<div dir="ltr"><div dir="ltr"><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif">I read the e-mail, was excited, and have followed up. Thank you Nick.</div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif"><br></div><div class="gmail_default" style="font-family:verdana,sans-serif">FRIAM may be interested to know that our Center for Emergent Diplomacy has pulled together a group of Complexity scientists to meet with high-level guests in Stockholm in early December. The purpose of the Colloquium is to share experiences and ideas that can lead to scalable action as we navigate the global climate impacts that are already upon us. The question directed at us from colleagues in Sweden that led to this event was: Can the new science of Complex Adaptive Systems help generate ideas and solutions to address climate catastrophe and the Sixth Extinction? Participants include Stu Kauffman, Stephen Guerin and Steve Smith, Arthur Dahl, Gary Metcalf and others.</div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Wed, Nov 6, 2019 at 12:27 PM Nick Thompson <<a href="mailto:nickthompson@earthlink.net">nickthompson@earthlink.net</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left-width:1px;border-left-style:solid;border-left-color:rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div lang="EN-US"><div class="gmail-m_-273555314225083505WordSection1"><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(31,73,125)">Hi, Frank, <u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(31,73,125)"><u></u> <u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(31,73,125)">Last Thursday, in order to stir up a conversation amongst the mathematicians and the humanists, I forwarded the attached to the FRIAM list. It is a book about the intellectual/emotional relationship between the two siblings, the mathematician Andre Weil, and his sister Simone. When I got home, I realized that absolutely nobody had mentioned it. Now, the experience of being ignored is not ENTIRELY unfamiliar to me, but I did begin to wonder if the message had never gone out on the list. So, if you don\u2019t get this from the list, but only directly, could you forward it on to the list? You might want to edit a bit, first, to take out some of the nesting. <u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(31,73,125)"><u></u> <u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(31,73,125)">Oh, and \u2026 don\u2019t forget to read it yourself. You were one of the people I had in mind when I wrote it. <u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(31,73,125)"><u></u> <u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(31,73,125)">Nick <u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(31,73,125)"><u></u> <u></u></span></p><div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(31,73,125)">Nicholas S. Thompson<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(31,73,125)">Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(31,73,125)">Clark University<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(31,73,125)"><a href="http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/" target="_blank"><span style="color:rgb(5,99,193)">http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/</span></a><u></u><u></u></span></p></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color:rgb(31,73,125)"><u></u> <u></u></span></p><div><div style="border-style:solid none none;border-top-width:1pt;border-top-color:rgb(225,225,225);padding:3pt 0in 0in"><p class="MsoNormal"><b>From:</b> Nick Thompson [mailto:<a href="mailto:nickthompson@earthlink.net" target="_blank">nickthompson@earthlink.net</a>] <br><b>Sent:</b> Thursday, October 31, 2019 3:21 PM<br><b>To:</b> Friam (<a href="mailto:Friam@redfish.com" target="_blank">Friam@redfish.com</a>) <<a href="mailto:Friam@redfish.com" target="_blank">Friam@redfish.com</a>><br><b>Cc:</b> 'Jon Zingale' <<a href="mailto:jonzingale@gmail.com" target="_blank">jonzingale@gmail.com</a>><br><b>Subject:</b> Document8<u></u><u></u></p></div></div><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal">Dear Phellow Phriammers, <u></u><u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal">So I have been reading, Olsson, K. <i><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Weil-Conjectures-Math-Pursuit/dp/0374287619" target="_blank">The Weil Conjectures</a>: On the pursuit of math and the unknown.</i> New York, NY Farrar Straus Giroux. 2019. Not only does the book evoke the chasm that mathematical genius excavates around itself, but it also has many interesting meditations on conjecture, metaphor, and scientific creativity generally. I keyed in some passages, attached them, and will copy them in below <u></u><u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal">Love to hear some comments tomorrow. Also, I am hoping for a continuation of our discussion of Darwin\u2019s Origin as a metaphor. <u></u><u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal">Nick <u></u><u></u></p><div class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><span style="color:rgb(31,73,125)"><hr size="2" width="100%" align="center"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><span style="color:rgb(31,73,125)"><hr size="2" width="100%" align="center"></span></div><p class="MsoNormal">Selections From, Olsson, K. <i>The Weil Conjectures: On the pursuit of math and the unknown.</i> New York, NY Farrar Straus Giroux. 2019. <u></u><u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p><div class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><span style="color:rgb(31,73,125)"><hr size="2" width="100%" align="center"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><span style="color:rgb(31,73,125)"><hr size="2" width="100%" align="center"></span></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12pt">PP 41-2<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12pt"><u></u> <u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12pt"> The word conjecture derives from a root notion of throwing or casting things together, and over the centuries it has referred to prophecies as well as to reasoned judgments, tentative conclusions, whole-cloth inventions, and wild guesses. \u201cSince I have mingled celestial physics with astronomy in this work, no one should be surprised at a certain amount of conjecture,\u201d wrote Johannes Kepler in <i>his Astronomia </i>Nova of 1609.\u201dThis is the nature of physics, of medicine, and all the sciences which make use of other axioms beside the most certain evidence of the eyes.\u201d Here conjecture allows him to press past the visible, to sacrifice the certainty of witnessing for the depth and predictive power of theory. There\u2019s another definition of conjecture that means something inferred from signs or omens (for example, from a Renaissance work on occult philosophy: \u201cWhence did Melampus, the Augur, conjecture at the slaughter of the Greeks by the flight of little birds\u2026\u201d).<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12pt"> <u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12pt"> Elsewhere it\u2019s hokum, claptrap, bull: \u201cConjecture, which is only a feeble supposition, counterfeits faith; as a flatterer counterfeits a friend, and the wolf the dog\u201d wrote one early Christian theologian. So it\u2019s a word with contradictory meanings since at times conjecture carries the weight of reasoning behind it, and at other times it\u2019s a wild statement, an unfounded claim. Good thinking or bad, clever speculation or a reckless mental leap. <u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12pt"> <u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12pt"> In contemporary mathematics, conjectures present blue-prints for theorems, ideas that have taken on weight but haven\u2019t been proved. Couched in the conditional, they establish a provisional communication between what can be firmly established and might turn out to be the case. More than a guess, conjecture in this sense is a reasoned wager about what\u2019s true. <u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12pt"><u></u> <u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12pt"> A rough draft. A trial balloon. It seems to me laced with optimism, a bullishness about what could, in the future, come more fully to sight. <u></u><u></u></span></p><div class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><span style="font-size:12pt;color:rgb(31,73,125)"><hr size="2" width="100%" align="center"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><span style="font-size:12pt;color:rgb(31,73,125)"><hr size="2" width="100%" align="center"></span></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12pt">P 54<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12pt"> Strategies for tackling problems, from Polya\u2019s <i>How to Solve it</i>: Do you know a related problem. Look at the unknown! Here is a problem related to yours and solved before. Could you use it? <u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12pt"> But what about the problem of too many related problems? My weakness for juxtaposition: I\u2019ll sense that one thing might be illuminated by another thing and go chasing the other thing. \u2026For better or worse, a light paranoia goads me along. Maybe it\u2019s all connected! This and this and this and \u2013 look, over there \u2013 that. There\u2019s the bringing together of disparate elements that informs a conjecture, and then there\u2019s the mental nausea brought on by the fact that there\u2019s too much out there to know. Not grasping but googling. I can\u2019t always tell one from the other. <u></u><u></u></span></p><div class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><span style="font-size:12pt;color:rgb(31,73,125)"><hr size="2" width="100%" align="center"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><span style="font-size:12pt;color:rgb(31,73,125)"><hr size="2" width="100%" align="center"></span></div><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12pt">Pp 95-6<u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12pt"><u></u> <u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12pt"> At last Andre goes on the offensive,, that is to say, he answers Simone\u2019s repeated requests with a long, technical description of some of this mathematical work, a treatise in the form of a letter. \u2026He knows full well that she won\u2019t understand these \u2018thoughts\u201d, as he calls the: \u201c I decided to write them down, even if for the most part they are incomprehensible to you. He plunges into a density of terms shouldn\u2019t know, with only minimal efforts to say what he means by quadratic residues, nth roots of unity, extension fields, elliptical functions. <u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12pt">In the first have of his letter he sketches a historical context for his work, starting with the 109<sup>th</sup> century watershed in algebra, that leap by which mathematicians inverted the problem of solving equations within given domains by construing domains in which given equations had solutions. He alludes to a time when questions about numbers began to rub up against questions about equations or functions in new ways. \u201cAround 1820, mathematicians (Gauss, Abel, Galois, Jacobi) permitted themselves, with anguish and delight, to be guided by the analogy between the division of the circle \u2026 and the division of elliptical functions,\u201d he writes. <u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12pt"> <u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12pt"> Anguish and delight! As he\u2019s laying out his none too explanatory explanation of his research, Andre emphasizes the role of analogy in mathematics\u2014which his sister might appreciate even if the rest of it flies right over her head. Here, analogy is not merely cerebral. The hunch of a connection between two different theories is something felt, a shiver of intuition. For as long as the connection is suspected but not entirely clear, the two theories engage in a kind of passionate courtship, characterized by \u201ctheir conflicts and their delicious reciprocal reflections, their furtive caresses, their inexplicable quarrels,\u201d he writes. \u201cNothing is more fecund than these slightly adulterous relationships.\u201d <u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12pt"><u></u> <u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12pt"> Analogy becomes a version of <i>eros</i>, a glimpse that sparks desire. \u201cIntuition makes much of it; I mean by this the faculty of seeing a connection between things that in appearance are completely different; it does not fail to lead us astray quite often.\u201d This, of course, describes more than mathematics; it expresses an aspect of thinking itself -- how creative thought rests on the making of unlikely connections. The flash of insight, how often it leads us off course, and still we chase after it. <u></u><u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12pt"><u></u> <u></u></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size:12pt">`<u></u><u></u></span></p><div class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><span style="font-size:12pt;color:rgb(31,73,125)"><hr size="2" width="100%" align="center"></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" align="center" style="text-align:center"><span style="font-size:12pt;color:rgb(31,73,125)"><hr size="2" width="100%" align="center"></span></div><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p><p class="MsoNormal"><u></u> <u></u></p></div></div>============================================================<br>
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</blockquote></div><br clear="all"><div><br></div>-- <br><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div><div dir="ltr"><div>Merle Lefkoff, Ph.D.<br>Center for Emergent Diplomacy<br><a href="http://emergentdiplomacy.org" target="_blank">emergentdiplomacy.org</a></div><div>Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA</div><div></div><div><a href="mailto:merlelefoff@gmail.com" target="_blank">merlelefkoff@gmail.com</a><br>mobile: (303) 859-5609<br>skype: merle.lelfkoff2<br></div><div>twitter: @Merle_Lefkoff<br></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div></div>