QOTD: "A subject deprived of its object is deprived of its reality." - Martin Buber
Reading: Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking
Listening to: Open House, Second Story
Decluttering accomplishments: cleared away all of the financial paperwork, mailed everything there was to be mailed, did laundry, packed for my vacation, organized office supplies. So why is the living room still a mess?
That last entry was an attempt to fictionalize how Robert makes my life complicated. I do want to spend as much time with him as possible and I'm happy he feels the same way. But it's never so simple, especially since I want a lot of other things, too. I suppose if I were really devoted, I'd simply spend all my vacation time in London. How much easier it would have been had we bumped rowboats on the lake at the Homowack Lodge circa 1974!
But I did have a nice weekend up in San Francisco, even if he did make me pay for our extravagant dinner at Le Colonial. (My own fault, as I'd commented on how good a raise I'd gotten. And I do make quite a bit more money than Robert does, so it's only fair.) The food will sound far less exotic if I describe it, because saying marinated carrots and chicken soup and green beans and so on is entirely inadequate. The fare is really upscale Vietnamese and was quite nice. The service was a bit slow, though.
I also saw the play, Proof, which was enjoyable. The story involves a daughter coming to terms with her life after the death of her mentally ill mathematician father, who she'd spend several years caring for. There was an obvious split in the audience, as there were some lines that only about half the people got right off. For example, the dead father's student (who is going through his notebooks, looking for any work he might have managed in his lucid periods) plays in a band with other mathematicians. He says that they do a song called "i" and just stand there silently for three minutes. I laughed out loud, as did several other people - but it wasn't until the daughter said "imaginary numbers" that the rest of the audience caught on. Anyway, the play had won both a Tony and a Pulitzer and I'd say that it deserved them.
Continuing the mad mathematician theme, I saw A Beautiful Mind on Tuesday morning. This was the one movie I'd really been looking forward to, based largely on the trailer. I knew a bit about Nash and his mental illness is not so surprising when one reflects that the entire concept of the Nash equilibrium is based on paranoia. (There are two basic approaches to multi-criteria decision making. Pareto-optimality requires the parties involved to agree not to benefit themselves if it would hurt the others, so that they effectively make decisions as a single party. That often leads to a lower cost for each, but is prone to cheating. The Nash equilibrium is a minimax approach, which amounts to assuming that the other guy is going to screw you if he can. Effectively, you try to minimize how much damage he can do.) Anyway, I thought the movie was done very well, though I had a few minor quibbles where I thought something was not explained well. For example, his wife was a student at M.I.T. when they met and seemed to have at least some mathematical ability, but her own career is pretty much glossed over. She was obviously working when he couldn't, but there's no indication of what she was working at. Another thing I wondered about is how his hospitalization came about. I mean, they don't just haul mathematicians out of lecture halls to mental hospitals every day - not even at conferences at Harvard.
Those are picky complaints, of course. The bigger question is when somebody is going to write a play or a movie (or at least a book) about a sane mathematician. Euler was, by all accounts, a pretty happy fellow, so there's a place to start. If you really need conflict, you can deal with somebody like Sophie Germaine, whose father took away her candles and, eventually, her clothing when he learned she was sneaking down to his library to read math books at night. (That happens to be my favorite math related story, by the way. It's right up there with the one that allegedly inspired Germaine in the first place - namely, the claim that Archimedes was so absorbed in a geometry problem that he didn't notice the soldiers who'd come to kill him.)
It isn't only mathematicians who can be mad or oblivious. Flying home, there was a moderately lengthy security line at the Southwest terminal at Oakland Airport. (The awful line was the one to check luggage, which I didn't have to deal with. The security line moved fairly fast.) They check your picture ID and that you have a ticket or itinerary at a point pretty near the metal detectors and x-ray machines. After I was past that point, a guy climbed over the barricade into the screening area. Admittedly, the barricade was one of those cloth tape ribbons arranged around a potted plant, so it wasn't all that imposing. I was trying to figure out who to notify, when he asked where the line for security was, and when people told him it went all the way back into baggage claim, he climbed back out of the area. And then he asked, "do I have to wait in line even if I'm just meeting somebody?" He was astonished when we told him that he couldn't go into the secure area without a ticket. The guy behind me and I just rolled our eyes. I know there are people who don't read newspapers or listen to news on the radio or watch TV, but there are also signs all over the airport explaining that only ticketed passengers can go through to the secure area. I was also rather perturbed that the security people (including the National Guardsman standing at the other side of the metal detectors) didn't seem to notice what was going on.
As for other things in life, I did go into work on Monday and got an amazing amount done. It's incredible how much more efficient one can be when almost nobody is around. Monday evening, I went to a party at Leonard's. The crowd was largely the storytelling contingent and I told a couple of Chelm stories, which were well-received. I'm particularly proud of my invention of the Organization of Potato Exporting Countries. (I should explain that Chelm is a town of fools in Jewish folklore. I tell several of the traditional stories but I have a more general affinity for the place. In fact, I claim to channel Chelm.) There was also a lot of music and food and conversation and so on. I overheard a great line when I walked into the kitchen. This isn't quite up to "excuse me, do you have a knife I can borrow so I can cut a backpack off a tree" but "I want to have half my ashes scattered over Ross Dress for Less and half over Trader Joe's" is still pretty good for random eavesdropping.
Copyright 2001 Miriam H. Nadel