Echoes

[stoutfellow]

I've begun reading George Stewart's _Storm_. So far, it seems to have the same characteristics as _Earth Abides_, a mix of (informative!) didacticism with solid human interest. The passage I just read had a pleasing multidirectional allusion. A meteorologist, analyzing data (with hand-annotated map and slide rule) that point to the just-emerging storm, recalls the relevant equations, and Stewart comments "To a well-trained mathematical meteorologist, they were more beautiful than Grecian urns." Of course, that's a reference to Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn" ("Beauty is truth, truth beauty - that is all ye know on Earth, and all ye need to know"), but it also called Edna St. Vincent Millay to my mind ("Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare. Fortunate they Who, though once only and then but far away, Have heard her massive sandal set on stone.").

I was going to say a few words about the aesthetics of mathematics, but Edna has done that job better than I could.