Forty-three years ago, I played a trick on my high school English teacher that I have felt bad about ever since. One week, I wrote an excellent piece on some subject or another, and Mr. Terry praised my talent. The next week we had a free assignment to write on anything. Knowing he admired me, I did something reprehensible: I wrote an obscure little piece of fiction that actually had no real meaning. I called it “Icebergs”, an allusion to suppressed memories or some such. But it was pretty much content-free. I deliberately packed it with words that were clearly allusions to something deeper—but the thing is, there was nothing deeper. Mr. Terry was fooled, or at least uncertain, and gave me an A or maybe even an A+. I am ashamed of this story.

Forty-three years later, walking down Broadway after hastening through a Yoko Ono retrospective at MoMA, I found myself thinking about “Icebergs”, and rather incredibly, it occurred to me for the very first time that my act of creating art without meaning was no more than what artists and writers do all the time. Sometimes an obscure work has a meaning, but you can be sure not always—and what’s more, it’s not certain this is a bad thing. (See any of my index cards on Bob Dylan.) How did it take me all these years to realize that my indiscretion was standard procedure?

[7 September 2015]

Kate and I have just returned from ten days at the Balliol chalet, up in the Alps near Mt. Blanc.  We led twelve students in a reading party devoted to Frankenstein and The Origin of Species.  Naturally, God and religion came up for discussion.

I was amazed to find that none of the students admitted to being an atheist.  It’s not that they were distinctly religious; indeed just one spoke in such terms.  Instead, what we heard was inoffensive waffle.  A common observation seemed to be that, well, wouldn’t it would be going a bit far to be an atheist, since religious belief may be good for a society?

These weren’t twelve random 20-year-olds, they were the best of Britain, products of the famous Oxford tutorial system, which proudly claims to develop habits of wide-ranging and rigorous enquiry.  I can’t imagine at age 20 not having made up my mind as to whether God existed!

Some of the seeming lack of opinion may have been British lack of candour.  These students are socially highly tuned, and perhaps some are atheists inside but sense that making their views clear would not be a constructive move.  And this trumps truth at age 20?  Astonishing.

[25 July 2015]

Today I received three messages from Harvard.  The first, at 15:48, began:

Dear Prof. Trefethen,
With just 14 hours left before the end of Harvard’s fundraising year, please consider joining other members of the alumni community in making a gift at alumni.harvard.edu/givehcf.

The second, at 16:57, began:

FEATURED NEWS / JUNE 2015
Big Boost for Engineering and Applied Sciences.
John A. Paulson’s $400 million gift will fuel rapid growth.

The third arrived at 22:15 with the subject line

“Harvard Gift Strategies”

but I didn’t click the READ MORE button.

[30 June 2015]

SIAM journal articles have doubled in length in the course of my career.  At least this is true of the three SIAM journals I’ve checked, those on applied mathematics, numerical analysis, and scientific computing.

Opinions vary as to what has caused this expansion and whether it is good or bad.  Certainly the arrivals of TeX (1980s) and electronic publishing (1997) have helped enable the trend.  In my opinion the essence of the matter, however, is growing professionalization.  These days all i’s must be dotted, all t’s must be crossed, and all referees must be satisfied.  Clarity of writing, indeed clarity of thought, must compete against many other worthy concerns.  A light, clear 10-page paper is easily shot down.  A weighty 25-pager can withstand heavier ammunition.

[13 June 2015]

On average, about one new nation is created each year, and of course, each one needs a flag. Now that fluorescent fabrics are everywhere, enlarging our very concept of the set of possible colors, I wonder, will some new nation adopt a neon flag?

[14 April 2015]

George W. Bush.

(One was awarded to Al Gore for not being Bush, the other to Barack Obama for not being Bush.)

[22 March 2015]

Music is not poetry, tunes are not ideas,
nor are you, Alice Oswald,
Chopin or Mahler,
but this they have in common,
that I, of limited capacity,
wishing oh wishing I knew these sounds,
get next to nothing from hearing them cold
and write notes like this one as your voice fills the room,
looking earnestly up from my index cards
from time to time
to admire the performance.

[13 February 2015]

Almost all the novels ever written fall in one of four categories:

1st person singular, present tense (The Hunger Games)
1st person singular, past tense (Huckleberry Finn)
3rd person singular, present tense (One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest)
3rd person singular, past tense (For Whom the Bell Tolls)

Approximately what fractions fall in each?

This is just the kind of question a scientist embarking on a study of literature might begin with. The funny thing is, most literary scholars wouldn’t go near it. How unimaginative, how mechanical!

I confess I’d be glad to know the answer. So might some literary scholars, I imagine, though they might not confess it.

[2 July 2014]

Oxford, Cambridge and London, they say, form the golden triangle.

Now every mathematician knows the triangle inequality: the distance from A to C is no greater than the distance from A to B plus the distance from B to C.

The golden triangle, however, violates this principle. From Oxford to London takes an hour, and from Cambridge to London takes an hour, but from Oxford to Cambridge it’s three hours!

[28 February 2015]

It’s 10 below here in Banff, but when we ordered beers last night at the bar, they arrived North American style, ice cold. For good measure, the barmaid brought us each a glass of ice water too.

Having lived in America and Britain, I have experience of beer at all temperatures. The Americans are right: on a hot American summer’s day, cold beer is better. And the British are right: on a chilly English evening, warm beer is better.

Last night here in frozen Banff, cold beer felt pretty much insane.

But this is how cultures work. Nobody is going to serve beer Yankee-style on hot days and Brit-style on cold days. A culture makes its choice and sticks to it. This is another illustration of the “Who wears shorts in the Andrew Wiles Building?” principle.

[12 January 2015]