The meaing of mathematics in Against the Day.....

[Richard Fiero]

Ray Easton wrote:

>>http://amstud-lublin.edu.pl/pynchon/?page_id=449
>>
>
>This writer is confused.  Quite surprisingly (to me), the 
>"foundational crisis" in mathematics is not discussed in AtD.
>
>Ray

"Maniacs," cried Root, "every one of us! Fifty years ago of course more than
today, today the real maniacs have gone into foundations work, set theory, all
abstract as possible, like it's a race to see who can venture out 
furthest into the
borderlands of the nonexistent. Not strictly speaking 'mania,' not as we once
knew it. The good old days! Grassmann was German and hence automatically
among the possessed, Hamilton was burdened with early genius and in the grip
of a first love he could never get beyond. Drinking a lot, though who am I to
talk, didn't help. Heaviside was once termed 'the Walt Whitman of English
Physics'-"
"What. . . excuse me . . . does that mean?"
"Open question. Some have found in Heaviside a level of passion or maybe
just energy, beyond the truculence already prevailing among the different camps
in those days."
"Well if Heaviside's the Whitman," remarked a British attendee nearby in a
striking yellow ensemble, "who's the Tennyson, you see?"
"Clerk Maxwell, wouldn't you say?" suggested someone else, as others
joined in.
"Making Hamilton I imagine the Swinburne."
"Yes and who'd be Wordsworth then?"
"Grassmann!"
"I say, what an amusing game. And Gibbs? The Longfellow?"
"Is there an Oscar Wilde, by any chance?"
"Let's all go to the Casino!" someone invisible screamed. Kit wondered how
any of this crowd would get as far as the door, let alone inside it- 
though, as it
turned out, the Quaternion folks all had members' privileges at the Kursaal,
which included the Casino.
"Intriguing new field opening up," Root confided on the way in. "Quaternion
Probability. Seems that, as a baccarat game proceeds, you can describe each
coup as a set of, well you'd call 'em vectors-different lengths, 
pointing off in
different directions-"
"Something like your hair, Root."
"But instead of finding a single resultant," Root continued, "we're working
here with rates of change, rotations, partial differentials, Curls, 
Laplacians, in
three dimensions and sometimes more-"
"Root, I got my fishing-boat pay, and that's about it."
"Stick around, my son, and you'll soon be wallowing in them francs."
"Sure. Think I'll just wander for a bit."