Pi in the Sky
A Sidebar in Jonathan Witt’s “The Gods Must Be Tidy”
The one thing I’ve noticed that most knocks my students out of their secure evolutionism is a question on the status of mathematical objects. I ask them, “Have you ever seen a circle?” They respond that they have, poor unsuspecting students. “You mean you’ve seen a set of points of no dimension, equidistant from a given point, on a plane of infinitesimal thinness?” Well, no, now that I put it that way, they’ve never seen one of those.
“So you’ve never seen a circle?”
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Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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more from the online archives
11.5—September/October 1998
Speaking the Truths Only the Imagination May Grasp
An Essay on Myth & 'Real Life' by Stratford Caldecott
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