Thursday, April 27, 2006

 

JSH: Power of myth, discoverer reality

I think I have mentioned this before that I am a big fan of the book THE POWER OF MYTH by Joseph Campbell, and I take his suggestion to heart to live my life like I am the hero of some mythological tale.

So there are quite a few postings in that vein.

With that said, hey, it is really starting to look like some kind of mythical tale where I do win out in the end, but not like how I thought, as, well, the simplest way to put it is, the discoveries just keep coming.

And thinking about it, that makes sense.

The major discoverers in mathematics are distinguished from the rest not only by how big their results are, but by them having more than one, or two, or even three.

And that is looking like what saves me, and confounds mathematicians who I think DO know about my research but suppose that they can sit on their hands, hope against hope the world never knows it, and have their lives work out ok.

I keep making discoveries.

And there is no protection against that, no way they could have realized, unless they read their history very carefully, that the major math discoverers tend to do that—keep making discoveries.

I think that is why the bad guys get to be the bad guys—and lose.

It is what they cannot imagine that undoes them.

If I had just one major result, or two—like I had—and they could watch those results not have any resonance, and people sit back while I was ridiculed, and get comfortable, it might make sense to think that they were safe.

But who could imagine I would just keep getting more?

And eventually, there would have to be a result that resonated?

If they could have known that then they would not have blocked for so many years, so sitting here, so many years after so much drama, including that destroyed math journal, and so much that has happened, the best explanation is that they did not conceive of me just continuing to find more major results.

And now Goldbach's Conjecture may be in reach.

I think there is a lot ot be said for the late Joseph Campbell and his ideas, and I think I will keep living my life as the hero of a great mythological tale, as increasingly, that is how the story actually looks, for real.





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