As Borges Use mathematical mathematical advances to create your fictions is one of the many aspects offered by the New and extended edition of the study of Guillermo Martínez, “Borges and mathematics.” MARTÍNEZDoctor of Mathematics and Narrator, travels through the stages in which Borges Use the knowledge “of metaphysics, theology and mathematics” for essay speculations and stories. Mark moments when Borges advances issues such as logical labyrinths and paradoxes of the rules, hyperlink, multiverse or fake news. We dialogue with him.
Journalist: Isn’t it admirable that Borges, already a poet and storyteller, dedicated himself to studying mathematics?
Guillermo Martínez: Mathematics was present throughout his life, from his readings in Bertrand Russell. Many of the forty -five books that he reviewed as a journalist in the newspaper “Criticism” and then in the magazine “The Home” are mathematics as “Mathematics and Imagination” by Kasner and Newman, “The man who calculated” Malba Tahan or “The Fourth Dimension” of Hinton, a theme that was very in vogue at that time.
Q.: Is there in some of those comments a special interest in the paradox, which Borges uses in his stories?
GM: There are their essays that have to touch the paradoxical, such as “Kafka and their precursors” with the idea that a writer somehow creates their precursors. Illuminate back, an idea that is a bit out of common sense. Or the extraordinary idea that appears in “Pierre Menard, author of Don Quixote” who is directly linked to the paradox of the “finite rule” of Wittgenstein, to the question of interpretation, how the text is not enough to give itself a single interpretation. Pierre Menard can write in contemporary times a paragraph that is syntactically identical to an original paragraph of Cervantes, but that must be read in an absolutely different sense, and even contrary to the original sense, that is: as the same text can house two completely contradictory senses. It is an extraordinary idea that Borges exposes through a fiction.
Q.: Does that perspective lead you to make another reading of “the Aleph”?
GM: In “A return to El Aleph” I give a personal interpretation of the only fact, of all those who see the narrator in the Aleph, to which he awarded three adjectives: the letters that are the tremendous revelation of Beatriz’s sexual relationship with his cousin Carlos Argentino Daneri, qualifies them as obscene, incredible, precise. It is no accident that the story is called “the Aleph”, a letter with which mathematician Georg Cantor designates the infinity of natural numbers “where everything is not greater than any of the parts.” In the infinity of mathematics there is its own part that is equivalent, or is as large, as the whole. Which contradicts the Aristotelian idea that the whole is greater than the parties, something than in mathematical infinity this does not happen.
Q.: Is it true that his book started from an request for his opinion on the scientist in Borges?
GM: It all started with a conference that they asked me at Boston University, through Professor and Writer Alicia Borinsky, who led me to reread Borges’ stories under mathematical light. I found a number of references that drove me to read the complete work and to give two courses in the Malba. From those courses I decided to gather that material in a book, maintaining the colloquial tone of the talks.
Q.: What added now?
GM: An appendix with a list of all mathematical references that appear in Borges’ work. There is a classification work of references for topics and location. A second appendix offers the list of mathematics books that Borges consulted throughout his life and left settled in his written work. At the same time I added as I did in the 2007 edition “The Golem and the Artificial Intelligence”- the articles “The player and the piece” about Borges and the Chess, “The Broadcast of Babel” about a question that appears in “Babel’s library” about the letters in the dorsos of the Babel library, which Borges calls “the most important fact in history.” I tried to elucidate what is the meaning of those letters.
Q.: Internet allows Borges to be considered as a precursor?
GM: It is an equivocal to attribute to Borges something premonitory of the Internet, the network of networks, in the story “The Library of Babel” with the Internet. It is a serious mistake because the sense of “Babel’s library” is that the nonsense reigns. The books that are there are babbling, gallimathies, accumulation of letters without any sense. It is the despair of meaningless. Everything we have written would be a very small part of that dispersed library, already very difficult to find. That same idea is in “Arena Book.” The two stories are variants of the same idea. Premonitory stories, in some sense they are “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis tertius”, clairvoyant of what is happening today, what was at the beginning Wikipedia and now are the News Fakes, how false information can no longer distinguish from the true one, and that in the future a false culture can replace it existing. How the false is accepted to the point of being consumed and accepted until they deform reality.
Q.: Do you return to fiction?
GM: I am in the last part of the writing of “a dialectical crime”, it is a philosophical police, within the characteristics of the police novels where ideas that come from science and philosophy appear, in this case the idea of free will. As for the movie “A dead cat”, a horror story that was part of the storybook “A repulsive happiness.” The final script is finished, the film is suspended due to understandable current production problems.
Source: Ambito
I am an author and journalist who has worked in the entertainment industry for over a decade. I currently work as a news editor at a major news website, and my focus is on covering the latest trends in entertainment. I also write occasional pieces for other outlets, and have authored two books about the entertainment industry.
