Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun

I may have mentioned earlier that I’m reading Everything and More, David Foster Wallace’s history of infinity. As with everything that DFW writes, it’s awesome. The problem is, the man is a super genius about everything, including math. And I’m a non-math-doing guy. So the book started off pretty good, with a lot of intellectual history and basic mathematics, it very quickly spiraled into a discussion of calculus and linear algebra and all sorts of advanced concepts that I have no idea how to even begin to describe. Which stinks, because I’d really like to finish the book.

This is all to say that I’m thrilled that the New York Times’s Opinionator blog has decided to commission Steven Strogatz, a professor of applied math at Cornell, to do a series of weekly blogs about the principles of math. Says Strogatz:

I’ll be writing about the elements of mathematics, from pre-school to grad school, for anyone out there who’d like to have a second chance at the subject — but this time from an adult perspective. It’s not intended to be remedial. The goal is to give you a better feeling for what math is all about and why it’s so enthralling to those who get it.

Is anyone else tremendously excited about this sort of thing? Maybe it won’t put me on the path to finishing the history of infinity, but math is very important! And, if mathematicians are to be believed, fun! Eh? Anybody?

William Rhoden on Bobby Knight and John Calipari.

So illustrator and children’s book author Maira Kalman is doing this monthly blog about American democracy for the Times called “And the Pursuit of Happiness.” This month’s installment is about Thomas Jefferson, and it’s a treat. It’s simple and singsongy, but by the end you find you’ve been reading about incredibly weighty and grown-up issues.

Like many people (probably like you too, precious reader) I’ve always had an ambivalence toward our third president, and Ms. Kalman addresses that ambivalence (although not quite enough, for my tastes). After all, Thomas Jefferson, like many wealthy Virginians of his time, was a slave-owner; the arrogance involved with penning the words “all men are created equal” while simultaneously presuming that one human can be owned by another makes Jefferson an all-time hypocrite. There are plenty of people I respect as thinkers who find him to be irredeemable as a result. I have a hard time writing him off completely, though (and Ms. Kalman tells you why). If we’ve ever had anything coming close to a polymath in America, it’s Jefferson. Anyway, he’s a lot more complex and formidable of a man, for good and for ill, than we were taught about in grammar school.

I pass this along for two reasons: firstly, because I thought the Tristam Shandy bit at the end was positively heartbreaking. Secondly, because there’s a dynamite fact about, and fun lil portrait of, every pollock’s boy, Tadeusz Kościuszko. (Homework assignment, dear reader: read his Wikipedia page, and then, in the comments, convince me that TK didn’t eat nails for breakfast and tacks for snacks.)

Also, HT 2 EK on this.