Theidlerhour - Bricolage Brain

Modern math is like a pyramid, and the broad fundament is often not fun. It is at the higher and apical levels of geometry, topology, analysis, number theory, and mathematical logic that the fun and profundity start, when the calculators and contextless formulae fall away and all that’s left are pencil & paper and what gets called “genius,” viz. the particular blend of reason and ecstatic creativity that characterizes what is best about the human mind. Those who’ve been privileged (or forced) to study it understand that the practice of higher mathematics is, in fact, an “art” and that it depends no less than other arts on inspiration, courage, toil, etc….but with the added stricture that the “truths” the art of math tries to express are deductive, necessary, a priori truths, capable of both derivation and demonstration by logical proof.

David Foster Wallace, Rhetoric and the Math Melodrama (via mindfuckmath)

Nothing could make me more curious about your taxidermy than this.

today’s locations

The Princess in the Forest. Gouache on paper. 35.5 x 40 cm.

Art by John Bauer.(1882-1918).

There is no branch of mathematics, however abstract, which may not some day be applied to phenomena of the real world.

Nikolai Lobachevsky (via curiosamathematica)

If you keep dividing the line segment infinitely you get something really interesting. It is called Cantor Dust. You get an infinite number of points with a total length of zero’ Fathom the Universe

Sometimes I want to go up to the people who insist that feminism and progressive values are Ruining Science Fiction and remind them that their genre exists because a teenaged girl was stuck at a house party and decided that inventing science fiction sounded more appealing than yet another tiresome threesome with Lord Byron.

It is by logic we prove. It is by intuition we discover.“

Henri Poincaré (via stardust-seedling)

"To paraphrase Walt Whitman: 'You are vast. You contain multitudes. Now let them live.'"

We can say that life itself is the axiom of the empty set. It begins in zero and ends in zero. We know that both states exist, but we will not be conscious of either experience: they are states that are necessary parts of life, even as they cannot be experienced as life. We assume the concept of nothingness, but we cannot prove it. But it must exist.

Hanya Yanagihara, A Little Life (via shrinemaidens)