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SUMMARY:Demotic mathematics and modernism's shipwrecked poetics of insuran
 ce - Alice Bamford (Faculty of English)
DTSTART:20140130T163000Z
DTEND:20140130T180000Z
UID:TALK49544@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Helen Curry
DESCRIPTION:'Demotic' or vernacular mathematics names the mathematical ide
 as and practices that are woven into literature: counting\, statistics\, h
 alf-forgotten schoolroom geometry\, measurement and risk. In this paper I 
 will unpick the ideas about probability that literary modernism inherits f
 rom mathematical probability theory\, statistics\, accident insurance and 
 19th-century philosophy. Adolphe Quetelet believed that the mean values of
  society's gathered facts could form the contours both of the 'average man
 ' and of a refined literary method. The literary future of the average man
  didn't\, of course\, play out quite as Quetelet expected. Nonetheless the
  average man\, the Gaussian distribution and the 'law of large numbers' ha
 ve had a literary history. I will sketch one version of this history throu
 gh a reading of Robert Musil's _The Man Without Qualities_ (1930–43) bef
 ore looking at the grammar of probability as it is lived with\, habituated
  and estranged by modernism's 'insurance men': Leopold Bloom\, Wallace Ste
 vens and Franz Kafka. The categories I will propose ('demotic mathematics'
  and the 'poetics of insurance') are tentative attempts to take the histor
 y and sociology of applied mathematics into account when reading literatur
 e written 'in the landscape of the curve'.
LOCATION:Seminar Room 2\, Department of History and Philosophy of Science
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