« NYC EVENT - MOTEV RECOMMENDS | Main | THE INDIAN CLERK »

August 20, 2007

WHO'S WHO IN THE INDIAN CLERK

The Indian Clerk might not quite boast the proverbial "cast of thousands" but there are numerous historical figures to keep track of. So, for your reading pleasure, we thought we'd provide a handy look at the key players.  Herewith, your Indian Clerk Scorecard:

Gh G.H. Hardy (1877-1947) - Prominent English mathematician best known for his contributions to number theory and his numerous books and essays, including A Mathematician's Apology.

Hardy once told Bertrand Russell "If I could prove by logic that you would die in five minutes, I should be sorry you were going to die, but my sorrow would be very much mitigated by pleasure in the proof"

Ramanujan Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920) - Self-taught Indian prodigy, considered one of the greatest mathematical minds of the century.  He made "substantial contributions to the analytical theory of numbers and worked on elliptic functions, continued fractions, and infinite series."

Ramanujan's arrival at Cambridge was the beginning of a very successful five-year collaboration with Hardy. In some ways the two made an odd pair: Hardy was a great exponent of rigor in analysis, while Ramanujan's results were (as Hardy put it) "arrived at by a process of mingled argument, intuition, and induction, of which he was entirely unable to give any coherent account". Hardy did his best to fill in the gaps in Ramanujan's education without discouraging him. He was amazed by Ramanujan's uncanny formal intuition in manipulating infinite series, continued fractions, and the like: "I have never met his equal, and can compare him only with Euler or Jacobi."

J.E. Littlewood (1885-1977) - British mathematician who spent his whole career at Cambridge.  Friend of Hardy's and best known because of their work together.

I read in the proof sheets of Hardy on Ramanujan: "As someone said, each of the positive integers was one of his personal friends." My reaction was, "I wonder who said that; I wish I had." In the next proof-sheets I read (what now stands), "It was Littlewood who said..."
A Mathematician's Miscellany, 1953.

Eric Neville (1889-1961) - A Trinity College colleague of Hardy's, dispatched to India to locate Ramanujan and persuade him to return to England.

The Cambridge Apostles - An elite, intellectual secret society which became less secret during the heyday of Bloomsbury, when its membership included:

Bertrand Russell (1872-1970) - Philosopher, logician, essayist, and social critic.

After a life marked by controversy (including dismissals from both Trinity College, Cambridge, and City College, New York), Russell was awarded the Order of Merit in 1949 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950.

Lytton Strachey (1880-1932) - British critic and author, best known for Eminent Victorians.

Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) - British poet, described by Yeats as "the handsomest young man in England," killed in action during World War I.  Known for his war poetry.

G.E. Moore (1873-1958) - Influential British philosopher, best known for Moore's Paradox.

And, finally, we're reasonably sure most TEV readers are well acquainted with the following two Indian Clerk cameos but just in case ...

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) - Perhaps the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century, author of only one book during his lifetime, the landmark Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.

D.H. Lawrence (1885-1930) - English novelist, author of The Rainbow, Lady Chatterly's Lover, Women in Love, and others.

Please be sure to join us tomorrow, when we'll be running an interview with David Leavitt as well as an exclusive excerpt from The Indian Clerk. 

Posted at 12:01 AM in Indian Clerk Week |

| | Pin It! | |

Comments

The comments to this entry are closed.

TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

Categories

Subscribe to this blog's feed