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Published 2015 | public
Book Section - Chapter

The Wolf and the Street: Narrative Encounters with Mathematics

Abstract

I was invited to this conference to present the results of an old experiment, a twenty year old exploration of narrative and mathematics, in the form of a collection of fairy tales. I began writing the stories of Racconti per il lupo (Tales for the Wolf) in 1986, when I was a 16 year old student of the Liceo Classico, more occupied with ancient Greek texts and philosophy than with mathematics. I finished the collection when I was about to graduate in Theoretical Physics, at the University of Milano, in 1993. Those few years spanned enormous transformations, at the personal level, going through the passage from late adolescence to adulthood, and from being a student of classical languages to a professional physicist, as well as on the larger scale of society and the world: those were the years that marked "the end of the short century", with all the upheaval, excitement and anxiety that came with it. In their minuscule cameo scale, the mathematical stories I was putting together, act as a small fragmented mirror of larger events. The stories, written in Italian, and illustrated by a series of collages I prepared in the style of Max Ernst, are now available online at the publisher Lulu.com, along with some of my more recent writings. In this presentation, I will try to describe the main ideas behind that old attempt at conveying in a narrative form some mathematical concepts, and I will contrast the spirit of that early encounter with mathematics, with the very different spirit in which I came to see the mathematical profession nowadays, after twenty years of experience. The latter is best represented in some of my more recent writings, especially the lyric prose collection Street Science, composed in 2013, illustrated by mathematical street art graffiti, also available online from the same publisher.

Additional Information

© 2015 Springer. Date: 12 November 2014.

Additional details

Created:
August 20, 2023
Modified:
March 5, 2024