What Is a Number?

2020 ◽  
pp. 283-298
Author(s):  
Charles McCarty
Keyword(s):  
Principal Result ◽  
Real Numbers ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Richard Dedekind

An examination of and plea for a time-honored answer to the title question, that answer being, “A number is one principal result among others of a process of converting magnitudes drawn from a continuum, via a scheme of measurement, into arithmetic quantities.” Ideas on this subject of Paul du Bois-Reymond, Richard Dedekind, and Otto Hölder are subjected to detailed statement and close analysis. At the very center lies du Bois-Reymond’s demonstration that the Cantor-Dedekind Axiom–that an intuition into the nature of continuous magnitude shows that the geometric line is isomorphic to the array of Dedekind real numbers–is not merely unprovable but wholly false.

Hard, Hard Religion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Hayes
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Capitalist Development ◽  
Poor Whites ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Religious Vision ◽  
The Poor ◽  
European Tradition ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
New Synthesis

This close analysis of faith and class shows that in the early 20th century South, poor whites and poor blacks exchanged songs, tales, lore, material display, and proverbs with each other, forging a shared religious vision and learning from each other about what it meant to live as Christians in a world of severe struggle. Beneath the well-documented religious forms of the New South’s “Bible Belt”, this folk Christianity spoke from the margins of capitalist development, giving voice to modern phenomena like alienation and disenchantment. Through haunting songs of death, mystical tales of conversion, grassroots sacramental displays, and an ethic of neighborliness, impoverished folk Christians looked for the sacred in their midst and affirmed the value of this life in this world. From Tom Watson and W.E.B. Du Bois over a century ago to political commentators today, many have ruminated on how, despite material commonalities, the poor of the South have been perennially divided by racism. Through its excavation of a folk Christianity of the poor that fused strands of African and European tradition into a new synthesis, this book recovers a historically contingent moment of interracial exchange.

Held in Checks: Du Bois, Johnson, and the Figurative Work of Financial Forms

PMLA ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 134 (3) ◽  
pp. 524-539
Author(s):  
Christine A. Wooley
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Form And Function ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Self Interest ◽  
Individual Actions ◽  
And Function ◽  
Finance Capitalism ◽  
White Individual

This essay investigates the personal check as it appears in two novels, W. E. B. Du Bois's The Quest of the Silver Fleece and James Weldon Johnson's he Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man. In these novels, checks move money between a wealthy white individual and an African American; a close analysis of the check's form and function shows how Du Bois and Johnson revise mid-nineteenth-century connections among feeling, money, and social change by exploiting, rather than challenging, the abstraction of this financial form. The checks in Du Bois and Johnson present the logic of reparations. In doing so, the checks make a material difference in the lives of black beneficiaries, tying them to the flow of money made possible by finance capitalism, a flow from which most African Americans were excluded. At the same time, the check's figuration of the drawer's emotional motivations salvages the potential for progressive individual actions in those whose self-interest limits their willingness to act decisively for the benefit of others.

scholarly journals Scales of functions

1960 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 396-418 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. Erdös ◽  
C. A. Rogers ◽  
S. J. Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Real Constant ◽  
Real Numbers ◽  
Du Bois ◽  
Image Position

We consider real-valued functions ƒ(x) which are defined for all sufficiently large real numbers x. In discussing the behaviour of such functions as x → + ∞, it is useful to compare ƒ with the functions of some “comparison scale”. The early work in this field was due to Du Bois-Reymond (see, for example, (2), (3)). This was elaborated by Hardy, (6), who was mainly concerned with what he calls the “logarithmico-exponential” scale of functions. This “scale of Hardy” may be defined as the smallest class ℋ of functions ƒ with the following properties:(i) if ƒ ∈ ℋ, ƒ, is defined and continuous for all sufficiently large values of x;(ii) (a) the function ƒ(x) ≡ α, where α is any real constant, is in ℋ;(b) the function ƒ(x) ≡ x is in ℋ;(iii) if ƒ and g are in ℋ and g is non-zero for all sufficiently large values of x, thenare also in ℋ.

Simultaneous Diophantine Approximation

1950 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 283-288 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gordon Raisbeck
Keyword(s):  
Diophantine Approximation ◽  
Classical Result ◽  
Principal Result ◽  
Real Numbers ◽  
Simultaneous Diophantine Approximation

Summary of results. The principal result of this paper is as follows: given any set of real numbers z1, z2, & , zn and an integer t we can find an integer and a set of integers p1, p2 & , pn such that(0.11).Also, if n = 2, we can, given t, produce numbers z1 and z2 such that(0.12)This supersedes the results of Nils Pipping (Acta Aboensis, vol. 13, no. 9, 1942) that there is a q satisfying (0.11) such that , and also the classical result of Dirichlet that there is such a q less than tn.

From a Distance: A Close Analysis of Skinner

1995 ◽  
Vol 40 (5) ◽  
pp. 424-425
Author(s):  
Laurence D. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Close Analysis

Plasticité du bois en compression simple

1993 ◽  
Vol 81 (12) ◽  
pp. 5-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
P. François ◽  
P. Morlier
Keyword(s):  
Du Bois

Transmission of Renaissance herbal images to China: the Beitang copy of Mattioli’s commentaries on Dioscorides and its annotations

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 236-253
Author(s):  
Wu Huiyi ◽  
Zheng Cheng
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural History ◽  
National Library ◽  
Materia Medica ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Northern Chinese ◽  
Jesuit Missionaries ◽  
Animal Names ◽  
National Library Of China ◽  
Made In

The Beitang Collection, heritage of a seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jesuit library in Beijing now housed in the National Library of China, contains an incomplete copy of Pietro Andrea Mattioli’s commentary on an Italian edition of Pedanius Dioscorides's De materia medica (1568) bearing extensive annotations in Chinese. Two hundred odd plant and animal names in a northern Chinese patois were recorded alongside illustrations, creating a rare record of seventeenth-century Chinese folk knowledge and of Sino-Western interaction in the field of natural history. Based on close analysis of the annotations and other contemporary sources, we argue that the annotations were probably made in Beijing by one or more Chinese low-level literati and Jesuit missionaries during the first two decades of the seventeenth century. We also conclude that the annotations were most likely directed at a Chinese audience, to whom the Jesuits intended to illustrate European craftsmanship using Mattioli’s images. This document probably constitutes the earliest known evidence of Jesuits' attempts at transmitting the art of European natural history drawings to China.

Stolen from the Snows: John Kinsella as Poet and as Fiction Writer

CounterText ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 232-238
Author(s):  
Nicholas Birns
Keyword(s):  
Close Reading ◽  
Artistic Identity ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Fiction Writer

This piece explores the fiction of John Kinsella, describing how it both complements and differs from his poetry, and how it speaks to the various aspect of his literary and artistic identity, After delineating several characteristic traits of Kinsella's fictional oeuvre, and providing a close reading of one of Kinsella's Graphology poems to give a sense of his current lyrical praxis, the balance of the essay is devoted to a close analysis of Hotel Impossible, the Kinsella novella included in this issue of CounterText. In Hotel Impossible Kinsella examines the assets and liabilities of cosmopolitanism through the metaphor of the all-inclusive hotel that envelops humanity in its breadth but also constrains through its repressive, generalising conformity. Through the peregrinations of the anti-protagonist Pilgrim, as he works out his relationships with Sister and the Watchmaker, we see how relationships interact with contemporary institutions of power. In a style at once challenging and accessible, Kinsella presents a fractured mirror of our own reality.

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