A Novel Idea
You don't need to understand math to love Karen Olsson's latest, "The Weil Conjectures"
My friend Karen Olsson wrote a book I want to tell you about. It’s about math.
Wait! Don’t fall asleep! Really. I’m serious. Give me a second. Honestly, if you were here for my disquisition on Jason Statham’s dives in The Meg you can damn well sit through me geeking out a little bit about a clever book written by someone I’ve found out is far smarter than I ever hoped to be. Also, there’s barely any math, which is how I understood it.
One thing I learned from Olsson’s book is the extent to which math is just a bunch of symbols meant to represent abstract concepts about truth. Numbers exist but are only imagined. The representation of a thing is not the thing, but that doesn’t mean the representation is not its own thing.
A good example of a representation becoming its own thing is the device you might be reading this on. People have entire relationships with other people without meeting them in the flesh. We can literally read each other’s thoughts in the digitized word and hear the author’s authentic voice. This is the online corollary to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle*, for if we can never truly determine where a particle is in time and space then it follows we are all to some extent abstractions to each other, though it doesn’t make us any less real.
We think of our relationship with abstractions as a new thing, but Olsson points out that novels were, at one time, novel, which ushered in “a new awareness of the inner self.”
Distant objects or people, represented by symbols on a page: we are so accustomed to this that it’s hard to conceive of a time when it was a new phenomenon. Carson compares this representing, the conjuring of things by written words, to the way that a lover constructs a mental image of an absent beloved. Desire spans the difference between the abstract thought and the actual person. Everything is triangulated—the lover, the beloved, the image. The writer, the thing, the word.
And then ability to relate to an abstraction led to the expansion of what could be abstracted.
According to one scholar’s thesis, it was the invention of writing that gave rise to number and an abstract concept. The pre-historic people of the ancient Near East, exchanging sheep or grain, originally recorded what they’d traded using clay tokens that represented the thing traded; in time they began storing the tokens in a type of envelope, marking the envelope to designate what was inside of it. Eventually they dispensed with the tokens, in favor of the marks.
The representation becomes the thing, and “we must love that which does not exist,” as Olsson quotes from Simone Weil’s writings. Much of Olsson’s memoir focuses on the relationship between two real-life siblings, Simone and André Weil. Simone, as is familiar to anyone who was especially moody and intellectual in high school, was a philosopher, mystic, and political activist. Her older, less-famous brother came up with the Weil conjectures, which apparently provided the framework of modern algebraic geometry and number theory. In math, he’s apparently a big deal, which is like your band having a hit song in Denmark or you having a girlfriend in Canada. It’s real, in theory.
I met Karen Olsson because she wrote one of my favorite political novels about Austin (Waterloo: A Novel), and I invited her to speak to a group I belonged to. Then, not wanting to rush into a successful career as a novelist, she wrote All the Houses: A Novel a decade later. Both are good and deserve more attention.
Perhaps wanting to push the throttle a little more, she started on another novel soon after All the Houses that included Simone and André as characters. The novel was not working, so she rescued the Weil siblings from that literary no man’s land and constructed around them The Weil Conjectures: On Math and the Pursuit of the Unknown, a dreamlike garden of a memoir about her fascination with math.
She writes about what she clearly sees as her failure as a math major at Harvard as climbing a sand dune that kept getting taller, but she clearly knows the subject. She describes the field as a series of failed paths from conjecture to proof until one finds the way to the truth. It’s all about how math requires abstractions to get from blueprint to construction, a good enough metaphor for the success of this, her third book.
Buy it. It’s good.
*If you’re interested in the namesake of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, check out the “What I’m watching section.”
What I’m reading
“Hopepunk,” a storytelling style that “weaponizes optimism,” is a thing, and I am here for it. The anti-woke left is also a thing, but that’s a big no for me. (Want an example of Hopepunk? Skip down to “What I’m listening to.”)
Want to see a great example of journalism using open records to do, well, journalism? Reuters FOIA’d the hell out the government and found that the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is drowning young people applying for protection under the Special Immigrant Juvenile program in paperwork.
Americans 18-34 are more likely to share news if they are interested in it than because they want to persuade someone. Basically, they’re the anti-Boomers.
Terry Gross has some smart interview tips.
Wait. The president of Mexico has his own newswire?
Ecuador reclassified gangs as legal cultural organizations — and murder rates plummeted.
There’s a peace deal in Sudan (yay!) but the junta responsible for killing everyone is neither leaving power nor being held responsible for anything (boo).
If you don’t sort your recycling in Shanghai you could have a harder time getting a bank loan.
The U.S. didn’t want tankers to ship oil from Venezuela to Cuba, so the boats turned off their GPS trackers for 42 days and changed their names.
It’s possible that the boss of a chain of hardware stores doesn’t have an important opinion about national security policy.
Is the gold standard to economics what flat earthers are to geography? Both are making a comeback, it seems, and the latest Federal Reserve nominee believes in the former.
Want to keep parents from quitting jobs? Increase the flexibility of their work schedules, not their salaries.
You think what you think, in part, because your mommy and your daddy met and, well…: “…between 40 and 60 percent of the variance in our political attitudes is heritable, stemming from genetic differences between individuals.” Also: “An experiment measuring the sizes of the anterior cingulate and the right amygdala accurately predicted a person’s political orientation 72 percent of the time.” tl/dr: There are genetic and physiological reasons you hold your political beliefs.
Most of the guests on NBC’s Meet the Press are Republicans.
Iowa and Nevada are going to allow caucusing by telephone now.
The migrant caravans are using Whatsapp to share information. By the way, the group least likely to think the U.S. has a responsibility to admit refugees are white evangelical Christians.
Newsroom employment has fallen by a quarter since 2008.
Streaming is responsible for hip-hop overtaking rock as the dominant music genre in the U.S.
A new study says that watching a lot of entertainment television makes you less intelligent and more likely to vote for populist political parties — but that’s just what those elitist bozos in power want you to believe!
Forced busing is the most effective thing we’ve ever done to close the achievement gap in the United States. Busing didn’t fail. Politics did.
Correlation does not equal causation, but… “Blacks who reside in counties that have a higher number of Confederate-named streets are less likely to be employed, more likely to be in labor-intensive occupations, and have lower wages compared to whites.”
There’s a reason it feels good to root hard for sportsball: science! See also: brains!
Pulling the Betsy Ross sneakers was a good move for Nike’s customer base, and it’s yet another example of how Colin Kaepernick is this era’s Muhammed Ali.
Speaking of sportsball, there is quantifiably less flopping in women’s soccer than in men’s soccer. Less whining, more winning.
Did you know moons can escape their planets’ orbits and become “ploonets”?
Employees who see that you trust them perform better, which is probably why I was fired from that pizza job in 1986.
This is a hilarious way to mess up a plastic bag ban.
Thanks to my friend N.R., who sent this Twitter thread about the "aesthetic chaos" of The Cheesecake Factory.
Lots of people back east have been talking about this piece on rich parents fighting about a Brooklyn pre-school. If you dig Schadenfreude, this is your jam.
Last word goes to the best kicker I’ve read in a while.
What I’m watching
Remember the bit about the Heisenberg principle above? Funny thing about The Catcher Was a Spy is that the plot is that a major league catcher is sent to kill Werner Heisenberg in Zurich. It’s not a great movie, or even a good one, but if you’re a completist like me and need to see any movie that combines baseball with espionage and puts Heisenberg in a fixed place in your understanding then you can’t go wrong here.
What I’m listening to
This one is for me, because I really needed it. And in case you’re wondering, this is totally hopepunk. (Also, for the Austin folks, note the Andy Langer cameo.)
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