Historical textbook collection

I’m working in the math department library today and have gotten distracted by a collection of historical math textbooks that’s just gone on the shelves.

From College Mathematics:  A First Course (1940), by W. W. Elliott and E. Roy C. Miles:

The authors believe that college students who take only one year of mathematics should acquire a knowledge of the essentials of several of the traditional subjects.  From teaching experience, however, they are convinced that a better understanding is gained if these subjects are presented in the traditional order.  Students who take only one year of college mathematics are usually primarily interested in the natural sciences or in business administration.

The book covers algebra, trigonometry, Cartesian geometry, and calculus.  The definition of the derivative as a limit is given, but the epsilon-delta definition of limit is not.  Startling to think that science majors came to college never having taken algebra or analytic geometry.

Further back in time we get Milne’s Progressive Arithmetic, from 1906.  This copy was used by Maggie Rappel, of Reedsville, WI, and is dated January 15th, 1908.  Someone — Maggie or a later owner — wrote in the flyleaf, “Look on page 133.”

On the top of p .133 is written

Auh!  Shut up your gab you big lobster, you c?

You got me, Maggie!

I can’t tell what grades this book is intended for, but certainly a wide range; it starts with addition of single digits and ends with reduction of fractions to lowest terms.  What’s interesting is that the book doesn’t really fit our stereotype that math instruction in olden times was pure drill with no attention paid to conceptual instruction and explanation.  Here’s a problem from early in the book:

How many ones are 3 ones and 4 ones?  Write the sum of the ones under the ones.  How many tens are 6 tens and 2 tens?  Write the sum of the tens under the tens.  How do you read 8 tens and 7 ones?  What, then, is the sum of 24 and 63?  Tell what you did to find the sum.

From the introduction:

Yet the book is not merely a book of exercises.  Each new concept is carefully presented by questions designed to bring to the understanding of the pupil the ideas he should grasp, and then his knowledge is applied.  The formal statement of principles and definitions is, however, reserved for a later stage of the pupil’s progress.

Would these sentiments be so out of place in a contemporary “discovery” curriculum?

Nate Silver is the Kurt Cobain of statistics

Or so I argue in today’s Boston Globe, where I review Silver’s excellent new book.  I considered trying to wedge a “The Signal and The Noise” / “The Colour and the Shape” joke in there too, but it was too labored.

Concluding graf:

Prediction is a fundamentally human activity. Just as a novel is no less an expression of human feeling for being composed on a laptop, the forecasts Silver studies — at least the good ones — are expressions of human thought and belief, no matter how many theorems and algorithms forecasters bring to their aid. The math serves as a check on our human biases, and our insight serves as a check on the computer’s bugs and blind spots. In Silver’s world, math can’t replace or supersede us. Quite the contrary: It is math that allows us to become our wiser selves.

Somewhere a dog barked

From Rosecrans Baldwin in Slate:

As a reader of novels and not much else, I keep a running list of authorial whims. Male writers of the Roth/Updike generation, for example, love the word cunt. Also, where novelists once adorned their prose with offhand French bon mots, Spanish now appears. Here’s another: Novelists can’t resist including a dog barking in the distance. I’ve seen it happen across the spectrum—Jackie Collins, William Faulkner, and Chuck Palahniuk: “There was no more rain, just an eerie stillness, a deathly silence. Somewhere a dog barked mournfully.” (American Star) “She did not answer for a time. The fireflies drifted; somewhere a dog barked, mellow sad, faraway.” (Light in August) “This is such a fine neighborhood. I jump the fence to the next backyard and land on my head in somebody’s rose bush. Somewhere a dog’s barking.” (Choke)

I checked The Grasshopper King, and nope:  no barking dogs.  There’s a ceramic dog, and one dog who howls (but who appears moments later, and is named) and finally, near the end, a talking dog.  Me 1, cliche 0.

In other Slate literary coverage, Dan Kois reviews Ben H. Winter’s novel The Last Policeman, a detective story set in a future where Earth is six months away from certain destruction by asteroid collision.  When I was in college I took Spike Lee’s screenwriting course, and my screenplay was roughly on the same theme. It was a meteor heading for the earth, not an asteroid, and the atmosphere was supposed to be roughly that of After Hours or Into the Night.  It was called Planet Earth.  Lee’s total commentary on the screenplay, written on page 3, was “Some parts I laughed, some parts I didn’t,” and he gave me an A-.

There is no such Albanian as Jiri Kajane

The Guardian covers a literary hoax, in which several prominent literary magazines published short fiction by “Jiri Kajane,” purportedly a middle-aged Albanian emigre, actually a couple of twenty-something American MFA students.  One of them was a classmate of mine in the fiction program at Johns Hopkins.  Among the students he made no secret of the fact that he was writing stories set in Albania, putting the name “Jiri Kajane” on them, and getting them published in literary magazines.  At the time it seemed like some kind of grandiose participatory performance art and I never thought of spilling the beans.  But every so often I wondered, will this ever get revealed, or will Jiri Kajane become an accepted minor figure in the history of Albanian literature?  Now I know.

Jonah Lehrer, Niall Ferguson, the lecture economy

They apparently had the same problem — their brand was “person who writes books” but their actual business model became “person who gives lectures for five-figure fees.”  The demands of the two roles are very different.

• Josh Levin on Jonah Lehrer:  ”He stopped being a writer and became an idea man”
• Stephen Marche on Niall Ferguson:  ”Articles and ideas are only as good as the fees you can get for talking about them”

Ideally, a public lecture should be an advertisement inducing people to read your book and engage with your argument presented in full.  What a disaster if the book becomes an advertisement for the lecture instead.

Update:  Stuff on this theme is all over the place today:  here’s Daniel Drezner on “Intellectual Power and Responsibility in an Age of Superstars” and Justin Fox on “the rage against the thought-leader machine.”  Both pieces are great.

Although of course you end up becoming yourself

It’s mostly a book-length transcript of an interview David Lipsky conducted with David Foster Wallace in March 1996.  I’m about a quarter of the way through.  It’s hard going — hard meaning sad, not hard meaning difficult.  Notable things:

• “In those essays that you like in Harper’s, there’s a certain persona created, that’s a little stupider and schmuckier than I am.”
• Something that I think has been retroactively forgotten about DFW is that he meant his writing to be in the experimental, avant-garde American tradition; he was thinking about John Barth, and I guess about Robert Coover and Donald Barthelme too, though he hasn’t mentioned them yet in this book.  I think this has been retroactively forgotten because no one cares about that tradition anymore.  When I was an aspiring fiction writer everybody read Barthelme, but I haven’t heard him mentioned in years.

Some googling reveals that DFW did like Barthelme.  In fact, here’s a whole interesting chunk of an interview he did with Larry McCaffrey:

For most of my college career I was a hard-core syntax wienie, a philosophy major with a specialization in math and logic. I was, to put it modestly, quite good at the stuff, mostly because I spent all my free time doing it. Wienieish or not, I was actually chasing a special sort of buzz, a special moment that comes sometimes. One teacher called these moments “mathematical experiences.” What I didn’t know then was that a mathematical experience was aesthetic in nature, an epiphany in Joyce’s original sense. These moments appeared in proof-completions, or maybe algorithms. Or like a gorgeously simple solution to a problem you suddenly see after half a notebook with gnarly attempted solutions. It was really an experience of what I think Yeats called “the click of a well-made box.” Something like that. The word I always think of it as is “click.”

Anyway, I was just awfully good at technical philosophy, and it was the first thing I’d ever really been good at, and so everybody, including me, anticipated I’d make it a career. But it sort of emptied out for me somewhere around age twenty. I just got tired of it, and panicked because I was suddenly not getting any joy from the one thing I was clearly supposed to do because I was good at it and people liked me for being good at it. Not a fun time. I think I had kind of a mid-life crisis at twenty, which probably doesn’t augur real well for my longevity.

So what I did, I went back home for a term, planning to play solitaire and stare out the window, whatever you do in a crisis. And all of a sudden I found myself writing fiction. My only real experience with fun writing had been on a campus magazine with Mark Costello, the guy I later wrote “Signifying Rappers” with. But I had had experience with chasing the click, from all the time spent with proofs. At some point in my reading and writing that fall I discovered the click in literature, too. It was real lucky that just when I stopped being able to get the click from math logic I started to be able to get it from fiction. The first fictional clicks I encountered were in Donald Barthelme’s “The Balloon” and in parts of the first story I ever wrote, which has been in my trunk since I finished it. I don’t know whether I have that much natural talent going for me fiction wise, but I know I can hear the click, when there is a click.

I quote the whole thing in order to concede Wallace is in some sense disagreeing with my disagreement with James Wood.

Anyway, here’s “The Balloon.”  And here’s my favorite Barthelme story, the one whose presence in a high-school anthology made me want to be an avant-garde fiction writer, “A Shower of Gold.”

 

 

The map of adjectives

I am the child of two statisticians, and as a result my childhood reading included the great sourcebook Statistics: A Guide To The Unknown, a collection of essays by some of the great statisticians of the century.  The thing that made a lasting impression on me was the map of adjectives from Joseph Kruskal’s article, “The Meaning of Words.”  Psychologists gathered survey data about pairs of adjectives describing personality traits, asking  to what extent the traits were similar or different, until they had enough responses to estimate a “dissimilarity measure” for each pair.  Then they used multidimensional scaling (pretty new in 1968, I think) to map the adjectives onto the plane in such a way that the distances between adjectives matched the measured dissimilarities as well as possible.  That such a thing was possible was a relevation to me — I guess I knew on some level that arithmetic could be translated into geometry, but I didn’t know that meaning could be translated into geometry.

Here’s the map, from Rosenberg, Nelson, and Vivekananthan’s original paper:

There were anti-vaccination activists in 1736

From Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography:

In 1736 I lost one of my sons, a fine boy of four years old, by the smallpox, taken in the common way.  I long regretted bitterly, and still regret that I had not given it to him by inoculation.  This I mention for the sake of parents who omit that operation, on the supposition that they should never forgive themselves if a child died under it; my example showing that the regret may be the same either way, and that, therefore, the safer should be chosen.

Update:  I should have Googled this — Howard Markel gives a much more detailed account in the New York Times, including the relevant fact that one of the chief anti-inoculators was Franklin’s older brother, James.

Simon: The Genius in my Basement

I review Alexander Masters’ biography of the finite group theorist Simon Norton in this Sunday’s New York Times Book Review.

When Simon Norton was 3 1/2, his I.Q. was measured at 178. For three years running in high school, he was among the top scorers in the world at the International Mathematical Olympiad. At the age of 27, he and a colleague, John Conway, formulated an audacious conjecture in group theory called “monstrous moonshine,” which inspired a frenzy of mathematical work around the globe that culminated in a Fields Medal-winning proof by Richard Borcherds almost two decades later.

Today, Norton holds no paid employment, publishes in his field only occasionally, subsists largely on canned mackerel and rice packets, and spends much of his time riding buses around Britain in a campaign to preserve public transport against deregulation. He lives in the basement of a house he owns in Cambridge, renting out the upper rooms. By chance, one of his tenants is the writer Alexander Masters, whose heartfelt and eccentric book “Simon: The Genius in My Basement” chronicles Norton’s strange journey from prodigy to . . . well, to whatever he is now.

Lev Grossman — they asked him anything

Friend of the blog Lev Grossman did an AMA on reddit tonight about his novels The Magicians and The Magician King.  (I wrote about The Magicians here.)  Lots of good material but I especially liked this from Lev on Narnia:

You know how you — by which I mean me — love your parents, but you’re also kind of permanently angry at them, all the time? That’s how I feel about the Narnia books. I really do love them. I’ve tried to make my daughter read them about 100 times. But I feel so bitter about them too — about what they did and didn’t prepare me for in life.