読んでいます: www.amazon.com
これは truism ですが、Chomsky ほど著名な研究者でもしっかり先行研究から ground-up で discourse を展開していくわけです
-- Academia で生き抜くための技術、備えたい
神保町
-- で働く将来: まず、何を勉強しておけば役立つか: 言語学はある程度道がひらけるのではないかとにらんでいる
文献学から数学に移った時枝先生をおもいだしますね:
He then studied at Lycée Sainte-Marie Grand Lebrun[1] in France as a classical philologist. According to his personal homepage, he taught himself basic mathematics from Russian collections of problems.
極限環境下での研究
誕生日に頂きました (ありがとうございます):
L'ésprit de géométrie et l'ésprit de finesse について:
まあ、intuitionist からの例を挙げるのもどうなのかわかりませんが、たとえば数学的発見の諸相について Henri Poincaré は次のように言っています:
One is at once struck by these appearances of sudden illumination, obvious indications of a long course of previous unconscious work. The part played by this unconscious work in mathematical discovery seems to me indisputable, and we shall find traces of it in other cases where it is less evident. Often when a man is working at a difficult question, he accomplishes nothing the first time he sets to work. Then he takes more or less of a rest, and sits down again at his table. During the first half-hour he still finds nothing, and then all at once the decisive idea presents itself to his mind. We might say that the conscious work proved more fruitful because it was interrupted and the rest restored force and freshness to the mind. But it is more probable that the rest was occupied with unconscious work, and that the result of this work was afterwards revealed to the geometrician exactly as in the cases I have quoted, except that the revelation, instead of coming to light during a walk or a journey, came during a period of conscious work, but independently of that work, which at most only performs the unlocking process, as if it were the spur that excited into conscious form the results already acquired during the rest, which till then remained unconscious.
Cédric Villani. Mathematics is the Poetry of Science. Oxford University Press. pp.53-54.
Edmund Husserl, きくところによると Paul Ricœur が収容所に強制させられてたときにも Ideen の余白にフランス語訳をひたすら書き込んでいたという話がありますね:
Ricoeur was studying in Germany when World War II broke out. Soon after being called up for service in the French army in 1939 he was captured and spent the rest of the war in prison camps in Germany. There he was able to study the work of Karl Jaspers and to prepare a translation of Husserl’s Ideas I in the margins of the book which he had to conceal from his jailers. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ricoeur/
André Weil の自伝にも、ソビエトのスパイだと疑われフィンランド警察に逮捕された際 ("Finnish fugue") の獄中について似た話があります:
Soon I was receiving a large amount of mail, which had to be read first by prison officials and by the examining magistrate; sometimes there were censored passages. Almost everyone whom I considered to be my friend wrote me at this time. If certain people failed me then, I was not displeased to discover the true value of their friendship. At the beginning of my time in Rouen, the letters were mostly variations on the following theme: "I know you well enough to have faith that you will endure this ordeal with dignity ... " (sometimes preceded by the theme, "You know I do not agree with your views, but...") But before long the tone changed. Two months later, Cartan was writing, "We're not all lucky enough to sit and work undisturbed like you ... "
-- Weil, André (1992). The Apprenticeship of a Mathematician. Birkhäuser Verlag. p.139
本を失うこと
ある日デスクトップ版の Kindle が (たぶん My Kindle Content が corrupt だという理由で) 開かなくなったときの考えごと:
やはり、本は燃え、データは消え、次第に知識源が失われていくなかで頼れるのは自分の持つ知識だけ (!) だというわけです
現代数学の先
には epistemology (認識論) が待ち受けているといかいう雰囲気が好きでたまらない:
From my point of view, as the author of [IUTchI-IV], one fundamental criterion that I always keep in mind — not only the in case of [IUTchI-IV], but also in the case of other papers that I have written, as well as when I am involved in the various types of evaluation procedures (Ev1) ∼ (Ev3) discussed above — is the issue of the extent to which the level of understanding of the mathematician in question enables the mathematician to “stand on his/her own two feet” with regard to various assertions concerning the theory, on the basis of independent, logical reasoning, without needing to be “propped up” or corrected by me or other known experts in the theory. I often refer to this criterion as the criterion of autonomy of understanding.
-- もちろん、数学研究といえば「外交」といった領域の話にもなってくるわけですが、そんな話題について André Weil はこう述べています:
[...] it has always seemed more worthwhile to me to meet people, even scientists, in their natural habitat than in the midst of a randomly mixed crowd. Meeting someone in his own surroundings seems to make it easier to read his writings - or, sometimes, it becomes apparent that they are not worth reading. Despite all the errors to which this method exposes one, it actually saves considerable time.
-- Weil, André (1992). The Apprenticeship of a Mathematician. Birkhäuser Verlag. p.52
ですから、京都を中心としてIUT研究が捗っていてもおかしなことではないと思うのです.
それに、数学のブレークスルーというものがある一か所を拠点に発展するといったことは、歴史を見返れば明らかなことです:
Bad faith
実存主義の Bad faith という言葉を最近 Being and Nothingness で読んでいました:
つまり、おおざっぱにいうと、外からの制限 (たとえば、個人の経歴や過去の言動 -- facticity とよばれる) を、超越 (Kant のいう transcendence) を避けるために '悪用する' ことを指します.
いちばんわかりやすい例は "天才" という言葉の使われ方でしょうか -- つまり、努力をするという発想のない (がために "才能" の果たす役割を仮定したがる) 人たちは、
のだというように説明がつきます.
I concluded that what we call 'intelligence' is as much about virtues such as honesty, integrity, and bravery, as it is about 'raw intellect’.
Intelligent people simply aren’t willing to accept answers that they don’t understand — no matter how many other people try to convince them of it, or how many other people believe it, if they aren’t able to convince them selves of it, they won’t accept it.
Importantly, this is a ‘software’ trait & is independent of more ‘hardware’ traits such as processing speed, working memory, and other such things.
Moreover, I have noticed that these ‘hardware’ traits vary greatly in the smartest people I know -- some are remarkably quick thinkers, calculators, readers, whereas others are ‘slow’. The software traits, though, they all have in common -- and can, with effort, be learned.
まあ、逃れるべきでない facticity というのはたくさんあるわけですが (たとえば子育て)、一方で、普段なにげなく信じているより自由かもしれないという気づきがあるかもしれません
-- なお、実存主義におけるこの気づき (revelation) には 'negative ecstasy' という名前がついています:
good-bye.