This isn’t particularly timely, I realize, but I thought others might be interested to know about it regardless. While news of Dan’s death did percolate through the alumni community, I at least had not heard any specifics in connection with it. The linked page includes a very nice section about Dan.

The lectures themselves are apparently designed to inform a general audience about higher mathematics, and are held annually at the University of Arizona (Dan was studying Algebraic Geometry at the UA math department at the time of his death). The next one will apparently be held this fall, and information about it can be found here.

The hub of his online activities is a website called The Tolkien Professor, which includes the aforementioned podcast lectures, links to both primary sources and criticism, and information about skype-in office hours.

Aside from the content of his work, Corey Olsen’s career trajectory strikes me as interesting in several respects. It reflects a more-or-less successful bid to make a career of studying genre literature in the academy. It reflects what I view as a commendable effort to reach out of the academy and engage a popular audience with academic research–I would love to see this happen more often, and to be rewarded rather than (at best) tolerated. Finally, of course, it raises the question of college classes being made available free and online–a trend which is extremely exciting, but which is not uncomplicated by questions about the future of academic institutions in a world where higher education costs are skyrocketing. Are universities going to go the way of the newspaper? How should we feel about that if they do?

But at the very least I can return periodically to the questions raised for me so fortuitously by a good visit, so, here, allow me to follow up on a question I mentioned my post “Who’s the Medium now?.”

When a friend stated she cannot enjoy art from creators with whose views she disagrees, I asked first, “Does this also apply to non-fiction?” She said, “I don’t read non-fiction.” As she is in a graduate program in a humanities discipline, my response was a look of some bafflement.

She clarified that she essentially does not read any books in a ‘non-academic non-fiction’ type genre, and that there are some books “I have to read to do my work.” Although she has since clarified that these academic books are enjoyable, her initial phrasing gave me the impression that she read them only because she has to.

I do not know, though I would welcome more insight from her, what formed her preference (aversion? categoric disinterest?), or whether she considers it something good, bad, or indifferent about herself. Perhaps she merely has so much good fiction to read she has decided not to distract herself with some of the enticing offerings of “actual” present and past. (I occasionally wonder how I will ever get to any new books, since there are so many wonderful books to re-read: not just The Little Prince, of course, but also How to Eat Fried Worms, Watership Down, and the Fionavar Tapestry—although I more recently realized I can’t handle that world again.) Or perhaps her identification of an author’s ground axe(s) with the art makes her especially suspicious of authors working in actual facts. Or perhaps it simply hasn’t interested her so far.

But I doubt that good non-fiction cannot interest her. This world is, after all, a wondrous place, full of far more variety and subtlety than we can grasp. Good fictional worlds share the same qualities, to my interpretation: but it takes less skill in an author to go beyond the reader’s imagination when facts are involved.

Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction. (NOT SO in the case of Macbeth: the historical Lady Macbeth’s given name was Gruoch, but I understand there is no documentation beyond that of her being particularly intimidating or formidable.) But it is very often more interesting. The much-married Henry VIII of England and his extensive, fractured family provide a favorite example of mine. (My main source is Alison Weir’s joint biography The Six Wives of Henry VIII; among the prosaic fictional treatments I have briefly encountered are The Tudors, The Other Boleyn Girl, and The Autobiography of Henry VIII.)

When King Henry married Anne Boleyn, she was very likely in her early-mid thirties, pushing the safe limits for childbearing years in her time (and even in our time, pushing the easy limits for conception). So although Henry was fixated on securing his succession with a legitimate male heir, that was not a strong argument for marrying this woman.

Furthermore, the extrication process from his marriage to his first wife (his brother‘s widow), Katherine of Aragon, had dragged on for seven years, due in no small part to Queen Katherine’s own exemplary political and personal connections and her popularity with the British people. Henry could not expect to gain in domestic or foreign clout by repudiating the daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella.

Finally, during all but the last few months of the political and religious wrangling leading up to Henry’s “divorce,” he and Anne most likely were not sleeping together.

Which pretty much leaves Anne Boleyn’s own personal magnetism as the one most likely proximate cause for Henry’s insistence on marrying her. And I have to say I have a heck of a lot of respect for a woman who had an intensity of magnetism that maintained such a hold for so long over the imagination of a man who had very little rational expectation that she could bring to his complex life any relief (beyond, presumably, in bed), and every reason to wish he might be able to forget her.

Nancy Kress’s short story “And Wild for to Hold” is the only fiction I’ve seen on Anne that can so much as hold a candle to the compellingness of her history. (If only Siân Phillips had ever had a chance to play her!) Unfortunately, Kress’s treatment does not depict Henry or any of the other wives, each of whose own stories was fascinating and tragic in a uniquely real-life way.

I told my friend about Henry-and-wives the day she said she doesn’t read non-fiction. She was fascinated.

If I were Murray, I would be seriously upset—livid, to be specific—with myself and my editor for dropping those paragraphs into the essay, where they all but beg to be seized upon by hundreds of clever Netizen writers, dressed up (and talked up) as if they were the whole point, and swiftly shredded, item by item.

Because, you see (or, at least, as I see it), the examples paraded rather colorfully about are quite tangential to the fairly subtle, multi-faceted, and very much discussion-worthy issue Murray states: How does/can/should a governmental system strive for balanced representation, given that achieving balance along any one continuum means foregoing all consideration of one or more other salient measures?

Americans generally have liked to think of our culture as individualistic, and of our individuals as less bound by their personal, family, and local history than in earlier Western cultures (let alone non-Western). Nonetheless, for centuries the American elite was, as in Britain, France, Germany &c., by and large defined by blood and money, and the powerful were drawn almost entirely from the elite, although with ambition and ability one could push impressively far. Some of that has changed. But is an elite defined primarily by ambition and ability more diverse than its predecessors? In terms of the modes of thinking it naturally employs, the constituencies it can identify (with) and represent, and its abilities for intellectual cross-fertilization, perhaps not.

What type of segregation is imposed rather than alleviated by meritocracy? If admission to Harvard were merely a matter one’s parents’ connections, with one’s own accomplishments, hopes and plans incidental, one might very well encounter among one’s classmates more diversity of hopes and plans. (Of course, it does not follow from this that one necessarily would appreciate or even notice that available diversity.)

But to break the hold of a meritocratic elite, what could a culture or government do? Lottery admission to top schools, on the primary, secondary, or post-secondary level, wouldn’t do it, because even once in, a young person would have to succeed on his or her own merits. One neat idea got some new publicity in a Time opinion piece from Joe Klein earlier this fall: choose representatives quasi-randomly, but push them to inform themselves on the issues before them by reading and interacting with expert opinions. Turns out that, given power, the “average” person often will embrace responsibility.

Well, I think it’s funny, and I also think Edward Tufte’s stand on PowerPoint is interesting (if not news at this point):

Slideware may help speakers outline their talks, but convenience for the speaker can be punishing to both content and audience. The standard PowerPoint presentation elevates format over content, betraying an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch.

For example, here’s a scathing criticism of PowerPoint use in NASA:

I examine a key slide in the PP reports made while the Columbia was damaged but still flying….In the reports, every single text-slide uses bullet-outlines with 4-6 levels of hierarchy.  Then another multi-level list, another bureaucracy of bullets, starts afresh for a new slide.  How is it that each elaborate architecture of thought always fits exactly on one slide?

Anyway, to my knowledge, no animals were harmed in the creation of the first link.

h/t: Felix Salmon

My problem with National Grammar Day (and most popular grammarians in general) is that it suggests that the best part of studying language is the heady rush of telling people that they shouldn’t say something. But if you really study language, you know that there’s so much more to it than that. Each time March 4th comes and goes, we’re missing an opportunity to show people how wonderful the field of linguistics is.

Gabe goes on to describe a couple of papers that got him interested in linguists, and then proceeds to celebrate National Grammar Day by debunking ten common myths about grammar. So rather than giving into the “better than thou” spirit of the day, go read Motivated Grammar and learn something new and inspiring about language.

In brief, lay terms, as I have heard it, there was this brilliant young French mathematician in the 1950s by the name of Alexandre Grothendieck who all but single-handedly revolutionized/created certain fields of Algebraic Geometry. Some 10-15 years later, he gave up academic life, moved to the Pyrrenées, and became a sheep farmer.

Since Grothendieck’s disengagement, his body of work has remained wildly useful and has formed a bedrock for later mathematical generations. The respect accorded to his own writings has gone so far as to inspire its own personal Distributed Proofreaders analogue for creating a TeX version of a long systematic work, “Séminaire de Géométrie Algébrique” (or SGA). The free electronic SGA project has been ongoing for the better part of a decade or more; volumes SGA 1 and SGA 2 are up on the arXiv already.

It seems just possible that might not be true much longer.

Behold the text of the until-recently-current webpage for the SGA 4 project:

Alexandre Grothendieck a malheureusement souhaité que cessent les travaux de réédition de SGA. Les pages qui étaient consacrées sont donc closes.
Dernière actualisation : 2 février 2010.

There is slightly more information, and much discussion, at Scott Morrison’s post on the Secret Blogging Seminar, a group math weblog. Again in brief (and English), Grothendieck apparently resurfaced enough to put out a letter stating that he doesn’t want his work republished or translated.

And he wags his finger at anyone who has done so or wants to.

Which is the really weird part. Assuming the letter is genuine, what legal ramifications does it actually have? Why use a phrase like “unlawful in my eyes,” which sounds to me deliberately obfuscatory? (Legality is not a matter of an individual’s vision.) The comments on the SBSeminar post seem weighted towards arguments as to the moral dimensions of Grothendieck’s stated wishes and a given mathematician’s obligation to respect them (or not). To me, the legal questions are more pressing and pertinent. Whether one has a moral obligation to respect an author’s wishes is a decision one makes for oneself. Whether the mathematical community as a whole has a legal obligation to take Grothendieck at his word has greater ramifications–and probably a single, findable answer (unlike a question of personal morality).

Edixhoven, one of the prior leaders of the TeX SGA project, did research the distribution question through the publishers and was told copyright had in fact reverted to the original authors (as he states on the linked page). This seems to indicate Grothendieck is not out of line to say he withholds his permission. But the questions only start there. …

Some on the SBSeminar comment thread made the “glass half full” suggestion that maybe it’s time SGA got a revamp anyhow. Yet the original is still a precious resource. I’ll be interested to try to follow what decisions are made.