HN Books @HNBooksMonth

If you're interested in the math behind the library, you can't do better than this book: http://www.amazon.com/Unimaginable-Mathematics-Borges-Librar...

⬐ davegauer

Or the library's own explanation: https://libraryofbabel.info/theory4.html

The thing that really got me going was finding and using the search feature! Until then, the library looked to me like an afternoon of programming fun, but little more.

Mathematically inclined Borges nerds will enjoy William Goldbloom Bloch's The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges' Library of Babel [0]. It's a pop-math book, but much better written than most, and intriguing enough in uncovering mathematical connections to the Library that I recommend it even to readers already familiar with all the math it discusses.

(Curiously, as far as I remember, Bloch doesn't ask whether there's a comprehensive meta-catalogue of those catalogues in the Library that do not mention themselves.)

0. http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0195334574

⬐ jacques_chester

And the further question of whether those meta-catalogues are accurate, or how many of them are deceptive, or how many of them mention themselves under a million different titles, or ...

I wonder if Borges knew about Russell's Paradox. It seems unlikely that he wouldn't.

⬐ pash

I don't know; Bloch does try to note what Borges knew about the math, and he sometimes speculates (for example in the chapter in which he models librarians as Turing machines).

... By the way, having now read the submitted article, let me point out a selection that exemplifies what I love about Borges's writing:

There is a Hindu school of philosophy that says that we are not the actors in our lives, but rather the spectators, and this is illustrated using the metaphor of a dancer. These days, maybe it would be better to say an actor. A spectator sees a dancer or an actor, or, if you prefer, reads a novel, and ends up identifying with one of the characters who is there in front of him. This is what those Hindu thinkers before the fifth century said. And the same thing happens with us. I, for example, was born the same day as Jorge Luis Borges, exactly the same day. I have seen him be ridiculous in some situations, pathetic in others. And, as I have always had him in front of me, I have ended up identifying with him.

In Borges's short stories there are very many selections like this, but it's mostly pseudo-realistic wisdom (or paradox) that's the product of Borges's own mind.

In the short story "Tlön, Uqbar, and the Orbis Tertius," Borges writes about a short discussion of base 12, which he calls (at least in translation) duodecimal. This is interwoven with a discussion of the 1001 nights, which I found odd, so I wondered what 1001 base 12 was.

It turns out to be a rather unremarkable number: 1729.

Given the time that the story was published, it is possible that Borges, who was fascinated by mathematics and always encoding maths concepts into his stories, had read the anecdote about the Hardy-Ramanujan number, and hid it purposefully in the story.

Edit: anyone interested in reading more about how Borges incorporated mathematics into his stories might find this book worthwhile

http://www.amazon.com/Unimaginable-Mathematics-Borges-Librar...