The British Society for the History of Mathematics
Rewley House, Oxford, 30-31 May 2009
Organisers: Tony Mann (A.Mann@gre.ac.uk), Noel-Ann Bradshaw (N.Bradshaw@gre.ac.uk) and Raymond Flood (Raymond.Flood@conted.ox.ac.uk).
Mathematics and its history abound in fiction – there are novels by mathematicians, novels about mathematicians (historical or fictitious) and novels about mathematics. Some writers base work on Mathematical structures or use mathematical methods to generate and transform their prose. Some mathematicians use fiction to communicate their mathematical ideas.
This workshop explores the various interactions between mathematics and literature. It includes readings and interviews with writers, talks about the uses of mathematics in fiction, and opportunities for discussion and debate.
Here is the registration form which includes provisional timings.
Melanie Bayley is in the final year of a DPhil in Victorian literature and mathematics at Linacre College, Oxford. She was one of the first women to enter Trinity College, Cambridge in 1978 where she read Natural Sciences, and then became a journalist. She worked for Nature, the science journal, and contributed regularly to The Times. She moved on to study English Literature at Kingston University while bringing up a family and completed an MPhil in nineteenth-century literature at Linacre in 2001.
Free will and statistics in Middlemarch and Jude the Obscure
As more and more statistics were gathered during the first half of the nineteenth century, and crime figures were shown to be roughly constant from year to year, influential commentators began to announce that statistics were driving people to behave against their will. Mad as it may seem, the public seized on the idea that people would act in a particular way to fulfil a statistical quota. George Eliot’s Middlemarch can be read as a part of the intellectual backlash against this idea. Through the character of Lydgate, a doctor working in a small provincial town, she argues that the irresistible powers of statistical fatalism are nothing more sinister than the opinions and expectations of a person’s neighbours. People are free to act as they will in much the same way as they are free to choose their hats – from a limited range of acceptable options.
Statistical determinism also drives the plot of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure. The determinism in Jude, which has so often been seen as fatalism, is in fact the interplay of correlated variables which Karl Pearson, the biometric statistician, was in the process of quantifying. The themes that provide the ‘tragic machinery’ of Jude – Christian faith, class, education and the marriage question – are linked to Pearson’s interests and pursuits. Jude the Obscure is a representation in fictional form of Pearson’s deterministic outlook.
David Bellos (D. Phil, Oxford U.) is Professor of French and Comparative Literature and Director of the Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication. He has taught at the universities of Oxford, Edinburgh, Southampton, and Manchester (England), where he served as head of the department (1985-1988) and as chair of the Graduate Studies Committee (1992-1996). He was chair of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Princeton from 1999 to 2002. He has published three books in the field of Balzac studies (Balzac Criticism in France, 1850-1900, Oxford, 1976; a critical study of La Cousine Bette, London, 1981; and an introduction to Old Goriot, Cambridge, 1987) as well as many articles on the history of fiction and the book market in 19th-century France. More recently he has concentrated on the modern French writer Georges Perec, first as his principal English translator (Life A User’s Manual, 1987, which won the French-American Foundation's translation prize in 1988; W or the Memory of Childhood, 1988; Things, 1990; 53 Days, 1992) and then as the author of the first literary biography (Georges Perec. A Life in Words, Boston, 1993) which in French translation, was awarded the Prix Goncourt de la Biographie (1994). His biographical study of the French filmmaker Jacques Tati appeared in Fall 1999; a French version was published by Seuil in April 2002. Professor Bellos was awarded the first Man Booker International Translator's Prize in 2005 for his many translations of the novels of the distinguished Albanian writer, Ismail Kadare. He is currently working on a life of the multilingual novelist and diplomat Romain Gary. David Bellos holds the rank of Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Palmes Académiques.
William Goldbloom Bloch is a mathematician at Wheaton College in Massachusetts who has always read voraciously. His doctoral work, done at the University of California, Berkeley, was in the rich intersection of topology and smooth dynamical systems. In addition to the book The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel, he has published a prime number of articles. Current research interests include Chomsky's universal grammar, logic, and automata. Current hobbies include modern fountain pens and winter sports.
Navigating Labyrinths in Jorge Luis Borges' story The Library of Babel
Jorge Luis Borges, the poet, essayist, librarian, and master crafter of short stories, was arguably the most influential writer in Spanish in the 20th century. An autodidact, he read and reread works by (among others) Bertrand Russell on the foundations and philosophy of mathematics, and these kinds of considerations explicitly directed the arcs of many of his short stories. The Library of Babel is perhaps his most famous story, and in its scant seven pages, he deploys simple combinatorial ideas to help create a miasmic atmosphere in the service of raising issues about the meaningfulness of our existence. The story also evokes ideas from three-dimensional manifold theory, real analysis, and graph theory; and, moreover, it is open to an interpretation from the theory of computation. This talk will touch on a number of these themes.
Andrew Crumey is a novelist and lecturer in creative writing at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne. He has a PhD in theoretical physics from Imperial College, London, and is former literary editor of Scotland on Sunday. He is interested in the history of ideas (especially multiple realities, e.g. Leibniz, Everett) and in the relationship between narrative and music. His latest novel is Sputnik Caledonia (Picador).
His contribution will take the form of an interview and he will be reading from Sputnik Caledonia, which is a dystopian novel about a Scottish communist space mission to a black hole.
Marilyn Gaull joined the Editorial Institute at Boston university in 2007 after many years of teaching (William and Mary, Temple University, New York University), scholarship, and publication (English Romanticism: The Human Context, editions such as the Longman edition of Northanger Abbey, articles, introductions, reviews and public lectures in British and American literature, intellectual history, folklore and oral performance, the history of science). As an editor, she founded The Wordsworth Circle, a large and comprehensive journal of Romantic studies, Editor's News for the Council of Editors of Learned Journals which she helped to organize, and Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters, her most recent series for Palgrave.
Romantic Numeracy
The paper covers a range of allusions from statistics to time, geometry and accounting, even the sizing of clothes and interpreting temperature, all new to fiction during this period as they were new to the culture. My thesis would be that novelists such as Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott used contemporary mathematical concepts and applications to create an illusion of fact in their fiction, which also helped their readers learn and adapt to mathematics. In turn, mathematicians used literary examples and fictional style to explain mathematical concepts culminating in the Russell's Tristram Shandy paradox.
Dorothy Ker’s music is performed and broadcast internationally and has been heard at international
festivals in Auckland, Belfast, Huddersfield, Switzerland, Perth, Taipei and Seoul, in London and on
BBC Radio 3. Her most recent work 'a gentle infinity' was commissioned by the London Symphony
Orchestra. Her music has recently been celebrated with a new CD ‘diffracted terrains: Chamber
Music of Dorothy Ker’ performed by the leading ensemble Lontano on the Lorelt label. Her interest
in space and the ways thinking about space and time are shared across disciplines has led to
ongoing dialogues with sculptor Kate Allen, mathematician Marcus du Sautoy and choreographer
Carol Brown from around 2001. She collaborated with Kate Allen on two mixed-media works for
live performance ‘DT:remix’ (Transversalities Conference, Reading, 2005) and ‘gps for a known
place’ (Sound Junction, University of Sheffield, 2006). The opportunity to bring this group and the
various threads of investigation together came with an award from the Gulbenkian Foundation
(2006-2007). She is a Research Fellow in Music at Sheffield University.
www.dorothyker.com
the 19th step: Borges, Maths and Music
In his short story 'The Library of Babel' Borges imagines an exhilarating universe by means of a
heady cocktail of combinatoriality, topology, symmetries and infinities. While Borges' story uses
language, how might such concepts also be rendered 'visible' through symbols, music, dance and
visual art? the19thstep project brought three artists together with Marcus du Sautoy to explore
Borges' virtual universe. Composer Dorothy Ker introduces the project and talks about how
working with a mathematician stimulated new ways of thinking about space in live performance.
www.the19thstep.co.uk
Don Knuth is a retired professor of Computer Science at Stanford University, where he joined the faculty forty years ago. His multivolume work-in-progress entitled The Art of Computer Programming has been translated into twelve languages. His software is used to format the pages of most of the world's books and journals about mathematics and physics. He tries to write computer programs that are actually a pleasure to read.
In June 2008 Nikita Lalwani won the Desmond Elliot Prize for New Fiction and donated the £10,000 prize money to human rights campaigners, Liberty. Her first novel Gifted was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. It is currently being translated into 16 languages. Her most recent publication is an essay in the anthology AIDS SUTRA. Nikita Lalwani was born in Rajasthan and raised in Cardiff. She lives in London. For more information see nikitalalwani.com
She will be interviewed by Noel-Ann Bradshaw and will read from Gifted, her novel about a maths prodigy.
Ann Lingard, novelist and broadcaster, is a former academic and research scientist. Enthusiastic about ‘explaining science’ she helps fiction-writers, artists and musicians meet and collaborate with scientists; has helped teenagers discover the ‘science of the shore’ through creative writing; gives talks on modern science to groups ranging from Farmers’ Discussion Groups to Humanists, WIs and Quilters; and is founder of SciTalk (www.scitalk.org.uk) the free national resource that helps fiction-writers to find and talk to scientists, engineers and mathematicians.
The Embalmer’s Book of Recipes (with a nervous nod towards quasicrystals)
One of the characters in Ann Lingard’s fifth novel is a mathematician, who works on quasicrystals. Why? Ann will talk about the fun and challenges of making this decision. (Further information about the novel – and many of the spectacular images that inspired the writing – can be found on www.annlingard.com )
Mark McCartney read mathematics and physics at university, graduating with a PhD in theoretical physics from Queen's University, Belfast in 1993. He is currently a lecturer in mathematics at the University of Ulster and has research interests in applied mathematics, pedagogy, and the history of science. He has recently edited (with Raymond Flood & Andrew Whitaker) Kelvin: Life Labours and Legacy (OUP, 2008). His own attempts at poetry tend to be either morose, feebly amusing, or in worst case scenarios, both.
James Clerk Maxwell: A Poetic Life
James Clerk Maxwell was not only an outstanding natural philosopher, he was also a poet. His poetry ranges from the witty and winsome to the well observed and well balanced. This talk will survey aspects of Maxwell's life and poetry, and along the way literary advice will be sought from Seamus Heaney and C. S. Lewis.
Scarlett Thomas is the author of seven novels, including PopCo and The End of Mr. Y. She has published short fiction, book reviews and articles in a range of newspapers, magazine and journals, as well as having work broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Scarlett has been teaching at the University of Kent since 2004. She is currently working on her eighth novel and reviewing books for the Independent on Sunday and Scotland on Sunday. She also reviews on the 5Live Books Panel. Her work has been translated into 16 languages. Scarlett is particularly interested in innovation in the contemporary novel, on the levels of structure and language, in particular. Other interests include the works of Katherine Mansfield, Boris Vian, B.S. Johnson and Magnus Mills; and the language of science in the 19th century.
The British Society for the History of Mathematics is registered as a company limited by guarantee, no. 3326816, and as a charity, no. 1061229. Its registered office is 37 Norreys Road, Cumnor, Oxford OX2 9PT, UK.