As if summoned from the void (nitin's new blog)

[marcus]

http://commeappeleduneant.blogspot.com/

nitin has an exceptionally fine blog style IMO, or style of thinking
in proximity to his blog

judging from just two entries.

it is very new, and called in French Comme appelé du néanthe has a bit about Phil Anderson (condensed matter Nobelist) and a piece Anderson wrote for (London) Times Higher Education Supplement of 25 August.
this issue of THES is apparently interesting for several reasons,
there'v been several discussions of stuff in it.

another thing, nitin is something of a riddle himself. I think he has been posting here.
He says he just finished undergrad Physics in Australia and is bound for grad school, maybe in U.S.

he says that his MOTHER TONGUE is exclusively a spoken language----as if, for example, it were Maori but probably isn't that.
he says that as a beginning freshman at Melbourne or some other Oz U, the language he was thinking in was French.

(as a new Freshman, he accidentally encountered a paper of Grothendieck and tried to read some, believing that since he was fluent in French he would have no trouble)

 

[nitin]

Hi Marcus

Thank you for mentioning my indeed very new blog here! I'm glad you find it good, because I was, and still am, not sure whether it will become something of interest. I am a bit busier than normal these days, but I will make every possible effort to put up what could be interesting things. Well, time will tell. One has to live a life to live one's passions.

My homeland is a french-speaking country (and also part of the Commonwealth), because of its colonial history. It's Mauritius, a small island in the Indian Ocean. People here mainly the mother tongue of course (the so-called Mauritian Creole), French and English. Many speak oriental languages like Hindi (which I used to speak and write for 12 or so years, but then I lost touch with it once I dropped it in high school), Tamil, Telegu, Mandarin. Mauritian creole is, as you wrote, an exclusively spoken language, though some people here are coming up with reasons to formalise it into one that could also be written. I don't think this is a promising enterprise. I'm sure you can find more about the country on google.

So I guess from now, I'm less of "something of a riddle".
If you want to know more about me, well I think google could be helpful. There are not so many Nitin from my country who do physics and studied at Melbourne University.

Oh, I didn't write anything about me thinking in French in my freshman year! lol. Far from it.. I don't think it's easy for me to think about mathematics in French, for the simple reason that I have been instructed in the sciences in English. However, I still read some popular science in French, which has a bit of a different taste I must say. The anecdote only shows the somehow pretentious and specially naive me who was challenged by a friend to understand maths in French, simply because I told him it would be hard for me. One tough thing for me when I first landed in Melbourne, was to speak English fluently, and believe me, most of the time I was translating like mad from French to English in my head in any conversation (except technical ones, like Maths and Physics).

That's pretty much all I wanted to say about these things, and this is a lot! lol.

Again, thanks for the publicity!


Nitin

 

[marcus]

Comme appelé du néant
is a haunting phrase

thanks for pointing us to the Allyn Jackson article that begins with this quote from G's "Reaping and Sowing"

Et toute science, quand nous l’entendons non comme un instrument de pouvoir et de domination, mais comme aventure de connaissance de notre espèce à travers les âges, n’est autre chose que cette harmonie, plus ou moins vaste et plus ou moins riche d’une époque à l’autre, qui se déploie au cours des générations et des siècles, par le délicat contrepoint de tous les thèmes apparus tour à tour, comme appelés du néant.

 

[rbj]

nitin,

can you please change the quoted text from the ultra-light "gray" to something darker? perhaps a form of blue or just a darker gray. i can hardly read it. (maybe my 50 year old eyes are turning into crap.)

 

[nitin]

Have a go now r b-j ; )