[FRIAM] The danger of a single story

[Jon Zingale]

"""
The fact that such distance (euclidean as well as non-euclidean as well
as network) is a heuristic for "otherness" seems very much implicit in
life itself, most familiarly among visual creatures, less so for audio,
and even less so for chemical (smell/taste) and least for tactile (if I
am not touching it, it doesn't exist?).
"""

I wonder about the price paid for privileging sight. Trivedi recounts
an observation of Sossinsky[☍]:

“It is not surprising at all that almost all blind mathematicians are
geometers. The spatial intuition that sighted people have is based on
the image of the world that is projected on their retinas; thus it is a
two (and not three) dimensional image that is analysed in the brain of
a sighted person. A blind person’s spatial intuition, on the other hand,
is primarily the result of tile and operational experience. It is also
deeper – in the literal as well as the metaphorical sense.

recent biomathematical studies have shown that the deepest mathematical
structures, such as topological structures, are innate, whereas finer
structures, such as linear structures are acquired. Thus, at first, the
blind person who regains his sight does not distinguish a square from a
circle: He only sees their topological equivalence. In contrast, he
immediately sees that a torus is not a sphere”

Which dovetails nicely with my mathematical goal of the day to think
about p-adic metrics, a subject where *visual* habits seem to get in my
way or otherwise lead my intuitions astray[p, p²]. P-adic considerations
lead to formal koans like:

"Every point in an open ball is a centre of the ball."

[☍] https://onionesquereality.wordpress.com/2011/07/31/blind-geometers/
[p]
https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/2225905/interpretation-of-open-balls-with-the-p-adic-metric
[p²] https://www.math.uh.edu/~haynes/files/topgps5.pdf
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