Vladimir Nabokov

NABOKV-L post 0012883, Thu, 29 Jun 2006 14:32:21 +0100

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Re: verboleptic who dreamed up Humbert ...
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On 18/6/06 00:57, "Sandy P. Klein" <spklein52@HOTMAIL.COM> wrote:

>
> ...when you've got crossword puzzles, and a smart new movie to celebrate them
> By RICHARD CORLISS <javascript:void(0)>
>
> The latest fad is Sudoku, a number game in a box, In less than two years, the
> puzzle has won a popularity that verges on the epidemic. It now appears daily
> in newspapers on all six inhabited continents and has spawned hundreds of
> magazines, not to mention dozens of books that elbow traditional puzzle
> volumes off the Barnes & Noble shelves.
>
> ...---... When Humbert Humbert sadly apostrophized his absent inamorata by
> crying, "Oh my Lolita, I have only words to play with!", he was selling words
> short. Vladimir Nabokov, the verboleptic who dreamed up Humbert, surely knew
> this, as do his readers: Lolita is the wordplay lover's favorite novel.
> Numbers have their power; they can be squared, cubed, extended to infinity.
> But they can't match the universe of ideas and feelings that come into being
> when letters collide. Words create worlds. ...---...
>
> Hate to spoil Richard C¹s theorizing, but the basic SuDoku is a
> logical/symbolic not a numerical puzzle. (See my ³Anything SuDoku I Can Do
> Better,² ACM Queue Magazine, Dec 2005). The puzzle uses the numbers 1-9 as a
> convenience ‹ any 9 distinct symbols can be used. There is (no surprise) a
> WorldCupSoccer variant called Sven Doku (after the English coach Sven-Goran
> Eriksson) which uses symbols related to Sven¹s active sex life! We need to
> distinguish Magic Squares from Latin Squares. The former are numeric, the
> latter symbolic. AND, dear ListMeisters, there are several Nabokovian
> resonances. Euler, who solved many of the Latin Square problems, is buried in
> St Petersburg (I¹ve made the pilgrimage).
> Jansy: many connections with your QUILTS! Not just fancy patterns ‹ practical
> agricultural applications ‹ dividing fields so that certain combinations of
> crops/fertilizers/chemicals occupy non-adjacent squares. (I recall VN
> describing Œquilted¹ fields somewhere in the Butterflies anthology). We
> mathematicians cringe un peu when false dichotomies are made between ³numbers²
> and ³words.²
> The underlying, majestic unity of mathematics (whether you call it math or
> maths!) is pattern/relationship.
>
> Stan Kelly-Bootle


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