Tackling Great Big Ideas: Anatomy of the Blurb
(Math + Nora) ÷ Lydia
The back of each card contains a doodle and a blurb. The doodle takes up space so the blurb has to be tight. Around 65 to 85 words tight.
There isn’t room for flimflam. (Though the flimflam is funny.) With so little space, and so much to say, there was only one place to turn: Lydia Davis. Her story In a House Besieged is 65 words. They Take Turns Using a Word They Like — one of my favorites — is 11.
She is a genius. There is no better person to try (and fail and try and fail) to copy.
Explaining the monster group was the first time I had a legitimate crisis. The guiding mission of these cards is to write them in a way that is accessible to everyone, regardless of math experience. A principle I won’t compromise on. Of group theory, mathematician Cassius Keyser wrote that he could not, in one hour, “give you anything like an extensive knowledge of it, nor facility in its technique, nor a sense of its intricacy and proportions…” Oh great!
Still, Cassius Keyser was helpful. And James R. Newman. And Erica Klarreich, who wrote this great big wonderful piece. See also Columbia math professor Peter Woit, who writes the brilliant Not Even Wrong blog (named after the beyond brilliant Not Even Wrong book). But groups are still gnarly to weed wack.
Back to Lydia. And really, why bother being consistent with tense? Since I can’t hypnotize us both and somehow telepathically borrow her brain, the next best thing is her green book Essays One which contains invaluable glimpses into her brain like Revising One Sentence and Commentary on One Very Short Story (“In a House Besieged”). These pieces are, thank God, more than 10 words long.
Anyway this was all still hard. But I started to gather ideas from here, quotes from there, and foof them like a floral arrangement around mathematical anchors (invariants, groups, transformations, the boy genius Évariste Galois) that I definitely wanted to include.
The missing item is Nora, of course. The late Nora Ephron. One of the greatest sentence writers of all time and my flimflam idol. For this card, I think this sacred ingredient is still missing. Though Nora did say this:
“I can’t stand writers who quote people saying very mundane lines like “I was born in 1934.” You read something like that and wonder to yourself why did he quote that, it doesn’t take you anywhere or show you anything the writer couldn’t have done himself in a more interesting way.”
So maybe I am halfway there. A mathematician saying “stupid duel” is funny.
Which makes this a working blurb. It comes in at 82 words. Is Hermann Weyl important? I think so. Weyl, a mathematician, wrote a groundbreaking physics book that was so math-y physicists struggled to understand it. (Apparently Wolfgang Pauli called the whole field die Gruppenpest — the plague of group theory.)
A potential swap for Hermann Weyl is the aforementioned mathematician Cassius Keyser. There’s a question that haunted him “a good deal from time to time in recent years” and which he’s “not yet prepared to answer confidently.” Is mind a group? This finite mind group would include abstract things like feeling, believing, seeing, tasting, hoping, etc.
That is interesting right? It’s also 17 words.
Anyway here’s the working blurb:
Group was first used in a math sense by 20-year old Évariste Galois “the night before he was killed in a stupid duel.” Groups are collections of things — numbers, shapes, sounds — that meet a few crucial conditions. They can be finite or infinite. (Infinite, or Lie (LEE) groups, are a big part of quantum mechanics.) You can transform groups and see what changes. But what’s more interesting is what doesn’t (the invariants). The monster is a very very* big group!
Let’s hydraulic press this all into one blurb!
*808,017,424,794,512,875,886,459,904,961,710,757,005,754,368,000,000,000