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CowperKettle
CowperKettle
01:04
> "The time was one minute past midnight. But he was the only one who had to sit on his way back. The time was one minute after midnight and the wind was still standing on the counter and the little patch of straw was still still and the street was open".
("1 the Road")
Bookworm
Bookworm
01:33
0
Q: Was Agatha Christie's short story "Magnolia Blossom" inspired by Ibsen?

verboseIn both incident and theme, Agatha Christie's short story "Magnolia Blossom" has several parallels with Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House. In Christie's story, Theodora Darrell is on the point of leaving her husband Richard for another man, his associate Vincent Easton. Just as she and Vincent are ab...

short-stories inspiration agatha-christie henrik-ibsen a-dolls-house
 
7 hours later…
Bookworm
Bookworm
08:23
0
Q: What does "Catholic privilege" mean in Pym's Excellent Women?

verboseThe narrator of Barbara Pym's Excellent Women is Mildred Lathburn, a clergyman's daughter in 1950s London. Here, Mildred's Welsh cleaning lady, Mrs. Morris, is complaining half-humorously about the High Anglican tendencies of their vicar, who wears a biretta while preaching: "It isn't like the c...

meaning historical-context religion barbara-pym excellent-women
verbose
verbose
08:34
@Bookworm I vaguely remembered this story from when I was a teenager, so checked out a collection of Christie short stories from the library so I could post it for the ibsen challenge. But I ended up reading the entire collection, and I now have two more Christie questions I need to post in short order, before I have to return the book. Sigh.
verbose
verbose
08:51
I don't even like Christie that much. At some point in my early 20s I realized that I found her plots preposterous and repetitive, and her prose style labored. Like, "X is actually Y pretending to be X!" is a major plot point in so many stories, it's cliché: The Clocks, Dead Man's Folly, Cat among the Pigeons, "Four and Twenty Blackbirds", "Death by Drowning", A Murder is Announced (not one, but two people independently passing themselves off as other people) ....
... so many, they won't even fit in one message. Hercule Poirot's Christmas, Lord Edgware Dies, Murder on the Orient Express (I mean, really), Murder in Mesopotamia, One, Two, Buckle my Shoe, After the Funeral .... that's not even a complete list.
 
3 hours later…
b_jonas
b_jonas
11:52
I was wondering why literature.stackexchange.com/q/17259/139 didn't mention in the question body which novel it is about. But it turns out that Pratchett and Neil Gaiman only have one novel written together, so this would probably look less confusing to someone more familiar with their work.
 
2 hours later…
Peter Shor
Peter Shor
14:03
@b_jonas It seemed to me that adding the name of the novel in the body would improve this question, so I did it. If anybody prefers enigmatic questions, feel free to undo my edit.
Mithical
Mithical
14:36
I do enjoy enigmatic questions, but probably best to keep those over at Puzzling.
b_jonas
b_jonas
15:09
chuckle
Rand al'Thor
Rand al'Thor
15:42
@PeterShor Thanks, and sorry for my originally unintentionally enigmatic phrasing! While you're here, would it be OK with you if I post a question on the main site asking about the inspiration behind your poem "Addicted to Proof"?
Not necessarily expecting an answer or comment from you, of course, maybe just analysis from other users. Your note "On reading this poem, you may believe that you can identify the person who inspired it. However, you are likely to be only partly right—I had more than one person in mind when I wrote it." made me curious. If you'd rather avoid any potential awkwardness from having the names of actual researchers associated with that poem, I understand and I'll keep my own guess(es) to myself.
Rand al'Thor
Rand al'Thor
16:11
@Bookworm HNQ privilege.
Peter Shor
Peter Shor
16:46
@Randal'Thor The person I expected everyone to think of was Sir Michael Atiyah, who was a fantastic mathematician before he got old, but came up with several incorrect proofs (including one of the Riemann hypothesis) in the last few years of his life.
But there was another inspiration, who I won't name. He is a string theorist who did great work when he was younger. However, today, even though he is perfectly coherent when you talk to him, his recent papers all seem to me to be utter nonsense.
Go ahead and post it on the main site. I may not give an answer, but I'd certainly be interested in seeing other people's answers. Maybe this happens more often than i know about.
b_jonas
b_jonas
17:05
"his recent papers all seem to me to be utter nonsense" => to other string theorists, or to normal people?
oh, you said "seem to me"
The text didn't remind me of anyone specific as a whole. But that may be because I'm too young to have met any famous mathematician both when they were a brilliant young mathematician and much later in their advanced years. I've only seen them separately: the brilliant forty year old mathematician; or the interested person with little mathematical ability now but I don't know what they were like when younger.
Rand al'Thor
Rand al'Thor
@PeterShor Thanks! Done.
Bookworm
Bookworm
17:31
0
Q: Who inspired the poem "Addicted to Proof"?

Rand al'ThorOne of Peter Shor's poems was published in The Mathematical Intelligencer. It's called "Addicted to Proof" and it's a short (16-line) poem about a mathematician who won the Abel Prize aged 40 for a result in number theory but now gets laughed at by his colleagues for claiming he's proved the Gold...

poetry inspiration peter-shor

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