Alegrías are a flamenco form with the light of Cadiz. Camarón sang one that affirms with the forcefulness of a theorem: “Trust in man / you should never have”.
The lyrics of these alegrías are half surreal and have resonances as if from haiku: “With the light of the cigarette, / I saw the mill. / My cigar went out. I lost my way”.
Almost as surreal as that couplet is what we propose in this section: using mathematics as a knife, we will split reality open, be it social, political, cultural, scientific or other… and we will look to see what is inside.
“I shot in the air, sang Camarón, it fell into the sand. / There is no trust in man.”
Al-Bīrūnī: sourer than vinegar, I
After the events in Afghanistan this August, it seems appropriate to dedicate a couple of posts to al-Bīrūnī, a mathematician who moved in that part of the world at the turn of the first to […]
