The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199715165
Total Pages : 213 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (997 download)

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Book Synopsis The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel by : William Goldbloom Bloch

Download or read book The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel written by William Goldbloom Bloch and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-08-25 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Library of Babel" is arguably Jorge Luis Borges' best known story--memorialized along with Borges on an Argentine postage stamp. Now, in The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel, William Goldbloom Bloch takes readers on a fascinating tour of the mathematical ideas hidden within one of the classic works of modern literature. Written in the vein of Douglas R. Hofstadter's Pulitzer Prize-winning Gödel, Escher, Bach, this original and imaginative book sheds light on one of Borges' most complex, richly layered works. Bloch begins each chapter with a mathematical idea--combinatorics, topology, geometry, information theory--followed by examples and illustrations that put flesh on the theoretical bones. In this way, he provides many fascinating insights into Borges' Library. He explains, for instance, a straightforward way to calculate how many books are in the Library--an easily notated but literally unimaginable number--and also shows that, if each book were the size of a grain of sand, the entire universe could only hold a fraction of the books in the Library. Indeed, if each book were the size of a proton, our universe would still not be big enough to hold anywhere near all the books. Given Borges' well-known affection for mathematics, this exploration of the story through the eyes of a humanistic mathematician makes a unique and important contribution to the body of Borgesian criticism. Bloch not only illuminates one of the great short stories of modern literature but also exposes the reader--including those more inclined to the literary world--to many intriguing and entrancing mathematical ideas.

The Library of Babel

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9789333185875
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (858 download)

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Book Synopsis The Library of Babel by : Jorge Luis Borges

Download or read book The Library of Babel written by Jorge Luis Borges and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Tar for Mortar

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Publisher : punctum books
ISBN 13 : 1947447505
Total Pages : 110 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (474 download)

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Book Synopsis Tar for Mortar by : Jonathan Basile

Download or read book Tar for Mortar written by Jonathan Basile and published by punctum books. This book was released on 2018 with total page 110 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: TAR FOR MORTAR offers an in-depth exploration of one of literature's greatest tricksters, Jorge Luis Borges. His short story "The Library of Babel" is a signature examplar of this playfulness, though not merely for the inverted world it imagines, where a library thought to contain all possible permutations of all letters and words and books is plumbed by pious librarians looking for divinely pre-fabricated truths. One must grapple as well with the irony of Borges's narration, which undermines at every turn its narrator's claims of the library's universality, including the very possibility of exhausting meaning through combinatory processing. Borges directed readers to his non-fiction to discover the true author of the idea of the universal library. But his supposedly historical essays are notoriously riddled with false references and self-contradictions. Whether in truth or in fiction, Borges never reaches a stable conclusion about the atomic premises of the universal library - is it possible to find a character set capable of expressing all possible meaning, or do these letters, like his stories and essays, divide from themselves in a restless incompletion? While many readers of Borges see him as presaging our digital technologies, they often give too much credit to our inventions in doing so. Those who elide the necessary incompletion of the Library of Babel compare it to the Internet on the assumption that both are total archives of all possible thought and expression. Though Borges's imaginings lend themselves to digital creativity (libraryofbabel.info is certainly evidence of this), they do so by showing the necessary incompleteness of every totalizing project, no matter how technologically refined. Ultimately, Basile nudges readers toward the idea that a fictional/imaginary exposition can hold a certain power over technology.

Borges and Mathematics

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781612492520
Total Pages : 140 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (925 download)

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Book Synopsis Borges and Mathematics by : Guillermo Martínez

Download or read book Borges and Mathematics written by Guillermo Martínez and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Borges and Mathematics is a short book of essays that explores the scientific thinking of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986). Around half of the book consists of two "lectures" focused on mathematics. The rest of the book reflects on the relationship between literature, artistic creation, physics, and mathematics more generally. Written in a way that will be accessible even to those "who can only count to ten," the book presents a bravura demonstration of the intricate links between the worlds of sciences and arts, and it is a thought-provoking call to dialog for readers from both traditions. The author, Guillermo Mart nez, is both a recognized writer, whose murder mystery The Oxford Murders has been translated into thirty-five languages, and a PhD in mathematics. Contents: Borges and Mathematics: First Lecture; Borges and Mathematics: Second Lecture; The Golem and Artificial Intelligence; The Short Story as Logical System; A Margin Too Narrow; Euclid, or the Aesthetics of Mathematical Reasoning; Solutions and Disillusions; The Pythagorean Twins; The Music of Chance (Interview with Gregory Chaikin); Literature and Rationality; Who's Afraid of the Big Bad One?; A Small, Small God; God's Sinkhole. This book was originally published in Spanish as Borges y la matem tica (2003). It has been translated with generous support from the Latino Cultural Center at Purdue University.

The Book of Sand

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780140180251
Total Pages : 186 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (82 download)

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Book Synopsis The Book of Sand by : Jorge Luis Borges

Download or read book The Book of Sand written by Jorge Luis Borges and published by . This book was released on 1979 with total page 186 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes the stories The Congress, Undr, The Mirror and the Mask, August 25, 1983, Blue Tigers, The Rose of Paracelsus and Shakespeare's Memory.

Beautiful, Simple, Exact, Crazy

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Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300190891
Total Pages : 480 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (1 download)

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Book Synopsis Beautiful, Simple, Exact, Crazy by : Apoorva Khare

Download or read book Beautiful, Simple, Exact, Crazy written by Apoorva Khare and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2015-08-25 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this vibrant work, which is ideal for both teaching and learning, Apoorva Khare and Anna Lachowska explain the mathematics essential for understanding and appreciating our quantitative world. They show with examples that mathematics is a key tool in the creation and appreciation of art, music, and literature, not just science and technology. The book covers basic mathematical topics from logarithms to statistics, but the authors eschew mundane finance and probability problems. Instead, they explain how modular arithmetic helps keep our online transactions safe, how logarithms justify the twelve-tone scale commonly used in music, and how transmissions by deep space probes are similar to knights serving as messengers for their traveling prince. Ideal for coursework in introductory mathematics and requiring no knowledge of calculus, Khare and Lachowska's enlightening mathematics tour will appeal to a wide audience.

A Short Stay in Hell

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780983748441
Total Pages : 104 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (484 download)

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Book Synopsis A Short Stay in Hell by : Steven L. Peck

Download or read book A Short Stay in Hell written by Steven L. Peck and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A damned man struggles to find meaning in a library, the dimensions of which are measured in light years.

The Googlization of Everything

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Publisher : Univ of California Press
ISBN 13 : 0520952456
Total Pages : 281 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (29 download)

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Book Synopsis The Googlization of Everything by : Siva Vaidhyanathan

Download or read book The Googlization of Everything written by Siva Vaidhyanathan and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2012-03-13 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the beginning, the World Wide Web was exciting and open to the point of anarchy, a vast and intimidating repository of unindexed confusion. Into this creative chaos came Google with its dazzling mission—"To organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible"—and its much-quoted motto, "Don’t be evil." In this provocative book, Siva Vaidhyanathan examines the ways we have used and embraced Google—and the growing resistance to its expansion across the globe. He exposes the dark side of our Google fantasies, raising red flags about issues of intellectual property and the much-touted Google Book Search. He assesses Google’s global impact, particularly in China, and explains the insidious effect of Googlization on the way we think. Finally, Vaidhyanathan proposes the construction of an Internet ecosystem designed to benefit the whole world and keep one brilliant and powerful company from falling into the "evil" it pledged to avoid.

Out Of Control

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Publisher : Basic Books
ISBN 13 : 078674703X
Total Pages : 528 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (867 download)

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Book Synopsis Out Of Control by : Kevin Kelly

Download or read book Out Of Control written by Kevin Kelly and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2009-04-30 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Out of Control chronicles the dawn of a new era in which the machines and systems that drive our economy are so complex and autonomous as to be indistinguishable from living things.

The Information

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Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307379574
Total Pages : 400 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (73 download)

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Book Synopsis The Information by : James Gleick

Download or read book The Information written by James Gleick and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-03-01 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the bestselling author of the acclaimed Chaos and Genius comes a thoughtful and provocative exploration of the big ideas of the modern era: Information, communication, and information theory. Acclaimed science writer James Gleick presents an eye-opening vision of how our relationship to information has transformed the very nature of human consciousness. A fascinating intellectual journey through the history of communication and information, from the language of Africa’s talking drums to the invention of written alphabets; from the electronic transmission of code to the origins of information theory, into the new information age and the current deluge of news, tweets, images, and blogs. Along the way, Gleick profiles key innovators, including Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Samuel Morse, and Claude Shannon, and reveals how our understanding of information is transforming not only how we look at the world, but how we live. A New York Times Notable Book A Los Angeles Times and Cleveland Plain Dealer Best Book of the Year Winner of the PEN/E. O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award

Rhythms of the Brain

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Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 019804125X
Total Pages : 466 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (98 download)

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Book Synopsis Rhythms of the Brain by : Gyorgy Buzsaki

Download or read book Rhythms of the Brain written by Gyorgy Buzsaki and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2006-08-03 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides eloquent support for the idea that spontaneous neuron activity, far from being mere noise, is actually the source of our cognitive abilities. In a sequence of "cycles," György Buzsáki guides the reader from the physics of oscillations through neuronal assembly organization to complex cognitive processing and memory storage. His clear, fluid writing-accessible to any reader with some scientific knowledge-is supplemented by extensive footnotes and references that make it just as gratifying and instructive a read for the specialist. The coherent view of a single author who has been at the forefront of research in this exciting field, this volume is essential reading for anyone interested in our rapidly evolving understanding of the brain.

Lost Libraries

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Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 0230524257
Total Pages : 308 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (35 download)

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Book Synopsis Lost Libraries by : J. Raven

Download or read book Lost Libraries written by J. Raven and published by Springer. This book was released on 2004-01-31 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This pioneering volume of essays explores the destruction of great libraries since ancient times and examines the intellectual, political and cultural consequences of loss. Fourteen original contributions, introduced by a major re-evaluative history of lost libraries, offer the first ever comparative discussion of the greatest catastrophes in book history from Mesopotamia and Alexandria to the dispersal of monastic and monarchical book collections, the Nazi destruction of Jewish libraries, and the recent horrifying pillage and burning of books in Tibet, Bosnia and Iraq.

The Total Art of Stalinism

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Publisher : Verso Books
ISBN 13 : 1844678091
Total Pages : 145 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (446 download)

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Book Synopsis The Total Art of Stalinism by : Boris Groys

Download or read book The Total Art of Stalinism written by Boris Groys and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2014-05-27 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the ruins of communism, Boris Groys emerges to provoke our interest in the aesthetic goals pursued with such catastrophic consequences by its founders. Interpreting totalitarian art and literature in the context of cultural history, this brilliant essay likens totalitarian aims to the modernists’ goal of producing world-transformative art. In this new edition, Groys revisits the debate that the book has stimulated since its first publication.

Indra's Pearls

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Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780521352536
Total Pages : 422 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (525 download)

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Book Synopsis Indra's Pearls by : David Mumford

Download or read book Indra's Pearls written by David Mumford and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2002-04-25 with total page 422 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Felix Klein, one of the great nineteenth-century geometers, rediscovered in mathematics an idea from Eastern philosophy: the heaven of Indra contained a net of pearls, each of which was reflected in its neighbour, so that the whole Universe was mirrored in each pearl. Klein studied infinitely repeated reflections and was led to forms with multiple co-existing symmetries. For a century these ideas barely existed outside the imagination of mathematicians. However in the 1980s the authors embarked on the first computer exploration of Klein's vision, and in doing so found many further extraordinary images. Join the authors on the path from basic mathematical ideas to the simple algorithms that create the delicate fractal filigrees, most of which have never appeared in print before. Beginners can follow the step-by-step instructions for writing programs that generate the images. Others can see how the images relate to ideas at the forefront of research.

The Clock Mirage

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Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 0300252420
Total Pages : 269 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (2 download)

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Book Synopsis The Clock Mirage by : Joseph Mazur

Download or read book The Clock Mirage written by Joseph Mazur and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2020-04-14 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A tour of clocks throughout the centuries—from the sandglass to the telomere—to reveal the physical, biological, and social nature of time What is time? This question has fascinated philosophers, mathematicians, and scientists for thousands of years. Why does time seem to speed up with age? What is its connection with memory, anticipation, and sleep cycles? Award-winning author and mathematician Joseph Mazur provides an engaging exploration of how the understanding of time has evolved throughout human history and offers a compelling new vision, submitting that time lives within us. Our cells, he notes, have a temporal awareness, guided by environmental cues in sync with patterns of social interaction. Readers learn that, as a consequence of time’s personal nature, a forty-eight-hour journey on the Space Shuttle can feel shorter than a six-hour trip on the Soyuz capsule, that the Amondawa of the Amazon do not have ages, and that time speeds up with fever and slows down when we feel in danger. With a narrative punctuated by personal stories of time’s effects on truck drivers, Olympic racers, prisoners, and clockmakers, Mazur’s journey is filled with fascinating insights into how our technologies, our bodies, and our attitudes can change our perceptions. Ultimately, time reveals itself as something that rides on the rhythms of our minds. The Clock Mirage presents an innovative perspective that will force us to rethink our relationship with time, and how best to use it.

Our Cosmic Origins

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Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780521794800
Total Pages : 346 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (948 download)

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Book Synopsis Our Cosmic Origins by : A. H. Delsemme

Download or read book Our Cosmic Origins written by A. H. Delsemme and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This 1998 book examines the remarkable story of the emergence of life and intelligence through the complex evolutionary history of the Universe.

With Borges

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Publisher : Telegram Books
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 84 pages
Book Rating : 4.F/5 ( download)

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Book Synopsis With Borges by : Alberto Manguel

Download or read book With Borges written by Alberto Manguel and published by Telegram Books. This book was released on 2006 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In Buenos Aires, 1964, a blind writer approaches a sixteen-year-old bookstore clerk asking if he would be interested in a part-time job reading aloud." "The writer was Jorge Luis Borges, one of the world's finest literary minds; the boy was Alberto Manguel, who was later to become an internationally acclaimed author and bibliophile." "The young Manguel spent several years reading aloud and transcribing for the enigmatic Borges. Here he recalls this time with integrity and warmth, offering us an intimate and moving portrait of one of the great literary luminaries."--BOOK JACKET.