Naumann on TRP
Otto Sell
o.sell at telda.net
Thu Mar 30 02:46:27 CST 2000
I missed the part about Hilbert (maybe the most interesting part) cuz I was
driving a taxi and had a customer when Naumann was talking about TP´s plans
but luckily there wasn´t going on too much between 8-10 on a saturday eve.
Please tell more about that.
Hilbert is of course mentioned already in GR (p. 217) and Weisenburger
writes about that: "In non-Euclidean geometry, Hilbert space (named for
German mathematician David Hilbert, 1862-1943) is an abstract space. Whereas
is ordinary space any point has three dimensional coordinates, any point in
Hilbert space has a theoretically infinite number of coordinates; and any
point in Euclidean space can be identified with an infinite dimensional
point in Hilbert space, so that one is a sub-space of the other." (W. p.
117)
Encarta 98 says: "Hilbert, David (1862-1943), deutscher Mathematiker und
Philosoph. Hilbert wurde in Königsberg in Ostpreußen (heute Kaliningrad,
Russland) geboren, studierte und lehrte später an der dortigen Universität.
Im Jahr 1895 wechselte er an die Universität Göttingen, wo er ein
mathematisches Zentrum von Weltrang aufbaute. Hilbert beschäftigte sich mit
verschiedenen Bereichen der Mathematik, u.a. mit Zahlentheorie und
Variationsrechnung, sein Hauptgebiet war jedoch die Geometrie. In seinem
1899 verfassten Werk Die Grundlagen der Geometrie ersetzte er die
euklidische Geometrie durch ein genaueres, abstraktes Set von 21 Axiomen,
das Punkte, Linien und Ebenen und die sechs Beziehungen zwischen ihnen
behandelt. Zur Jahrhundertwende schlug Hilbert 23 mathematische Probleme zur
Untersuchung vor, von denen die meisten inzwischen gelöst wurden. Er
versuchte auch, die der ganzen Mathematik zugrunde liegende Folgerichtigkeit
nachzuweisen, was aber letztendlich der amerikanische Logiker Kurt Gödel
1939 widerlegte." Nearly a translation of an article in Infopedia2 from
1996:
"HILBERT, David (1862-1943), leading German mathematician and mathematical
philosopher of his generation. Born in Koenigsberg, East Prussia (now
Kaliningrad, Russia), Hilbert studied and then taught at the university
there until 1895, when he transferred to the University of Goettingen and
made it into a world-renowned mathematical center. He worked in several
fields of mathematics, including number theory and the calculus of
variations, but his major contributions were made in the field of geometry.
In his 1899 The Foundations of Geometry (Eng. trans., 1902), he effectively
replaced Euclid's geometry with a much more thorough and abstract set of 21
axioms dealing with points, lines, and planes and the six types of relations
between them. At the turn of the century, Hilbert proposed 23 mathematical
problems for investigation. Most have since been solved. He also tried to
establish the underlying consistency of all mathematics, an effort that was
eventually proved impossible by the American logician Kurt Goedel in 1931.
-----------------------------------------
Thomas said that Naumann said some stupid things about TP´s books: maybe,
but I clearly could feel Naumann´s dilemma between telling too much or being
uninteresting for the discussion.
There were two things Naumann said I want to look at: TP´s birthday and the
thing on smoking. On the first he said that he´s "not sure" if the date is
right and on the second that there´s a helluva lot of smoking in M&D and he
said quite definitely that dope is presented as a method to cope with our
banal and cruel everyday reality. Therefore my impression that he was
consciously hiding one information he wasn´t allowed to give (the exact
birthday - which I can understand) to keep TP´s privacy but admitting the
smoking stuff (durch die Blume gesagt) cuz it´s an open secret given the
things TP has said on dope throughout Vineland, GR and M&D. Or it was just a
trick trying to get readers for M&D...
On the whole I must say that the discussion wasn´t so important for someone
who is familiar with TP´s fiction but surely will get some readers on our
beloved author, make some people curious. It was ok.
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