28 September 2010

Nietzsche asked ...

... What else is love, but understanding and rejoicing in the fact that another person lives, acts and experiences otherwise than we do?

23 September 2010

A disappearing number ...

... is a beautiful play, using mathematical concepts, rhythmic music, patterns in space to explain ideas, emotions, loss, linking the past, present and future into infinity ... 

The convergent infinite series was used to illustrate love, marriage, children ... 



A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas... The mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or the poet's, must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way... It may be very hard to define mathematical beauty, but that is just as true of beauty of any kind — we may not know quite what we mean by a beautiful poem, but that does not prevent us from recognizing one when we read it.
- G. H. Hardy, "A Mathematician's Apology"