by Jonathan Kujawa

Popular media loves nothing better than leaning on a tired trope when telling a tale. Mathematicians are always solitary geniuses who toil away in solitude on really hard problems. When they solve one nobody can quite say why anyone should have cared in the first place. But never mind that, it was really hard and it's all very impressive that they solved it all by their lonesome with their otherworldly brain. And they'd better be peculiar! Only Sheldon Coopers need apply.

Image from [1].

The truth is much more interesting. Of course breakthroughs are sometimes made by the hard work of single individuals (such as Grigori Perelman's proof of the Poincaré conjecture or Andrew Wiles's proof of Fermat's Last Theorem). But much more often mathematics is a social, human enterprise. For me, at least, half the fun of it is in the give and take of sharing ideas with others. Ninety percent of my research papers are cowritten. Others may prefer to work alone, but even then they build on the work of others and hope others will read, appreciate, and use their work.

Heck, even the famously reclusive Perelman built his house on the foundation of using Ricci flow to study geometric objects provided by Richard Hamilton. And while Wiles worked in his attic office in complete secrecy for six years, he, too, depended on others. It was Berkeley number theorist (and oenophile) Ken Ribet who proved that Fermat's Last Theorem would follow from the Taniyama–Shimura conjecture about certain elliptic curves (those strange number systems we ran across last year). And when Wiles's proof of the Taniyama–Shimura conjecture looked to have a fatal flaw, it was in collaboration with Richard Taylor that a fix was finally found.

The collaborative and social nature of mathematics is exemplified by Paul Erdős. We crossed his path here at 3QD nearly two years ago. A mathematical vagabond, Erdős was famous for living out of a single suitcase. He traveled the world visiting math friends for a few days or weeks, doing math with anyone who was up for it.

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by Alexander Bastidas Fry

When you are told what someone is against, ask them what they are for. If you against nuclear power, what kind of power are you for? Reasonable answers include coal, natural gas, biomass, wind, solar, hydro, or geothermal. However, not all of these answers are equally genuine given the constraints of our world. Renewable energy sources have not historically been economically or technologically viable. Our energy landscape is changing today. A future with more renewables and no nuclear power is possible, yet it may not be the best choice if we are serious about climate change. Nuclear power has often been eschewed out of fear, not practicality or rationality.

The world nuclear, by itself, means little other than associating to the nucleus of the atom which all tangible things are made. The phrase nuclear power is used colloquially to refer to classic nuclear power plants that operate by splitting the atoms of heavy nuclei, such as uranium, in a process known as fission. The key to managing the fission process inside nuclear reactors is cooling. If the cooling fails, the fission reaction can get out of control and lead to disaster. Fission releases energy in the form of heat, this heat creates steam, and the steam turns generators that create electric power. Nuclear fission power can also be used at much smaller scales using devices known as radioisotope thermoelectric generators that harness the heat released from the radioactive decay of materials such as Plutonium 238 or Polonium 210. These devices can produce reliable energy for many decades and be used to power anything including cars or space probes that will be far from the Sun.

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by Shadab Zeest Hashmi

Award-winning essayist, novelist, critic, and poet Anis Shivani's second collection of poems Whatever Speaks on Behalf of Hashish was published a few days ago. Here is our conversation about his latest book:

SZH: These poems are first and foremost an ideational field, one in which the emotional takes the form of an occasional land mine or a treasure hunt— the “feeling” in the world of these poems is inextricable from the richly diverse tributaries of “thought.” In other words, emotion almost always goes through a thought-filter, which is unusual for poetry, wouldn’t you say?

AS: Thank you for these wonderfully imaginative questions. It makes the difficult task of writing this book over several years feel like it was worth it. These questions are truly a blessing, coming as they do the morning after I read extensively from Whatever Speaks for the first time, at Houston Poetry Fest last night. As I read from the book to a large and engaged audience, many things started becoming noticeable to me that I hadn’t known before; this always happens once the book is out, it changes shape from what you thought it was to something it wants to be.

To answer your question, yes, I would say that I feel through thoughts, or that thoughts feel me through thinking. This may not be very common in poetry these days, as you point out, when the ethos is to express emotion directly, feel without filters, lay it all out in the open. Anti-intellectuality has its cachet in the poetry world, you know, it’s just the reigning style these days. As for me, I don’t know how to separate the two branches of the mind. The best feelings come expressed in the form of complex ideas, even as it’s interesting to notice ideas unravel, spin to their doomed end in front of one’s eyes, dissipate like a spider’s web or an eddy of water if one so much as observes them. Very Heisenbergian.
It’s fascinating to hold an idea in focus, like the proverbial dot on the wall in Buddhist meditation, and see what happens to it. At first it becomes large, it becomes hegemonic and takes you over, but soon it dissolves until there is nothing left, until there is just the emptiness of your mind, the futility of your focus, to confront you. All ideas seem to me to be like that, they cannot withstand scrutiny, observation, analysis, though that is their claim to fame in the first place—as opposed to so-called emotion.

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by Jalees Rehman

“It's empathy that makes us help other people. It's empathy that makes us moral.” The economist Paul Zak casually makes this comment in his widely watched TED talk about the hormone oxytocin, which he dubs the “moral molecule”. Zak quotes a number of behavioral studies to support his claim that oxytocin increases empathy and trust, which in turn increases moral behavior. If all humans regularly inhaled a few puffs of oxytocin through a nasal spray, we could become more compassionate and caring. It sounds too good to be true. And recent research now suggests that this overly simplistic view of oxytocin, empathy and morality is indeed too good to be true.

Many scientific studies support the idea that oxytocin is a major biological mechanism underlying the emotions of empathy and the formation of bonds between humans. However, inferring that these oxytocin effects in turn make us more moral is a much more controversial statement. In 2011, the researcher Carsten De Dreu and his colleagues at the University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands published the study Oxytocin promotes human ethnocentrism which studied indigenous Dutch male study subjects who in a blinded fashion self-administered either nasal oxytocin or a placebo spray. The subjects then answered questions and performed word association tasks after seeing photographic images of Dutch males (the “in-group”) or images of Arabs and Germans, the “out-group” because prior surveys had shown that the Dutch public has negative views of both Arabs/Muslims and Germans. To ensure that the subjects understood the distinct ethnic backgrounds of the target people shown in the images, they were referred to typical Dutch male names, German names (such as Markus and Helmut) or Arab names (such as Ahmed and Youssef).

Oxytocin increased favorable views and word associations but only towards in-group images of fellow Dutch males. The oxytocin treatment even had the unexpected effect of worsening the views regarding Arabs and Germans but this latter effect was not quite statistically significant. Far from being a “moral molecule”, oxytocin may actually increase ethnic bias in society because it selectively enhances certain emotional bonds. In a subsequent study, De Dreu then addressed another aspect of the purported link between oxytocin and morality by testing the honesty of subjects. The study Oxytocin promotes group-serving dishonesty showed that oxytocin increased cheating in study subjects if they were under the impression that dishonesty would benefit their group. De Dreu concluded that oxytocin does make us less selfish and care more about the interest of the group we belong to.

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by Maniza Naqvi

Once again, as has always been the case come fall; September and October, all these past fifteen years and more, the so called leaders of the world have resolved to continue to bomb and bomb and bomb in order to save humanity. That's all they've got going for themselves, bombs. In the name of terrorism.

The Pentagon and its collaborators mainly in Hollywood, Media, Politics, Development and so forth, as the marketing agents for weapons manufacturers, have succeeded in only one project: the branding of a religion and therefore over 2 billion people, as being something else. Enemy combatants. In the name of vests. A vest trumps, drones, bombs, cruise missiles, uranium depleted ammunition, white phosphorus bombings. A vest.

This branding conversation, this fall too, remains and is in fact dialing up to maximize war profits and keep the world on the edge of suicide. As migrants fled war, and continued to don life vests and braved the seas between Turkey and Western Europe trying to wash up alive onto the shores of Greece to then walk further northward to refuge and away from war, and the latest pilgrims to become victims of the Saudis, died in their hundreds during the Hajj in Mecca, another set of migrants and pilgrims made their annual pilgrimage to the Mecca for diplomacy to the headquarters of the UN in New York to agree on one thing—more war, more bombings. The solutions, put forth, no matter what, revolve around religion and bombings. The Holy Roman Empire, it seems is on the rise, still glittering in the vestments of old.

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by Sue Hubbard

Four a.m. on an October Sunday morning. It's dark and there's a chill in the air as we head towards Dover. I am joining an artist friend to visit refugees in the Calais Jungle. She is a Catholic, so we are going with a west London Catholic mission. In the back of the car is a tiny Portuguese nun, Sister Natalia, who has many years of experience working in Africa and speaks Arabic, also a young missionary nun and a Somalian school-dinner lady, who is now a British citizen. As we drive along the empty, early-morning roads Sister Natalia prays and sings.

As the sun rises I stand on the deck and watch the White Cliffs of Dover disappear and think how easy it is for me to cross this narrow strip of water and how hard it is for so many others in the world.

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Gong and Pennywhistle
.
you can play a cheap pennywhistle
or beat on a big gold gong
down here on earth in the soft grass or stinging thistles
nobody stays here for long

those up on high
and those way down low
breath the same bitter air
we’ll just have to see how it goes

you can bring down the house with your gong if you’re not careful
the house can be had for a song
but many a song has been more than tearful
for both the weak and the strong

sing for the loss of the high
sing for the loss of the low
who breathe the same bitter air
we’ll just have to see how it goes

the future’s been sold, the contract’s more than settled
it’s clauses clear as a bell
no profit’s too high —the market in precious metal,
buy everything you can sell

those up on high
and those way down low
breath the same bitter air
we’ll just have to see how it goes

you can play a cheap tin pennywhistle
or beat on a big gold gong
down here on earth in the soft grass or stinging thistle
nobody stays here for long

by Jim Culleny
1/14/14
Copyright 2014

by Carl Pierer

A young man with a strong urge and deep conviction that he is destined to be of importance keeps a diary, which he calls “Diary of a Philosopher”. In fact, it is less of a diary than a notebook. He mentions and discusses ideas, arguments and impressions he had, articles he came across, and books he studied. An unbelievable self-assuredness, even pretentiousness permeates these pages of what one critic derides as thoughts ubiquitous with the youth of his time and social standing interspersed with bad poetry.[i] This man is so sure of his genius that it is hard to tell whether he is serious or ironic. Even more so, as his later life justifies this youthful impetus. In the diary, Kojève seems to explore precisely this ambiguity between genius and ridiculousness, the constant tension between aspiration and self-awareness.

*

Born in 1902 in Moscow, Alexander Koshevnikov (better known as Alexandre Kojève) is a truly iridescent character of French intellectual life in the first half of the 20^th century. Aged 15, he determines himself to be a philosopher and starts keeping a diary. Coming from a well-to-do bourgeois family – his uncle is none less than Wasilly Kandinsky – the young man leaves revolutionary Russia for Germany in 1920. There, he studies philosophy in Heidelberg and Berlin, whilst acquiring Sanskrit and Mandarin, and publishes his dissertation about Russian religious mystic Vladimir Solovyov under Karl Jaspers.

In the mid-1920ies, he moves to France, where his family wealth allows him to live a comfortable life. When he loses most of it during the crash of 1929, he has to turn to work again. In the 30ies, he achieves what has been described as a “philosophical miracle”: the resurrection of Hegel in French intellectual life. Taking over from his friend Alexandre Koyré, he holds a series of lectures from 1933-1939 on Hegel. His contentious, eclectic Marxist interpretation of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit will have a strong influence on many of the post-war French intellectuals. These lectures are attended by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Lacan, and Georges Bataille, among others.

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by Thomas R. Wells

The current immigration crisis in Europe has, finally, generated much soul searching among European citizens, as well as a great deal of unfortunate political squabbling among European governments. Yet a great deal of the debate still assumes the centrality of national political concerns when this is, morally speaking, irrelevant.

The right to migrate is a meta-right. As a practical matter, access to human rights, including social and economic rights, depends on governments. Since some governments are uninterested or unable to protect or support human rights, people must be free to move to other states where their access to human rights is acceptable, including such socio-economic rights as a fair market wage for their labour. The very point of the idea of human rights is that human beings do not belong to their states, and what they deserve is not to be determined solely by the benevolence or otherwise of the state they happen to be born into.

I

My case goes beyond refugees – those fleeing armed conflict or persecution. But refugees are a good place to start because most sovereign governments have formally acknowledged, with legally binding treaties, that the right to migrate trumps ordinary political concerns. They did so in the aftermath of the ethnic cleansing unleashed by the conclusion of the second world war, and for the kinds of reasons identified by Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism, the awful failure of European states to accept stateless Jewish and other ethnic minority refugees in the 1930s.

When refugees request asylum it must be granted, subject only to checking the basis of their claim. States acknowledge that they cannot refuse asylum merely on the basis of the economic costs or political unpopularity it would impose. The granting of asylum does not fall within the usual logic of statecraft in which a policy is considered from the perspective of the political interests of a governing party, taking into account how it will play to popular prejudices, how it fits with internal party disputes, its consistency with budgetary and other manifesto promises, its influence on the viability of other policies the government wants to pursue, and so on. None of these have standing in the face of the moral emergency of aiding refugees to regain their lives.

As Ban Ki-moon put it, “Refugees have been deprived of their homes, but they must not be deprived of their futures.”

As is clear from the present crisis in and around Europe, and in other parts of the world such as the Andaman Sea, many states are currently failing in their moral – and legal – obligations to refugees. This is often portrayed as an exercise of sovereignty. Actually it is a failure – an inability to govern oneself according to the principles one has laid down.

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by Charlie Huenemann

Descartes was not a bookish man. There’s a well-known anecdote that reveals what he thought of libraries:

One of his friends went to visit Descartes at Egmond. This gentleman asked him about physics books: which ones did he most value, and which of them he did most frequently consult. ‘I shall show you’, he replied, ‘if you wish to follow me.’ He led him into a lower courtyard at the back of the house, and showed him a calf that he had planned to dissect the next day.

It is a suspiciously artful anecdote: Descartes prefers nature bound in calfskin to another person’s words bound in calfskin. But it gets something right: while Descartes did read and comment on books, and wrote many books himself, he steadily maintained, as did many early modern philosophers, that you can learn more by going straight to nature itself than you can by poring over old books.

Descartes spends several pages in his Discourse on Method relating his disenchantment with different sorts of books. He had studied at La Flèche, a great academy for classical education; but while he found the stories and histories of the ancient authors informative and entertaining, he was wary of the effect they had on him:

For conversing with those of other ages is about the same thing as traveling. It is good to know something of the customs of various peoples, so as to judge our own more soundly and so as not to think that everything that is contrary to our ways is ridiculous and against reason, as those who have seen nothing have a habit of doing. But when one takes too much time traveling, one eventually becomes a stranger to one’s own country; and when one is too curious about what commonly took place in past ages, one usually remains quite ignorant of what is taking place in one’s own country.

This is coming from a Frenchman who spent most of his productive years the Netherlands, where he could count on having few distractions. He devoted his attention to the abstruse studies of physics, metaphysics, mathematics, anatomy, and optics, and wrote virtually nothing on cultural issues and politics. The path he chose in life, it seems, was to be a stranger to his own country, and a resident of the world of ideas. He really wasn’t in any position to look over at the philologist studying Homer and fault him for knowing more about that world than this one.

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by Hari Balasubramanian

I finished reading War and Peace recently. It took me three years but I did try to read it carefully. Tolstoy defined art “as that human activity which consists in one person's consciously conveying to others, by certain external signs, the feelings he or she has experienced, and in others being infected by those feelings and also experiencing them.” This is a wonderfully robust definition – especially because it does not impose which types of “human activity” or “external signs” qualify. And I was certainly infected by the themes of War and Peace: I felt on many occasions that the book was speaking especially to me. I took notes and copied down everything that struck me.

War and Peace operates in two distinct parts. There's the story of two upper class Russian families and individuals – the Bolkonskys, the Rostovs and the inimitable Pierre Bezukhov – whose lives are directly affected by the Napoleonic wars from 1805-1812, including the French invasion of and subsequent retreat from Moscow. Here the narrative flows so seamlessly from one character to another, from one high society intrigue to the next, and so clear is the psychological detailing that it never feels like anything is being overdone. This despite the fact that Tolstoy likes to intervene constantly. His style goes against the “show but don't tell” advice that is nowadays given to writers. He takes great pains to tell us what's going on in each character's mind, how things have changed since we last met this or that person. Everything, internal or external – estates, battlegrounds, soirees, dinners, military offices, forests – is described with great precision. Sudden twists are not Tolstoy's style; the suspense instead comes from how a character will respond to changes in her circumstances.

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by Justin E. H. Smith

[I have a long essay on the Roma communities of Paris appearing later this year in print. The essay's focus changed radically in the middle of my research for it, in part due to editorial decisions, in part as a result of changes in the world that seemed to demand attention to different issues than those initially conceived. One result of these changes is that I was left with significant amounts of material that have no place in the final version, which I thus thought best to share here at 3 Quarks Daily. This seems particularly urgent at the present moment, as there is inevitably a close connection between the plight of the Syrian refugees seeking to escape from war in Europe, and the plight of the Roma, who, I have come to believe, have very similar experiences of discrimination and social exclusion in Europe, and particularly Eastern Europe. The principal difference is that the Roma are internally displaced, and have been for centuries. –JS]

1.

‘Gypsy’ is a classic misnomer, a deformation of ‘Egyptian’, arising from a long-discredited theory that the people it denotes had wandered from that country into the Levant, Anatolia, the Balkans, and finally Europe proper. It gives us the French gitane, glamorized in a brand of cigarette, and the Italian gitano. There is the alternative generic term tsigane, which yields Zigeuner in German, ţigani in Romanian, and so on, and which likely arises from a Byzantine Greek word for fortune tellers (or, perhaps, for untouchables). These are exonyms, and they are considered derogatory, though as with any insult much depends on who is uttering them, in what tone and for what purpose. When in 2007 the Romanian president Traian Băsescu called a reporter a ţigancă împuţită (a stinking Gypsy), to unexpected outrage, he was plainly only using the adjective to make explicit what he already felt to be packed into the noun.

In recent years, ‘Roma’ (along with ‘Rom’ and ‘Rrom’ and the adjectival ‘Romani’) has gained currency, in part as a way of freeing the people it describes from the history of connotations, mostly negative, that have congealed around ‘Gypsy’, and in part to provide a cohesion at the global scale that is lacking in the various regional designations. ‘Roma’ is the term we are now obliged to use, and the term I shall use here, even though it is far from universally satisfactory. For one thing, it is a masculine plural noun: it means ‘the Romani men’, or, perhaps, ‘the Romani husbands’. Moreover, its resemblance to various other geographical terms from the region –notably the name of the capital of Italy, and of the country of Romania (which, like an ancient road, does lead back to Rome, the city of Romulus)– is only a coincidence. Yet, like the English ‘niggardly’, ‘Roma’ invites misunderstanding. Grassroots organizations of Romanians have even petitioned the European Parliament to ban it, in the hope of distancing themselves from their fellow citizens who, they believe, are tarnishing their reputation throughout Europe. And indeed many Western Europeans do have trouble grasping the difference in question, and lack the patience to stop and dwell on etymologies.

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