Last Sunday evening -- instead of watching Super Bowl LI -- in a crowded theater in downtown Silver Spring I watched the recently-released documentary "I Am Not Your Negro," narrated using words of writer James Baldwin (1924-1986). Baldwin was a contrarian, he avoided or contradicted labels and categories.
One of my favorite quotes -- that I see as intimately related to discovery in mathematics (from Hungarian-American Nobelist, Albert Szent-Gyorgyi (1893-1986)) -- applies also to Baldwin:
Discovery is seeing
what everybody else has seen, and thinking
what nobody else has thought.
And here, from Jimmy's Blues & Other Poems (Beacon Press, 2014) is Baldwin's little poem "Imagination" which captures the same sort of mind-play that occurs with mathematics.
Showing posts with label James Baldwin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label James Baldwin. Show all posts
Thursday, February 9, 2017
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