Dear All,
I hope all is well.
I thought the following course outline might be of some interest to some of you.
Bhavana Adhyayana: Conceptual Mathematic in Mother Tongues
Your time permitting, please critique (unvarnished π
Thanking you,
Yours respectfully,
posina
I'm sorry I couldn't figure out how to edit my earlier message to replace the above roundabout link with a direct one: Bhavana Adhyayana.
On a related note, there is a mathematical magazine BhΔvanΔ, which means composition / concept / bringing into being, among others, depending upon the context.Β It may be of some interest to note that unlike the trouble ivory tower mathematicians had in recognizing the primacy of concepts and symbolic languages as secondary constructs used to present concepts for the purpose of calculations, a high school dropout / movie hero / politician (Pawan Kalyan) in my state of Andhra Pradesh is on a mission highlighting the significance of concepts and thinking above and beyond that of languages used to express concepts and ideas for the purpose of communication.
On a not too unrelated note, I couldn't help but browse through every issue of Bhavana hoping to find an article or two about Grothendieck, given that concepts figured prominently in the work of Grothendieck, but alas not one (or I missed them).
On a somewhat relatively distant note, I was amused to find a series of articles on beauty (and math, of course) by Langlands; it's mildly amusing to see many mathematicians lost in thought pondering beauty, but there are four definitions of BEAUTY, which are abstractions from everyday experience and planned perception (that appear to be missing in action π
Definition I. Beauty is mostly an average (evocative of pleasantness), with a sprinkling of outliers (needed to draw our attention).Β This definition dates back to the perennial human pursuit of criminals before they commit crime; a clever police officer took a ton of pictures of known criminals and averaged them to identify the tell-tale features of criminals only to find the average criminal handsome (or so the story goes π
Definition II. Beauty is figure-sans-ground, with figure defined as that part of the image wherein small changes are readily perceived vis-a-vis the changes in the part of the image constituting background.
Definition III. Disappearing into the appearance of beauty, which must be all too palpable to those of us still in college.
Definition IV. Putting together those that fit together.Β