Introductions - General Discussion - Ideas, Suggestions, :-)

[Laura Gibbs]

Please use this space to introduction yourself to the group and to share any ideas you have about discussion, reading together, suggestions about how to most enjoy this text!

[Laura Gibbs]

Hi everybody, my name is Laura, and I teach online courses in mythology and folklore at the University of Oklahoma (http://mythfolklore.net). My training is in Classics, and I do a lot of Latin and Greek projects online as a kind of hobby... which is how I met up with Barry, who suggested this book as something of interest! Thanks, Barry!!!

I'm both excited and a bit intimidated about reading this book. I will confess to knowing NOTHING about the subject - some of the names in the table of contents (Diophantus? Vieta?) are total unknowns to me. Should I be embarrassed about that? Ha ha, I guess rather than being embarrassed, I'm mostly just excited: I always consider it a special privilege to tackle some area of real ignorance on my part, and this book will surely be a chance to do that!

At the same time, I feel like there are so many ways in which I could connect with this book in some profound ways... and I am very optimistic about that. Here are some points of connection I am hoping to explore:

- I love algebra. Passionately. I was a math major in college before I switched to majoring in Slavic languages (later I added Classics). I was actually taking Russian because of its usefulness in the history of math! (Tom Lehrer's song Lobachevsky exerted a strong influence on me in the formative years of my youth, ha ha.)

- I love asking questions about the BASICS. I've learned some great things about the history of the alphabet over the past few years... surely it is now time for me to learn something about the history of numbers! :-)

- Although I am NOT someone who has studied philosophy (in some ways I'm a kind of anti-philosophical person), there are several books which have really rocked my world in which Greek philosophy is of central concern: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig (the book which has probably influenced my life more than any other), Ancient Philosophy, Mystery and Magic by Peter Kingsley (a book which had a huge impact on me in graduate school), and two books by Eric Havelock: Preface to Plato, and also The Muse Learns to Write. I'm hoping this book will be added to that list.

[Bill Pearsall]

Good morning - I just happened across this group while killing time but the topic seems as if it would be of interest to me - I teach mathematics in high school (usually Algebra 2) and I use the history of math frequently to try to bring the topic alive (perhaps as much for myself as my students) - I am an engineer by education and profession and only used math as a tool - in the course of teaching for the last 11 years, I have heard the "why" question from my students all too often and decided they needed a better answer than "because" - I did too - I know some details of math history but really want to learn more of whys - I am not familiar with this book and this seemed like a profitable venture, so I've ordered a copy and here I am

[Laura Gibbs]

Super, Bill - I was just about to send you a note!!! I was also going to contact Kiki, who is another math person here at the Fireside, and I've told Ian about it, too. Often I don't know the educational areas of the people here at Fireside, so if you know of any other math people, spread the word.

I hope that I can provide a service as we read this book together by answering questions about the Greek. I'm really fascinated by Greek vocabulary and etymology - it's always hard for folks like Klein to be writing about Greek materials in another language (I think he originally was writing in German...?) - but I'll do my best to help out with the Greek and make that into a fun part of the adventure for people! :-)

[Ian Carmichael]

G'day all
I'm a teacher of religion, ethics, mathematics, computing and science. I've been interested in Mathematics always it seems - certainly from my Year 10 maths teacher, who introduced me to E T Bell's Men of Mathematics, Doing Pure Mathematics II (our holiday pre-project) we were set Davenport's The Higher Arithmetic which got me excited about repeated/continued fractions (and Diophantine equations - which I've since forgotten!), Infinite series in general are intriguing to me. Most recently I've enjoyed Euclid's Window and Prime Obsession.
As a Physics enthusiast by major training, I love the mathematics of quantum mechanics - but have to confess that general relativity is too much for me. Favourite authors - in this realm - I haven't mentioned yet: G H Hardy, P A M Dirac, P J E Peebles, A S Eddington DOnald E Knuth and Hawking & Ellis (Large Scale Structure...)
Also I'm an enthusiast for epistemology - what is knowledge and how do we know? which practically lands on my interest in Science and Religion and their relationship(s) - an enthusiasm I was able to pursue at Oxford last year, and a unit I've been teaching to Senior College for the last two years.

I'm looking forward to this group, but I won't get the book before mid-June.

[Laura Gibbs]

Aha, Ian, your Diophantine equations must come from the Diophantus who was a mystery to me in the table of contents here, but clearly a key player.

And now to worry about the timing of things - that's what I love about the asynchronous nature of online stuff. My book should be here this week - but even if people join in late, it's no problem at all to just jump in anywhere at any time.

True confession: I got so depressed looking at the calendar for June-July-AUGUST... I want summer to be endless. Seeing that it is composed of this finite number of weeks was very sobering. But still: IT'S MAY. As long as it is May, summer feels endless to me! :-)

[Ian Carmichael]

I haven't come to terms with my finitude either - I always borrow more than I can read, plan more than I can do, have more interests than I can satisfy. (And it must be so awful to be not like that - to actually feel that life can be encompassed and that there's time left to be bored!)
And that's the way I want to go on - finding new things, and then discovering them linking back to, and extending, frameworks I've already got. (I'm regretting my last library purge when I came to Tasmania - I thought I'd gone beyond some of my texts, but I'm still looking for them. I now know why I had Spinoza's Ethics, Mill's Logic, etc... Galileo's Two New Sciences etc...) On the other hand, my wife is quite happy (for space reasons) I had that last purge, and would like to see another one!

[Lee Perlman]

Hi all,

I was a student of Jacob Klein's, and I've been especially thinking about these matters for the last 5 or 6 years. Klein's book is deceptively difficult - it's one of those books that line by line seems to make sense, but then when you try to think through what it all adds up to you find yourself confused.

I'm looking forward to hearing what you all make of the book. I'm sure fresh eyes will help me with some of my confusions. Lee

[Laura Gibbs]

Hi Lee! I guess if I had a choice, I would prefer a book that makes sense as you read it, and then rattles you brain as you think back and reflect on it... that sounds far preferable to a book which rattles your brain so badly as you read it than you cannot manage to get through it!

For myself, I'm looking forward to getting a new perspective on the use of the word logos in Greek. In my own work, it comes up over and over again because the stories of Aesop are ambivalently referred to as "logos" or "muthos" in the Greek collections (the formulaic moral of the story at the end of the fable is "ho logos deloi" or "ho muthos deloi" - the story reveals - with the words logos and muthos being used interchangeably) - well, for some scholars who are committed to huge shifts of meaning back and forth between the words muthos and logos, it is disappointing for them to learn that, at least in the world of Aesop, the words seem to be used synonymously.

Then, of course, with my Christian students who are very interested in Bible studies, there is the whole legacy of "logos" in the tradition following John.

I'm excited about getting a chance to work on this word from a wholly new angle; just from the dictionary, I know that logos has meaning in the math tradition (computation and reckoning are the first meaning listed in the big LSJ Greek dictionary), and it looks like I am going to get to learn more about that now from Klein, at last!

[Ed Wall]

I, as Lee Perlman, am interested in what you all make of this and welcome the chance to re-read and re-think. Klein, by the way, was a sometimes student of Martin Heidegger.

[Ian Carmichael]

Wow! While I was trawling the 'net yesterday I disciver that there's a Klein Yahoo group (about 90 members) - I didn't investigate it then because I hadn't the patience to unearth my old Yahoo ID then.
And, Laura, on logos, does the brick-manufacturer take its name from legw - gather, count, reckon, or is it just a serendipity?

[Laura Gibbs]

At least according to Wikipedia, Lego is a Danish formation:
"The word lego is an abbreviation for two Danish words leg and godt meaning play well."
But I am sure we could cook up a good conspiracy theory to explain otherwise, ha ha.

And yes, that's how Lee found his way here, along with at least one other person from the old Yahoo Group - I'm a YahooGroup user (one of the Latin teacher groups operates there still) - when we really get going here, I'll send around a note to the list to invite anyone who wants to join in. I thought it was really cool that reading groups could leave trails like that... like finding a real trail in the real woods to follow! :-)

[John Devine]

DD: Howdy, all. John Devine here, usually known as DD on the internet. Devoted follower of Laura Gibbs, myths, fables and tarheel reader, usually out of my depth. My training is mostly in psychometrics. Lifer military. Former Asst. Prof. at a State University. Now resident Yogi and sometimes fitness trainer at the local PowerHouse Gym. Owner of two Latin lists, [e-mail] and [e-mail]. "Now let us sit in easy pose and contemplate the Euclidean n-space."