p-list backstory

[Paul Mackin]

On Dec 27, 2005, at 4:24 AM, Michael Bailey wrote:

> i used to think "peruse" meant to skim, was tickled to find not so
> very long ago that it meant the opposite


That can happen. Seems like there are words in our language that have  
been used or pronounced "incorrectly" so often and so universally  
that the incorrect rendering has become the correct one. Which is fine.


>
> i've been "perusing" (in my erroneous way) the p-list archives and
> found a reference to this post
> http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0003&msg=45243
>
> from Thomas Eckhardt:
>> Just wishful thinking, I guess, but did Naumann say anything at  
>> all about
>> Pynchon's current projects?  Anything about the next book?
>
>> No wishful thinking: Michael Naumann said that Pynchon had told  
>> him that a
>> new novel was in the works. In its center (if that is the term to  
>> use here)
>> is supposed to stand a young female Russian mathematician, who at the
>> beginning of the century belonged to the circle around David  
>> Hilbert, the
>> famous mathematician then teaching in Goettingen. She then falls  
>> in love
>> with a colleague...


As I recall Naumann's words were given some credence because for a  
while he had headed up  Pynchon's publisher, Henry Holt, after its  
acquisition by a German corporation.

>
> from the Wikipedia article on Sofia Kovalevskaya
>
> There seem to have been several roots to Sofia's mathematical bent.
> Some came from her father, accidentally; he had studied calculus in
> the army, and when they ran short of proper wallpaper for one house,
> he used lithographed notes from lectures by Ostrogradsky instead.
> Sofia spent many hours of childhood scrutinising the strange
> scribbles. Something of it seems to have stuck for when she later took
> calculus it came to her very quickly, as if it had always been there.
>
> She adored her uncle Pyotr Vasilievich Krukovsky, a self-taught
> eccentric with especial fondness for mathematics.
>
> While reading a book on optics given to her by a family friend, she
> came across trigonometric concepts unfamiliar to her at the time,
> which she tried to explain on her own. She explained it in the same
> manner it was explained historically, and the friend was so impressed
> he implored Sophia's father to let her take private mathematical
> study, calling her "a new Pascal" in the process.
>
> Kovalevskaya had a crush on Fyodor Dostoevsky and practiced his
> favourite piano work, Beethoven's Pathetique Sonata, to get his
> attention, but he was focused on the older sister Anna and he very
> probably proposed to her.
>
> ---------------
> i think it would be a treat to see a novelistic treatment of this
>