/lit/ - Literature

>>17435874
post the article, mongoloid.

>>17435874
retarded article, show me a novelist who knows advanced calculus

>>17435874
I mean I did A level maths which I always liked and found easy. I don't know why the article is acting like maths and writing are diametrically opposed.

>>17435884
Paste, you mean

>>17435900
>Lewis Carroll, Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace

>>17435900
I think the author is wrong suggest that mathematics will somehow improve your writing skills. However I think he’s spot on when he says that literature is currently constrained within its own echo chamber. That literature has become too inward-facing (a circlejerk), and that it might be better to incorporate more rigorous disciplines.
> Courage is not a word I’d use to describe a lot of today’s fiction. Writing, M.F.A. students are often told, is a messy exploration of the self. The result can be a suffocating narcissism, a lack of interest in the kind of extrapolation and exploration that is necessary to both mathematics and literature.
Really hits the nail on the head here.

>>17435954
I said novelist, not self aggrandizing academics who write 1000 pages of self masturbatory prose and wraps it up enough to sell it as a story

>>17435959
David Foster Wallace wrote like a complete narcissist, as did all the other academic writers that are lauded over /lit/

>>17435874
Anon paste the article I can't get thru the paywall and I'm interested about this

>>17435977
That’s what you got from IJ? I honestly felt that Wallace was trying to describe the opposite of narcissism. That his characters were all hopelessly trapped and starved of actual human connection

>>17435992
?
there isn't a paywall

>>17435992
Why Writers Should Learn Math
By Alexander Nazaryan

>In 1998, the New York Times wrote about a performance by the Fort Worth Ballet, singling out a male dancer for “his surprisingly fluid strength” while lamenting his lack of “soaring leaps” and “lively pirouettes” in a challenging routine that included Balanchine’s “Firebird.” If that seems like tepid praise, consider that the dancer was Herschel Walker, then a running back for the Dallas Cowboys. Walker had studied ballet at the University of Georgia, and while what he learned in the dance studio cannot alone account for his eight thousand two hundred and twenty-five career rushing yards, it surely fooled a linebacker or two. Nor is Walker the only football player to have seriously studied ballet: the Hall of Famer Lynn Swann is the subject of an NFL Films featurette titled “Baryshnikov in Cleats.”

What ballet is to football players, mathematics is to writers, a discipline so beguiling and foreign, so close to a taboo, that it actually attracts a few intrepid souls by virtue of its impregnability. The few writers who have ventured headlong into high-level mathematics—Lewis Carroll, Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace—have been among our most inventive in both the sentences they construct and the stories they create.

As anyone who has taken a standardized test in the last half-century knows, math and “language arts” run on parallel tracks for much of one’s school career. Both begin with an emphasis on rote memorization of the basics: sentence diagrams, multiplication tables. Later, though, both disciplines become more heady: English class discards grammar in favor of the ideas lurking beneath textual surfaces, while math leaves off earthbound algebra, soaring along the ranges of calculus.

By the time you’re old enough to drive, you’ve likely decided which region of the brain you plan to use in your adult life, and which you want nothing to do with beyond the minimum requirements imposed by modern society. Long gone are the days of the catholic scholar who could quote both Pindar and Newton with ease. As the Cambridge mathematician G. H. Hardy noted in 1940’s “A Mathematician’s Apology,” perhaps the most eloquent defense of the subject on its aesthetic merits, “most people are so frightened of the name of mathematics that they are ready, quite unaffectedly, to exaggerate their own mathematical stupidity.”

Poets have been more conversant with mathematics than fiction writers, probably because they have to pay attention to the numerical qualities of words when working in meter, forced to consider the form and even physical shape of what they write, not just its meaning. Wordsworth praised “poetry and geometric truth” for “their high privilege of lasting life,” while Edna St. Vincent Millay remarked that “Euclid alone has looked on beauty bare.”

>>17436049
Fiction writers have rarely expressed such earnest appreciation for mathematical aesthetics. That’s a shame, because mathematical precision and imagination can be a salve to a literature that is drowning in vagueness of language and theme. “The laws of prose writing are as immutable as those of flight, of mathematics, of physics,” Ernest Hemingway wrote to Maxwell Perkins, in 1945. Even if Papa never had much formal training in mathematics, he understood it as a discipline in which problems are solved through a sort of plodding ingenuity. The very best passages of Hemingway have the mathematical complexity of a fractal: a seemingly simple formula that, in its recurrence, causes slight but crucial changes over time. Take, for example, the famous retreat from Caporetto in “A Farewell to Arms”:

When daylight came the storm was still blowing but the snow had stopped. It had melted as it fell on the wet ground and now it was raining again. There was another attack just after daylight but it was unsuccessful. We expected an attack all day but it did not come until the sun was going down. The bombardment started to the south below the long wooded ridge where the Austrian guns were concentrated. We expected a bombardment but it did not come. Guns were firing from the field behind the village and the shells, going away, had a comfortable sound.

The procession here has an algebraic deliberateness, but that simplicity gives way to a complexity of meaning. Hemingway starts with the material (snow, wet, daylight, sun) only to end with the unexpected and intimate “comfortable sound” of the receding Austrian guns—a revelatory bit of naiveté on Frederic Henry’s part. Everything in this passage is intentional, from the plain imagery to the heightening of narrative urgency that comes with the repetition of “we expected.”

Hardy hints upon this, too: “A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns…. The mathematician’s patterns, like the painter’s or the poet’s must be beautiful; the ideas like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test.” But fiction that does nothing but follow rules is cold arithmetic, no matter how beautiful it is. And there are, indeed, many “craftsmen” today who can write what reviewers call lapidary prose, but who don’t come even close to wielding the axes that shatter the frozen seas inside us. That Hemingway paragraph would be inert artifice were it not for the “comfortable sound” that captures the impossible yearning of soldiers about to be sent either to slaughter or the gray twilight of retreat. The objective observation that begins the paragraph flowers into an ironic condemnation of war.

>>17436053
As the mathematician Terence Tao has written, math study has three stages: the “pre-rigorous,” in which basic rules are learned, the theoretical “rigorous” stage, and, last and most intriguing, “the post-rigorous,” in which intuition suddenly starts to play a part. As Tao notes, “It is only with a combination of both rigorous formalism and good intuition that one can tackle complex mathematical problems; one needs the former to correctly deal with the fine details, and the latter to correctly deal with the big picture. Without one or the other, you will spend a lot of time blundering around in the dark.”

In literature, that big picture means you have to extrapolate to people who are not yourself, which can be a risk as great as the potential reward—as, for example, William Styron found out when he tried to write from the voice of the rebel slave Nat Turner, quickly discovering himself branded a racist. The postmodernism of the late twentieth century, for all its excesses, at least understood that the world was now far too much with us, and fiction must tune into the frequencies of the age. David Foster Wallace came as close as anyone in the last half-century to finding that universal frequency. Wallace may have led a largely hermetic existence, and his novels aren’t exactly supermarket thrillers, but his fiction was obsessively concerned with the gulf between our small and discrete selves and the world at large.

A serious student of math in his youth, he had switched to philosophy by high school because high-level calculus did not provide the “click” of enlightenment, as D. T. Max describes in his new biography of Wallace, “Every Love Story Is a Ghost Story.” But even though Wallace may have foresworn mathematics, he never cast off the broadening spirit of the discipline. If Hemingway’s writing is algebraic in its precision, then Wallace’s is quantum calculus, a discipline that taxes the imagination by asking us to conceptualize things we cannot see, like the the way a function shows change through space and time. We must employ our private intellects to conceive forms that are, as Plato would have it, both timeless and universal. Not bad work if you can get it.

In a 2000 review of two mathematical novels in the magazine Science, Wallace wrote about “the particular blend of reason and ecstatic creativity that characterized what is best about the human mind”: “Just about anyone lucky enough ever to have studied higher math understands what a pity it is that most students never pursue the subject past its introductory levels and therefore know only the dry and brutal problem solving of Calc I or Intro Stats…. 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.”

>>17436060
Courage is not a word I’d use to describe a lot of today’s fiction. Writing, M.F.A. students are often told, is a messy exploration of the self. The result can be a suffocating narcissism, a lack of interest in the kind of extrapolation and exploration that is necessary to both mathematics and literature. In his landmark 1921 essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T. S. Eliot wrote, “What happens is a continual surrender of himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality…. It is in this depersonalization that art may be said to approach the condition of science.” He went to compare the mind of an artist to a crucible in which a chemical reaction takes place.

Presently, we have become too enthralled by the notion of literature as Jackson Pollock action painting, the id flung with violence upon the canvas. The most lasting fiction has both the supremely balanced palette of Rothko and the grandeur of his themes. All this may seem like I am urging for a literature that is cold and scientific, subjecting itself to the rigors of an alien discipline. That isn’t so. I am pleading, instead, that fiction think more deeply and determinedly about how it is to be composed and what it is to say—that is the best gift mathematics could give us.

“I am interested in mathematics only as a creative art,” Hardy, the Cambridge mathematician, wrote. He meant creative in the most literal sense, contrasting serious mathematical inquiry with chess. The latter, too, requires great intelligence, but it resolves nothing of the human condition. The same distinction exists in fiction, between the diverting and the serious, the trivial and the universal. In both cases, too, formulas are but guideposts that fall away the higher you climb. In the end, you are left alone with your own variables, your own private equations.

>>17435874
based and topographical art pilled, love me some Fomenko

>>17436071
yes!

>>17436004
He either did not read it or is a plot fag. Probably never read DFW.

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a500/incarnations-burned-children-david-foster-wallace-0900/

>>17436080
he literally think everything he doesn't get is "pretentious" and can't formulate a competent argumetn for the life of him tells you how much he knows - fuck all

>>17436080
brutal as fuck.

>>17436080
This hurts. I will be haunted by this story.

>>17435874
Civil engineer here, and some of you younger /lit/ members need to hear this while you're considering your college major:
More artistic people need to get into STEM. For a few reasons:
>say goodbye to selling out your creative energy just to live
You'll get a good enough paying job, and after a few years of shit you'll get licensed and live happily ever after
>STEM needs people that are creative
Sure, the flat, detail-oriented stereotype of an engineer gets a job quick and easy. But if you're able to see the big picture communicate effectively you're going to end up a manager and see the changes you bring to the world around you from start to finish
>creative people need STEM
Sure, you obviously have the creative firepower to do great things, but what about the cognitive firepower? Speaking from experience, after surviving calculus 3 I had far more confidence in my creative efforts because I saw how far my brain could go. The challenge forces discipline into your life which - while boring - is proven to make you more effective at accomplishing your passion

>>17435954
Pynch dropped out of engineering school after sophomore year. I don't even know if he took calc 3.

>>17437126
The real filter for non-electrical engineers is physics 2

>>17437117
"STEM" itself is the problem. Science, technology, engineering, mathematics, etc. are all inherently creative and appealing to creative people. It's only when they're taught via the modern educational system - as "STEM" - that things start to change. There's a direct connection between the decline of creativity in the sciences and their reduction to a monosyllabic acronym.

>>17437198
The acronym doesn't dictate teaching style. The teaching style is soul-sucking because through high school you have fucking education majors trying to teach you calculus with a focus on production and test scores over actual learning, and then in college you have physics PhD's who not only dont know how to teach, but don't even want to do it because they have articles to write.

Rec me a math book. Assume I have forgotten everything I learned in school

>>17435959
Agree. I think MFA programs and the like have killed an entire generation of creative writers.

>>17437262
The "STEM" acronym was created by the NSF specifically to goad school administrators into making their programs more production-centric. There's a strong association between it and the kind of science those education majors are taught to teach their students.

>>17435874
It's much more difficult to learn math than to learn writing, so the answer is mathematicians should learn to write.

Bump

Why learning math can be important for developing abstract thinking and generally fostering an understanding of reality, I don't necessarily see the correlation between creating patterns mathematically vs artistically.

Good literature should dwell in the realm of reason, symbolism, theme/motif and metaphor. It should be striving for a exemplification of principles and ideas, their interplay.

Having an astute aptitude for numerical objects doesn't really help with that? Math is rather concrete.

I'm autodidactic but I can still apprehend
what is being explained in multivariable calculus and differential equation lectures on youtube(right now I'm studying functional analysis and general relativity). It's all very concrete information.

>>17435874
>the jew yorker
>faster! faster! read this article goyim!!
no.

>>17435959
absolutely
the funny part is that the author himself is one of those keeping the echo chamber up and going and ruthlessly massacring and bullying anyone outside of it that attempts to partecipate; therefore the writing and publication of this article should have been punished through Scaphism.

>>17437398
Picrel covers school math but in a book written for adults. So elementary algebra, trigonometry, etc., but no random skateboard pictures.

The same author has books on calculus, linear algebra, and a ton of other college math if you want to continue.

Bonus you get an aesthetic bright yellow Springer book on your bookshelf which is the most recognized and respected series of math books.

>>17440504
i think i remember trying to go through that. it's fucking difficult

My best Abstract Algebra professor told us on the first day of class that his course was ultimately a writing course because it revolved around proofs. He was absolutely fantastic even if I had to take that class twice. Improved my abstract reasoning and the structure of my writing, 10/10 would recommend.

>>17436049
>Lewis Carroll, Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace
also Fernando Pessoa

>>17435959
I agree. Language and thus literature soars when it explores new avenues of thought, and it falters when it is left to its own devices to be used, abused, and be turned into a mere tool of enforcing intellectual circlejerks.

Though it should be noted that the key word here is not narcissistic subversion for its own sake that has become a vapid cliché of its own, but actual exploration of the mind.

>>17439304
Mathematical knowledge makes one's workmanship more rigorous. "reason, symbolism, theme/motif and metaphor" don't come into being through pure intuition alone, but are made manifest by the skills of the writer.

>>17435959
>a lack of interest in the kind of extrapolation and exploration that is necessary to both mathematics and literature.

Yeah, says the not-at-all-a-hack-no-sir pushing the absolute boundary of establishment thinking in radical, experimental prose. What a hero.

would recommend reading Logic: The Laws of Truth first before touching on any of the math
>>17440534
Read Gelfands books on algebra, geometry and trigonometry first

>>17441226
kek

>>17436004
>That his characters were all hopelessly trapped and starved of actual human connection
Isn't that an usual symptom of narcissism though?

>>17435874
This article has nothing to do with literature. The author wrote this article to bolster his cred as a 'progressive' fuck yeah science! ally.

>>17440534
anything about fundamental concepts that delve into the history of mathematics. don't know any in english though.

alternatively you can study proofs of basic theorems, like the demonstration that the square root of 2 is an irrational number, try to do it yourself after, that will give you a gist of what maths is all about

>>17441325
thanks, i'll try doing that

>>17441231
>Read Gelfands books on algebra, geometry and trigonometry first
okay

>>17440934
> his course was ultimately a writing course because it revolved around proofs
Based. College math education rarely emphasizes enough on the fact that the first two years are basically dedicated to learning how to read and write mathematics.

>>17435874
Mathematics is a surrogate activity that should ideally be kept at a distance from one's life excluding whatever minor aspect is personally needed. Any literature produced by a talented author has within it a wide range of meanings to be extracted, though the message taken is often that which resonates with the reader the most. In contrast, a mathematician can only ever appreciate abstractions detached from their reality, but worst of all, its aim is to advance techno-capital. Despite the great amount of literary garbage that is produced and sold yearly, its redemption springs from the minority of writers who indeed make a difference for its readers long into their lives. Mathematics translates into continually progressing technology, and excluding medical forms, is entirely unnecessary and harmful for the wellbeing of our fellow humans. Increased luxuries contribute towards mental decline and spiritual stagnation.

>>17442011
These Kaczynski/Luddite views assume a human-centric view of reality. I don’t think technological progress is ever unequivocally good or bad— for every freedom lost, we gain new ones, and for however much of our ‘humanity’ is eroded (which is already a pretty fickle concept, anyway) there are new, interesting configurations of intelligence and technology that fall in place to supersede us. It might seem disturbing considering what we’re used to, but this progress is inevitable and already happening.

I think writers in this age should be able to interrogate both the personal human world and the inhuman outer world— and an understanding of the latter is best cultivated by rigorous disciplines like mathematics.

>>17442401
Still, a STEM background needn't be necessary for the future's literature as long as one has access to methamphetamines (refer to Nick Land's Fanged Noumena).

Bump

>>17437126
>>17437132
Not a burger, someone tell me what's in calc 3 and physics 2

>>17435902
>didn't do further
ngmi

>>17435874
If authors learned math, there wouldn't be some dumbass saying the set [0,2] is an infinite bigger than the set [0,1].

>>17444705
Calc 3 is just integral applied in R^n.
Physics 2 is either Electromag or Termodynamics.

>>17441185
Too right. I'm an art/literature guy went into chemistry after an entire public school career of believing I was bad at it and "not a math person".

One of the most beautiful realizations I've made after truly giving mathematics a chance is just how much writing can be a thing of hardened principle and even more beautifully, how mathematics can be a thing of intuition

>>17442401
Good post.

>>17442401
hard to see mathematics as "inhuman" when to understand them beyond a simple animal level requires human reasoning in the first place

>>17435954
no thanks I don't want to write like a redditor

If i want to study math and physics what would be a good epistemology book to begin with?

>>17437132
You take physics 2 by then, and even then it's cake. Its pure baby physics lol.

>>17437117
Everything written here is correct, t. master's in compsci.

>>17435900
I haven't read the article but Math is one big exercise in building a series of logical statements on one another. In this sense it likely develops your critical and abstract thinking skills. As a mathematician, I often have to think very creatively to solve problems. This creativity plus the critical thinking means your writing could be of a higher quality than otherwise. I don't at all agree with the absolute meme that "you either have to be a math guy or a literature guy, not both." I think the tendency for deep and creative thought that exists in math is more than pertainable to literature.

>>17445430
You'd like Spengler. Spengler is probably the ideal model writer for this thread

>>17445493
Where should I start?

>>17445666
Decline of the West of course. There's Man and Technics, but I'm not sure if it can be read prior to Decline. You just have to get used to his odd terminology, which can seem a bit boisterous at times. He has a strong grasp of physics, mathematics, and so forth, which he uses in his descriptions.

Half of me is thinking:
>take the mathpill and unearth deep, aesthetic fundamental secrets about the universe
and the other half is thinking:
>yeah no, I’ll just read and write

>>17445741
Ok, thanks.

>>17437398
Calculus made easy

>>17437398
Eculids elements.
Or watch some 3blue1brown on yt

>>17444980
>how mathematics can be a thing of intuition
Mathematics is pure intuition.

>>17445871
3b1b is based. Best used as inspiration to seek out and solve mathematical problems yourself, which is what builds intuition.

>>17435954
Lewis "my book is a screed against math" Carrol
David "releases books praising math while filling them with math errors" Wallace
Thomas "no formal conception of entropy" pynchon
What were you trying to prove?

>>17435954
Bullshit.

Is anyone here doing Maths at Warwick?

writers should learn philosophy first

>>17435954
Yikes.

>>17435925
Same shit.

i agree with this article because i am a mathfag

>>17435970
bruh GR is GReat

>>17448583
It fits that description to a tee lol. Rest is subjective

>>17436049
>David Foster Wallace

>>17448594
Imagine seething over a footnote for 23 years until death. Petty, petty man.

>>17437398
The intro chapter to Apostol Calc

>>17448591
someone's upset

>>17437470
Is this why economics centered people are the ones who recommend STEM?

>>17448621
wardine be cry

let's not

>>17435900
Me.
t. me

>>17435954
DFW did not advance past calc 2 and it's pretty obvious when you read his works that try to include math. He dipped his toe in the lake that is advanced Mathematics and fancied himself an expert when in reality he had the understanding of math a smart high schooler would have. DFW was a smart guy but his brilliance was not all encompassing as he tries to make it seem.

>>17448703
It's you.

>>17449622
that's a mirror

>>17449632
Reddit comeback

>>17449650
you would know

>>17449669
Met a lot like you

>>17449679
on redd*t, yes. You should stay there :)

>>17449704
On here, because redditors like you cross over. Go back.

>>17449725
>no u

wow did you learn that one on redd*t lol

>>17449758
>Reddit spacing
Heh! fucked it up, kid.
>'No u' is reddit
Then some

>>17449783
that's not redd*t spacing but at least you're trying to fit in i guess

>>17449793
You would know.
>Projection
Of course

>>17449162
because they want better cogs for their system

>>17449800
hey check out this selfie I found of you

>>17449586
>"writers need to study math"
>writer studies math
>"no not like that"
fucking make up your mind

>>17449815
I want to be a better cog too because then I can get paid more

>>17449822
That's your mirror

>>17449854
no, that's clearly an image

>>17449873
Clearly your image

>>17449886
of yourself, yes

>>17449903
There's another one of your selfies.

>>17449903
So it's clearly your image of yourself, yes? Brave of you to accept it.

>>17449910
>>17449953

>>17449972
Someone's upset.

>>17449972
Stop posting your selfies.

>>17449980
Yeah you after being completely obliterated by facts and logic

>>17450048
Sure showed me lol.

>>17450056
I accept your concession :)

>>17450062
I accept another one of your selfies, redditor.

>>17450069
yeah that one's me dabbing on the incel children

>>17450078
By being one of them? Not a good look

>>17450095
heh, got me there :)

>>17436071
thanks for showing me this, anon. What a guy. What's that with the alternative history conspiracy lol. Should have a whole own thread.

>>17437398
Work through high school math books. If you have done everything get 'How to Prove it' by Vellemann

>>17449823
Easy m8, I think it's great for them to study math. I was just saying that using Wallace as an example of a writer who is also a mathematician is a tad insincere. He's definitely somebody who studied logic and had an interest in concepts of advanced mathematics but never got around to studying it even though he writes like he did.

>>17451696
no wonder he killed himself