Reflections

So here is a mathematical answer to a question that I have quite often asked myself and seldom troubled my friends with: “Does life move in Spirals or Circles?” The course that life takes is often described as a maze by some and a road with lots of twists and turns by others. A complicated web of events, people, emotions and thoughts, caught between these is you, the spider. A lot of our religious books refer to the course of life as “the cycle of life”, which essentially means “the circle of life”. It is perhaps the phrase used most often during those innumerable philosophical discussions that boring people like us have over drinks with friends. Yes, I have been ranting for quite a while, without really bringing in what I promised: the mathematics! In laymen terms, a circle is a two dimensional figure which is a collection of all points that are at equal distances from a given point. Essentially, a circle starts and ends at the same point. A spiral, is a three dimensional figur...

It has been a long time since “The Fountainhead” that I came across a novel so satisfying as “A Certain Ambiguity: A Mathematical Novel” by Gaurav Suri and Harosh Singh. Certainly not two of the known strata of intellectual authors that I have tried to read over the past year, kudos to them for the book! Now the book does not boast about a great vocabulary or the use of satirical statements that make you smirk at the wit of the author. Neither does it transport you to a fairy land. It talks about two things: Mathematics and Philosophy. Or rather one, Mathematical Philosophy. The book has two subplots, one being the narrator’s story and the other being the story of the narrator’s grandfather’s arrest when he came to America as a mathematics student. Both the stories run parallel and get interspersed with each other by the end. Each one complimenting the other. The story is simple, without any romantic drama that often accompanies a novel. A grandchild follows into the footsteps of hi...