Frank Bascombe is one of the most unforgettable fictional characters that literature has given us in the last three decades – a sort of Sancho Panza orphaned from Don Quixote. I am tempted to write that he is the “son” of the American writer Richard Ford, were it not for the fact that Ford dislikes Bascombe being described in this way -read Ford’s description of his relationship (which could be described as difficult) with the character in this wonderful article published by La Vanguardia Frank Bascombe y yo–. Ford – 2016 Princess of Asturias Award for Literature – has dedicated four magnificent works to Bascombe: three novels: The Sportswriter (1986), Independence Day (1995) and The Lay of the Land (2006), and a book of short stories Let me be Frank (2015). Rereading The Sportswriter recently, I came across a phrase very typical of Bascombe’s irony, in which he mentions how close mathematics – algebra in this case – is to the heart:
When it comes to matters of the heart, everything is as problematic as algebra.
To prove that we are not biased, we dedicate a pill to him, despite the fact that his meaning is quite the opposite of what is written in the introduction to this blog: “Mathematics is often as much a matter of the heart as of the head”.
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