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 the author of over thirty 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). He and his wife Debra publish a web magazine, Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com), on poetry, hymnody, language, classic films, and music. He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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