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landofnowhereThick as Thieves, Megan Whalen Turner. Good fun -- appreciated it a bit more this time around due to having recently read the earlier books in the series.
Return of the Thief, Megan Whalen Turner. First time reading this! A nice conclusion to the series, even if I don't care that much about Eugenides at this point. Some dark bits but also plenty of plot armor for those who need it. I <3 Pheris though, Pheris is the best, I want more Pheris. Spoilers: When Eugenides signed the paper handing over his power to Erondites, I was like, ohhh, this is significant, Pheris is going to become Erondites. I thought the document might be used more literally to make Pheris prime minister, though that would be hard to pull off politically. But Eugenides is clearly aware of it when he listens to Pheris at the critical moment. Also I should reread the Relius/Teleus bits, I don't think I caught everything that was going on there.
Eine Frau und die Mathematik 1933–1940, Hel Braun. So I am minorly obsessed with Hel Braun, a 20th century woman mathematician who studied with Carl Ludwig Siegel (a big name in number theory) in the 1930s before he fled Nazi Germany and she stayed behind.
There is not nearly enough biographical material available about her, despite her having clearly lived a very interesting life and was a successful research mathematician (though her career was overshadowed by that of some of the more famous men she was associated with -- though also Siegel doesn't have that much biographical material given his stature as a mathematician). Somebody needs to write a dissertation on her!
Anyway, this is her memoir of her student days and early career. My German is somewhat adequate for reading math, but not up to this, so I signed up for a free trial of DeepL machine translatation, and had it translate the PDF -- which I'm sure missed some subtleties (not to mention a lot of cultural context I'm missing), but was good enough to be generally readable. (Living in the AI future is nice!)
Anyway, I'd already read some of the best bits involving Siegel (such as the bit where Siegel invites Hel Braun over for dinner after a successful thesis defense, and surprises her with a gift of a box of live crabs!) in the chapter on Siegel in Benjamin Yandell's The Honors Class, which quotes extensively from this book, and if you want the highlights on Braun and Siegel, you should go there.
But the book was generally engaging reading, if with an odd arc of "Hel Braun successfully launches a scientific career while the world goes to hell around her". She's trying to avoid politics in the story, but it's hard to -- the attitude generally seems to be that yeah, the Third Reich is awful, let's hope it goes away soon and try not to get in trouble before then. (As a student, Braun protested a Nazi lecturer and was forced to transfer universities, she feels lucky that nothing worse happened, though this may have also contributed to Siegel's willingness to take her on as a student.) The memoir doesn't answer many of the questions I had about Hel Braun, but it does give a good sense of her personality as a young woman, as well as providing commentary on academia and how it's changed over time.
Return of the Thief, Megan Whalen Turner. First time reading this! A nice conclusion to the series, even if I don't care that much about Eugenides at this point. Some dark bits but also plenty of plot armor for those who need it. I <3 Pheris though, Pheris is the best, I want more Pheris. Spoilers: When Eugenides signed the paper handing over his power to Erondites, I was like, ohhh, this is significant, Pheris is going to become Erondites. I thought the document might be used more literally to make Pheris prime minister, though that would be hard to pull off politically. But Eugenides is clearly aware of it when he listens to Pheris at the critical moment. Also I should reread the Relius/Teleus bits, I don't think I caught everything that was going on there.
Eine Frau und die Mathematik 1933–1940, Hel Braun. So I am minorly obsessed with Hel Braun, a 20th century woman mathematician who studied with Carl Ludwig Siegel (a big name in number theory) in the 1930s before he fled Nazi Germany and she stayed behind.
There is not nearly enough biographical material available about her, despite her having clearly lived a very interesting life and was a successful research mathematician (though her career was overshadowed by that of some of the more famous men she was associated with -- though also Siegel doesn't have that much biographical material given his stature as a mathematician). Somebody needs to write a dissertation on her!
Anyway, this is her memoir of her student days and early career. My German is somewhat adequate for reading math, but not up to this, so I signed up for a free trial of DeepL machine translatation, and had it translate the PDF -- which I'm sure missed some subtleties (not to mention a lot of cultural context I'm missing), but was good enough to be generally readable. (Living in the AI future is nice!)
Anyway, I'd already read some of the best bits involving Siegel (such as the bit where Siegel invites Hel Braun over for dinner after a successful thesis defense, and surprises her with a gift of a box of live crabs!) in the chapter on Siegel in Benjamin Yandell's The Honors Class, which quotes extensively from this book, and if you want the highlights on Braun and Siegel, you should go there.
But the book was generally engaging reading, if with an odd arc of "Hel Braun successfully launches a scientific career while the world goes to hell around her". She's trying to avoid politics in the story, but it's hard to -- the attitude generally seems to be that yeah, the Third Reich is awful, let's hope it goes away soon and try not to get in trouble before then. (As a student, Braun protested a Nazi lecturer and was forced to transfer universities, she feels lucky that nothing worse happened, though this may have also contributed to Siegel's willingness to take her on as a student.) The memoir doesn't answer many of the questions I had about Hel Braun, but it does give a good sense of her personality as a young woman, as well as providing commentary on academia and how it's changed over time.
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Date: 31 Jul 2022 10:26 (UTC)What a fascinating person, I hope that dissertation comes along. Also, it's really cool that translation AI is up to the point of doing that.