Bookish Miscellany
May. 11th, 2007 10:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stoutfellow1. This morning, after something like fourteen months, I finally finished reading Rahman and Schmeisser's Analytic Theory of Polynomials. Close to seven hundred pages of dense mathematics, in an area I wasn't familiar with - heck, I didn't even know that branch of mathematics existed until a couple of years ago - read in snatches on the bus to and from work, interrupted frequently by the need to backtrack, to do some pen-and-paper calculations, or just to reread the same paragraph four or five times until I was convinced it was correct... DONE! Fascinating stuff, although it's not something I'd want to research myself.
2. I'm currently reading Sen. Obama's memoir, Dreams from My Father, and have been struck by a couple of coincidences. Sometime in the mid-to-late sixties - Obama is rarely specific as to dates, and they have to be inferred from circumstances - he attended Punahou Academy in Hawaii. As it happens, I spent a year at Punahou, six or seven years earlier... Also, it appears that he was working as a community activist in Chicago at about the same time that I was working on my PhD there. There's nothing significant about either of those facts, of course, but it always feels odd to run into things like this.
3. I'm also reading Alex Marshall's Beneath the Metropolis: The Secret Lives of Cities, an account of the things - ruins, catacombs, and infrastructure - that underlie some of the world's great cities. It looks interesting so far, but I was struck by one passage:
2. I'm currently reading Sen. Obama's memoir, Dreams from My Father, and have been struck by a couple of coincidences. Sometime in the mid-to-late sixties - Obama is rarely specific as to dates, and they have to be inferred from circumstances - he attended Punahou Academy in Hawaii. As it happens, I spent a year at Punahou, six or seven years earlier... Also, it appears that he was working as a community activist in Chicago at about the same time that I was working on my PhD there. There's nothing significant about either of those facts, of course, but it always feels odd to run into things like this.
3. I'm also reading Alex Marshall's Beneath the Metropolis: The Secret Lives of Cities, an account of the things - ruins, catacombs, and infrastructure - that underlie some of the world's great cities. It looks interesting so far, but I was struck by one passage:
New York's first skyscraper district arose in downtown Manhattan adjacent to the historic harbor, where ships docked from all over the world, and near the site of the present World Trade Center, where an early train station was located.The publication date is 2006...
