Book Review-The Geography of Genius By Eric Weiner

 I became aware of this book when I was reading a list of  Bill Walton’s favorite books after his passing, this title popped off the page. I have been reading and learning about genius and its place in our culture recently and this title had a unique spin on the idea of genius, and what idea means in human consciousness. The idea that a place, at a given time, can play a role in creating a hothouse for original thinkers that nurtures an environment that is conducive to growing creativity seemed intriguing to me.

I had previously read and enjoyed  Sparks of Genius: The Thirteen Thinking Tools of the World's Most Creative People by Robert S. Root-Bernstein (Author), and Michele M. Root-Bernstein. https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2022/01/book-review-sparks-of-genius-by-robert.html Which delved into the kind thinking tools that are employed by creative people as well as the changes in perspective these people employ to open their imagination. I used that reading experience as preparation in anticipation of this reading experience. The central topics are different for the two books, as this book is focused on the seven cities/locations had experienced a golden age of creativity and innovative thinking, writ large as the author had identified: Athens, Hangzhou, Florence, Edinburgh, Calcutta, Vienna, and Silicon Valley. Vienna had two chapters devoted to it as the golden ages happened at different times and the Viennese golden ages were focused on different areas of genius. The order of the cities roughly follows chronological order.

The author travelled to these cities, stayed there for an extended period of time, met and interviewed people in those cities who are knowledgeable about the histories of the cities as well as the people who created those golden ages. Since the author is a travel writer, his descriptions of the visits to these cities play a key role in his narrative and are a major source of reading enjoyment. His sense of how to document history as well as his ability to spin a yarn all contributed to a most entertaining narrative.

The most important part of the very enjoyable narrative is the author’s ability to stay with the main theme of his mission, which is to find out what qualities each of these cities had that made their golden age possible, the salient reasons why it happened to these cities and not others. A particularly helpful technique that the author uses is to continuously reiterates salient points that he made in the previous chapter, this helps bind the new narrative with the older narrative. It reminds the readers of what they had read previously, it helps the reader  synthesize the contexts of the idea with each new city, to integrate the ideas in their thoughts, and to help the reader compare and contrast the different manifestations of those ideas while never losing the  different flavors  of the concept which are solely attributable to a specific city.

A case in point is his focus on the social aspects of each city and how the social life feeds the creative spirit of the city. Places like: the Agora of Athens, the Hangzhou West Lake, the piazzas of Florence, the clubs of Edinburgh, the addas of Calcutta, the Café’s of Vienna, and so on. The places where people can meet, converse, and argue freely; be seriously challenged in a public setting to properly test their ideas; have an honest exchange of ideas without residual ill will, all under an umbrella of civility. The unique feature present in all the cities is that the group interaction never devolves into groupthink, which is what usually happens in modern day brainstorming sessions. There are many ground rules which make these social group interaction successful, the main difference is that the conversation is not sharply focused on specific subjects and that the purpose of the social interaction is quite dispersed and amorphous, which allows for the participants range broadly or deeply, as they please; whereas the modern day brainstorming sessions are set up for being useless because they are usually convened by people with an agenda to keep the subject narrow and focused. The social interactions described by the author are rarely convened by authorities or people with specific agenda, it is a free flowing free for all about everything and nothing at the same time.

This is just one example of the author’s writing expertise that draws the reader in, as he clearly integrates the common factors from all the cities to give us broad yet well-thought-out conclusions. It was all I could do to keep track of the salient points because there are so many of them. His various impressions about these cities reinforced the broad general observations that he made about the salient elements that caused the creative tensions that brought out the possibilities for each city to have a golden age of creativity.

It was obvious very early on in my reading that if these salient factors that are existent in these cities were implemented artificially in a generic city, golden ages of creativity wouldn’t necessarily blossom in those cities; correlation does not equal causation. I  recognize that these factors the author identified are the serendipitous results of the meeting of minds, those factors, and quite a bit of luck. However, it is always interesting to find out about the intangible factors that serve to incubate a vast amount of intellectual thought from seemingly disparate groups of people who are brought together by circumstance to a geographic location.

I so enjoyed Eric Weiner’s ability to aggregate ideas, his way with words, and his ability to communicate the key lessons from the history that he is writing about that I had purchased a few of his other books to add to my already teetering TBR pile.

Book Review-The Weil Conjecture: On Math and the Pursuit of the Unknown By Karen Olsson

This book piqued my interest because it is advertised as a biography of a mathematician and his philosopher sister. Mathematics and philosophy have been hobbies for many years, and I have been very interested specifically in the people who work in these milieus. I had heard and read about his book from many different book reviews, and I figured it would be a good read.

I didn’t expect this, which is high praise.

This is the story about the Weil family and their two very precocious children. It is about how the children developed and grew to be Andre and Simone Weil, as seen through the eyes of the author. It is about the conflicts between brothers and sisters made complicated by the upheavals of the mid-20^th century, and how the disruptions wreaked havoc with their lives. It is about how the siblings’ reactions to the upheavals formed their lives at that moment and shaped their future lives.

It is also about the author’s inner story. About her lifelong curiosity about mathematics, and most importantly, about her obsession with how these mathematicians do what they do and the seemingly opaque mental processes that they use to see the insights that had been denied to her and to many others.  

The instant I read the author’s words about her own background, I felt both a sense of alarm and empathy. Alarm because it is a foreshadowing that the book could just be a self-indulgent exercise in psychological offloading and purging. Fortunately, it was not what I had feared at all. The book was instead, a personal history that intertwined tightly with the Weil sibling’s story. Once I realized the possibilities of this unique kind of narrative, I started to empathize with the author because our interests and history are somewhat parallel in nature.

I am a passionate lover of mathematics, but I was too impatient to learn the tools of theoretical mathematics because the need for finding answers in my nature was too strong. In the end I became an applied mathematician by becoming an engineer. I was, however, obsessed with the idea of theoretical mathematics. I obsessively tried to read theoretical mathematics and tried to understand the kind of insights and results that came from that kind of magic. I continued to do so even though I was only partially successful in understanding each step and being able to put the logical sequence together in a coherent thought process. I will keep trying to this day.

Here is the frustration: Most of us look. The genius sees. the author and I, cannot see.

In my frustration at not seeing, turned my attention to the people who can see, reading about their upbringing, and pondering how they were able to see what I was not able to see. I became a mathematical history bluff to compensate for my inability to see.

Karen Olsson’s writing, especially regarding the transcendence of pure mathematics, became a major reason for reading this book. She has a knack to convey the beauty of mathematics without having to explain mathematics, that is a rare ability. One way to demonstrate the beauty of mathematics is to just dig into the mathematics, but if the reader is not a mathematician, the long and drawn out explications of the mathematics is lost on the reader. The second way is to describe the how and the why mathematics is considered to be beautiful and elegant without diving into the technical granularities of the mathematics. This second way is rarely successful, because mere words cannot fully convey the emotional responses of the people who understand mathematics, yet Karen Olsson is able to pull out the aesthetics of mathematics, to give the readers the reason why mathematics is considered beautiful and to elicit the kind of responses from an amateur practitioner that is often reserved for the expert practitioner. It is, however, understood that we amateurs only have a partial perspective.

In the book, Simone Weil’s story spoke for the readers and the author, as her frustrations with her lack of mathematical accomplishments that paralleled those of her brother reflected the frustrations of the author and this particular reader. The narratives in the book that are based on her correspondences between Andre and Simone describe the internal struggles of anyone who is thwarted from reaching a higher level in anything, from seeing. The irony is that her work in philosophy had propelled her to greater notoriety in present-day intellectual society, so much so that in many ways her writings superseded her brother’s accomplishment in mathematics, which is rather astounding.

The narrative became ever more riveting as my reading took me to the end of the story. Karen Olsson deftly drew the picture for us about the agonizing mental process of being professional mathematicians and the strain it exacts on the mathematicians and the people closest to them over time. Her description of the end of Simone Weil’s life was heartbreaking, but Andre’s life, though lasting far longer than his sister’s life, was also sad, given that his successes had mostly been during his youth and the love of his life, mathematics, had deserted him decades before his own demise.

At the end of the book, I felt that I had taken a step, albeit a small step, towards understanding how mathematicians thought and worked. It was a clarifying book and a riveting read.