In which the Idiosopher discovers a lot of new friends.

Antediluvian Friend-of-the-Blog Steve Devine points us to a paper in the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics entitled “Franz and Georg: Cantor’s Mathematics of the Infinite in the Work of Kafka“. If this paper is not idiosophical, then idiosophy has no meaning.

Knudson is discussing a posthumously-published story by Franz Kafka entitled “The Great Wall of China“. I had never heard of it before; getting to read a new Kafka fantasy means it’s already a good day. (The story is depressingly relevant in a few places.) Knudson’s paper talks mostly about the curious method of constructing the Great Wall, and notes its similarity to the “Cantor Set“. (Please go look at the pictures in that Wikipedia article — there’s a wonderfully unexpected one in there.) It doesn’t mention the messenger finding his way through the crowd, which appears to be a two-dimensional analogue of the same fractal process.

Illustration of the Cantor set to five levels

Cantor Set

If necessary, it’s possible to read Knudson’s paper like a moviegoer, skipping the theorems the way a Peter Jackson fan skips the poems in The Lord of the Rings. He always returns to plain English before long.

This kind of mathematics is related to graph theory in a way I hadn’t appreciated before, and graph theory is no stranger to Idiosophy. (Do you suppose the editors at JHM would be interested in hearing about calling people fools?) Anyway, at the end of Shi Wen’s post, there’s a link to a wonderful video, made by the kind of student I always wished I had.

Work Cited

Knudson, K. P., “Franz and Georg: Cantor’s Mathematics of the Infinite in the Work of Kafka,” Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, Volume 7 Issue 1 (January 2017), pages 147-154. DOI: 10.5642/jhummath.201701.12 . Available at: http://scholarship.claremont.edu/jhm/vol7/iss1/12