of paring my library anywhere near that deep, but it may have opened up a way that I can bring myself to get rid of at least a few books. There are certainly plenty I wouldn't contemplate making part of a collection restricted to a thousand, never mind fifty, so it's absurd that it's so hard for me to part with them.