freecounterpoint: The Face of a Man Whose Lost His City

Thursday, October 19, 2006

The Face of a Man Whose Lost His City

The wages of turbulence, Navier, are not well Stoked

11 comments:

Tecumseh said...: AA, I remember we discussed at length this topic at some point, in the pre-blogger era. Anything new there?; 10/19/2006 10:49 AM
Arelcao Akleos said...: No, AI, his defeat seems absolute; 10/19/2006 10:51 AM
Mr roT said...: What are you guys talking about?; 10/19/2006 4:20 PM
Tecumseh said...: I'm lost. Can you be more specific, AA?; 10/19/2006 5:32 PM
Arelcao Akleos said...: Constantin hit Chicago, in the mid 80's, with a whole slew of ideas as to how attack and subdue the NS once and for all, to solve in a complete sense the mathematical structure of fluid dynamics. The key problem being turbulence, of course. [It is now a Clay problem, I believe]. He pretty much jettisoned wine, song, and a bodacious wife for this pursuit, and in the 90's was pumping out some really interesting stuff at a very fast pace. He started to talk as if it was all but a grasp away........and then, around 2000, he hit a wall that would not break. He had tried artful combinations of every method known or could be conjured up, from the geometry of integral manifolds, functional anaylsis, mean-ingful statistics, inequalities, classical analysis on PDEs, approximation methods, vast computation, barrels of physics experiments and measurements, and more geometry. He thought he had it, gave seminars laying out how close the programme was to snatching the whole shebang, and then everything just fell short in all possible directions.....So now he is tired, old, sober, bodacious babeless, and in the south side of Chicago....forever to his death.
There's a moral there somewhere, but I'll let you and JJ tell me what it is.
Anyway, around 2002, he published a couple of survey articles, to set out "the state of the art" as it was at the ebbing of his personal tide. A concise one in the "Mathematical Intelligencer", and a much longer one in, I think, the Bulletin. I remember, well, maybe remember, egging on JJ to try his hand at a serious read of these....But it seems that at the time MS was enjoying JJ too much to allow him to be discombobulated by anything so remote from Riemann-Roch or Dolbeault.....However, if JJ wishes to correct me on this, then am Game.; 10/19/2006 7:36 PM
My Frontier Thesis said...: ...So now he is tired, old, sober, bodacious babeless, and in the south side of Chicago....forever to his death...

This is where we in the humanities take over. Upon this description, it sounds like he'd be perfect as an associate prof in some English department.; 10/19/2006 8:40 PM
Tecumseh said...: Sad story you lay out; had not heard it before. My impression was that the guy was extremely successful -- has over 100 published papers, on one of the hardest problems in math, the Navier-Stokes (indeed, a Clay millenium problem), which has also stumped the likes of Ciprian Foias.

For those who like buying books from Amazon, here are a couple of books by him (and co-authors).; 10/19/2006 9:11 PM
Arelcao Akleos said...: Well, you are right AI. He has been very successful. Had extremely productive years, mostly early 80's to early 2000's, has books, has deservedly had publications in important places, and he has done all this while tackling a very very very hard mathematical challenge. On the other hand, AI, you are again right, it is a 'sad" story. But only in the sense that Peter's ambitions were of the highest order, and all his success has left him, so it seems, stranded offshore from a Land of Canaan he will never walk on. So he is sad in the way Napoleon was when it dawned on him his Armee could go no further, and that altough vast swathes were his domain, what he had thirsted for was simply impossible. Sad in a much much nicer way than a son of a peasant who had thirsted for great things only to find his life chained to dung and death.
Hey, I could certainly use some of that Constantinian sadness!; 10/19/2006 11:35 PM
My Frontier Thesis said...: This has a sort of Greek tragedy all over it. I'm thinking of Oedipus, who was ultimately brought down by himself, by his strength of inquiry. It's not to say Constantin married his mother, or whacked his father (it was a different time and a different place). Rather, Constantin (from AA's interpretation) worked so hard at what he loved that it, his strength, ultimately brought him joy, but in the end, misery (again, from AA's interpretation).

I'm also thinking along the lines of Chekhov. Even though he wrote "fiction," his stories had their origins with real life. Ultimately, Man's best strength or trait happens to be his unduing -- but don't let bullshit English departments tell you that everyone has a "fatal flaw." That's a bunch of hullabaloo.; 10/20/2006 9:25 AM
Tecumseh said...: Interesting interpretation, AA. By the way, this has happened to many mathematicians, eg, several who went after the Holy Grail of proving the Poincaré Conjecture, hacked at it for 20 years, only to fall short -- though they did all sorts of wonderful work while at it. Maybe "sad" is too strong a word -- you are right. Perhaps, bittersweet is slightly better?

At any rtae, let's not close the book on this story. Man can still catch his second breath, bounce back, and kick ass, after all. Why not?; 10/20/2006 5:10 PM
Mr roT said...: PDE guys always look like that.; 10/20/2006 5:35 PM