ATD 588-614

Please keep these annotations SPOILER-FREE by not revealing information from later pages in the novel.

Page 588

tannery
???

Gauss's brain
After Carl Friedrich Gauss died in 1855, his brain was preserved for research purposes. To this day, it is in the possession of the University of Göttingen.

impervious to the wind
(Attribute of tanned leather?)

"Heiliger Bimbam!"
A German expression of surprise, translated elsewhere as "Holy Moly!"

Roentgen-ray spectacles
The X-ray glasses that used to be advertised in comic books.

natürlich
German: naturally.

rim
Kit pretends to think he's referring to monocle as 'chichi' (stylish).

Page 589

Those curves . . . Noli me tangere
A well-turned wordplay: The operation of differentiating a curve involves drawing tangents to it at selected points. The curves in question are continuous, but the injunction Noli me tangere means you can't draw the tangents.

Noli me tangere
Latin for 'don't touch me'

Hausknochen
???

Page 590

Hadamard... Poussin... Prime Number Theorem
???

patent Kühlbox
???

beleaguered subset
???

Prime Number Theorem
Gives an estimate of the number of primes less than a whole number n. For example, if n is 20 then there are nine primes less than it (1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19). The Prime Number Theorem is closely related to the Riemann Hypothesis.

Page 591

prats
Literally the buttocks. As a slang term, a 'prat' is an idiot.

Die Nullstellen der ζ-Funktion
German: the zeroes of the ζ function. (Null = zero; Stelle = location.) Wikipedia on the "Zeros of the Riemann zeta-function".

not all that hard to prove
Kit will upset the applecart if he can prove the Riemann Hypothesis; Yashmeen's research topic will shrink to triviality. (Last time I checked, no one had yet proved the hypothesis.) --Volver 19:37, 9 January 2007 (PST)

"Richard Harding Davis"
Popular writer of fiction and drama, journalist/war-correspondent and a major male-role-model of his time (1864 - 1916). He was considered the model for illustrator Charles Dana Gibson's dashing Gibson man, the male equivalent of his famous Gibson Girl. He is also referenced early in Sinclair Lewis's book, Dodsworth as the example of an exciting, adventure-seeking legitimate hero. Wikipedia

seldom, if ever
Cf p559 re Umeki!?

tetralatry
made up from greek "tettares" (prefix -tetra) = four and "latreia" = worship

C. Howard Hinton
Charles Howard Hinton (1853 – 1907) was a British mathematician and writer of science fiction works titled Scientific Romances. He was interested in higher dimensions, particularly the fourth dimension, and is known for coining the word tesseract and for his work on methods of visualising the geometry of higher dimensions. He also had a strong interest in theosophy. Wikipedia Entry

Johann K.F. Zöllner
Johann Karl Friedrich Zöllner (1834–1882) was a German astrophysicist. Studied Photometrie and optical illusions. He insisted a fourth dimension should be considered in Physics and tried to scientifically explain spiritist phenomena.

vogue... 'vague'
???

Page 592

upside-down triangles
Also Pléiade p538. In mathematics that would be the operator del Wikipedia. Since pre-history and across most cultures the upside-down triangle is a symbol for the female (genitals).

screamingly obvious fallacy in this . . . "proof" of yours
Yashmeen reacts in a slight panic to Kit's threat (page 591).

metallic banging'

"metric interval"
In Euclidean (three-dimensional) space a distance is just what you think it is. In other geometrical systems the term "metric interval" is preferred as a generalized distance.

Prinzenstrasse and Weenderstrasse
A street corner at the very center of Göttingen (Google Maps), "known to mathematicians here as the origin of the city of Göttingen's coordinate system".

Page 593

twenty marks
???

der Pistolenheld
German: the pistol hero.

das Nichtharmonischestrahlenbündel
Or das nichtharmonische Strahlenbündel. German: the anharmonic pencil. A "pencil" is the set of lines passing through a point.

Latin... Euler
???

Mathematical Theory of the Top
Published in the U.S. in 1897. Compare Felix Klein and Arnold Sommerfeld, Über die Theorie des Kreisels, 4 volumes, 1897-1910.

Leopold Kronecker and Cantor
The "monumental quarrel between Kronecker and Cantor" is also referred to as a "religious war," appropriately enough. It's based in a disagreement over the legitimacy of numbers. Kronecker held that "'the positive integers were created by God, and all else is the work of man.'" This is contradicted by "'Cantor with his Kontinuum, professing an equally strong belief in just those regions, infinitely divisible, which lie between the whole numbers so demanding of all Kronecker's devotion.'"

The disagreement between the two mathematicians is reminiscent of (or does it anticipate?) the rift between Pointsman and Mexico in Gravity's Rainbow. Kronecker's integers "created by God" have become a Pavlovian digital binary for Pointsman, but the two oppositions track faithfully right down to the italicized "between."

"The young statistician [Mexico] is devoted to number and to method, not table-rapping or wishful thinking. But in the domain of zero to one, not-something to something, Pointsman can only possess the zero and the one. He cannot, like Mexico, survive anyplace in between. Like his master I. P. Pavlov before him, he imagines the cortex of the brain as a mosaic of tiny on/off elements.... But to Mexico belongs the domain between zero and one." [Page 55]

It should be noted, however, that the continuous number line was a modern innovation. In Greek number theory, a number is a collection of indivisible units. Irrationals, such as the square root of 2 are not numbers but "magnitudes." One is not even a number for it is not a number of units. There are no negative numbers as well. (see Klein's Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra.) So Kronecker's position may be less of a crazy innovation as much as a maintenance of ancient theory.

(That last paragraph makes an excellent point. --Volver 19:45, 9 January 2007 (PST))

Kontinuum
This passage closely parallels the one about the "microcosm of Venice" on page 575.

Page 599

Nervenklinik
German: nerve clinic. Three-dollar word for a mental hospital.

boundless epsilonic world
???

Der Finsterzwerg
The choice of the tavern "The Dwarf of Darkness" may have been meant as a dig at five-foot-tall Kronecker.

chloral hydrate
A/k/a "knockout drops" a/k/a a "Mickey Finn". Hence the Mickifest. Wikipedia entry.

Kneipe
German: dive.

Gauss passing to Weber a remark
???

crisis in mathematics . . . Weierstrass functions, Cantor's continuum, Russell's inexhaustible capacity for mischief
A genuine crisis as well-established ideas were challenged. Weierstrass functions have the unheard-of property that they are "continuous but nowhere differentiable." Cantor's ideas about the continuum violated a longstanding prohibition against infinite quantities. Bertrand Russell around this time was setting the cat among the pigeons by identifying paradoxes and inconsistencies in set theory and number theory.

"the infinite" was all but a conjuror's convenience
There is a very good book relating how the infinite, between the 18th and early 20th centuries, finally found a place in mathematics: In Search of Infinity by N.Ya. Vilenkin (translated by Abe Shenitzer).

Page 595

That winter, in St. Petersburg
22 Jan 1905 Wikipedia

Black Hundreds
Anti-Semitic vigilantes.

Japanese won
05 September 1905. Wikipedia

Muslim rebellion
???

the year that followed
???

Peter and Paul Fortress
At St. Petersburg, established by Peter the Great. Political prisoners were confined there from the first half of the 1700s. Conditions were notoriously harsh.

kazatsky
A Cossack dance, stereotypical Russian behavior.

Waziristan
???

Page 596

as-ever transcendentally interesting hair
???

'gen'
Slang term for "genuine" maybe? Maybe; it means solid information.

a soul impaled . . . as if to bisect me
Harks back to the fate of La Jarretière in V.

Afghani dirhan
An Afghani coin, more usually transliterated as "dirham". This site has pictures and more information.

Ghaznivid Empire
Usually transliterated as Ghaznavid Empire (Wikipedia)

coffee scion
Coffee motif.

Günther von Quassel
"quasseln" is a German verb, meaning roughly "to jabber"

less than universally respected Ludwig Boltzmann
Boltzmann proposed an explanation of thermodynamics based on the statistical behaviour of atoms. Many influential colleagues at the time did not believe in the reality of atoms and thus worked to discredit Boltzmann.

Page 597

Gymnasium child
A Gymnasium is a German secondary school

Ach, die Zetamanie
German: Oh, the zeta-mania.

one measure of the chaos
Cf GR on entropy?

Göttingen tradition
???

statue
???

Rathaus square
The square in front of City Hall.

Page 598

Axioms of Zermelo
The basic axioms of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory.

Poincaré
Henri Poincaré (Wikipedia)

Cauchy
Augustin Louis Cauchy (Wikipedia)

Whittaker and Watson
A standard mathematics textbook of the time (Wikipedia)

two point one
(Cf Sondheim lyric.)

Page 599

"What here is he doing?" . . . "Obviously, we must now a duel fight."
In keeping with his name (see p. 596 annotations), Günther speaks in a stage-German accent.

dueling-society cap
Probably student corporation insignia.

Liebchen
German, "sweetheart"

Egal was, meine Schatze
German, "No matter what, my darling" - though "meine Schatze" is an improper femininization, which ought to be "mein Schatz".

Schläger
A specialized weapon for student duels. See Wikipedia's Academic fencing article.

Krummsäbel
German, "scimitar".

Korbrapier
A rapier with a basket ("Korb" in German) like protection hilt.

épée
A sharp-pointed duelling sword.

Page 600

Colt six-shooters
I guess Kit's luggage beat him to Gottingen.

Verbindung
German: connection, union. Here the student corps one belongs to.

upon the face of the other, to inscribe one's mark
In several of his movies, the actor Erich von Stroheim appeared with a nasty scar on the left side of his face. Dueling was a pastime of honor at some universities, and the sword scar was the mark of having sustained one's honor there. Special weapons, masks and inflaming treatments were employed to produce this lifelong disfigurement.

a Mexican tilde
The wavy mark over the letter ñ in Spanish.

restoring moment, elastic constants
???

wasn't going to converge . . . skipped a step . . . divided by zero
Kit insults Günther by pointing out blunders in the proof he gave to Yashmeen.

Geheimrat Hilbert
German: confidential counsellor. A title of honor given to prominent civilian figures in Germany.

Page 601

Ehrenkodex
German, "code of honor"

Tyrolean hats
Images

Schnurrbartbinde
A device to keep one's mustache safe from entanglement when sleeping, like this.

Zeiss "Palmos Panoram"
An early panoramic camera, mentioned in the 1911 Britannica's Photography article.

"Auf die Mensur!"
German, "to the duel"

Andaman Islands
Here's a mention of tattooing practices in the Andaman Islands

Stephanie du Motel... group-theory godfather Évariste Galois
Évariste Galois died in a duel at the age of 20. Though much confusion surrounds the affair, it is suspected that he provoked the duel after being rejected by one Stéphanie-Felice du Motel. (Wikipedia)

Page 602

young Ouspensky
Peter D. Ouspensky (1878-1947), Russian mystic and philosopher, author of The Fourth Dimension, appropriate to Pynchon's themes in ATD. Wikipedia entry.

Chong
???

"The what?"
(Precipitous drop in authorial expectations?)

Sidney... Kensington Sid
???

transtriadic
Beyond the three.

Page 603

"Spiritual... At Göttingen?"
???

Applied Mechanics Institute
An institute of the University of Göttingen

Prandtl's recent discovery of the boundary layer
Ludwig Prandtl (Wikipedia) in 1904 developed the theory of the boundary layer (Wikipedia) in aerodynamics, greatly simplifying aerodynamic calculations.

powered flight . . . at the edge of history
In 1905 already a reality, but the pioneering empirical work was taking place in Ohio, not Germany.

brambled guttie
A proto golf-ball, see here.

Bürgerstrasse
German, "Citizen's Street", a street in Göttingen.

Brauweg
German, "Brewery Way", a street in Göttingen.

Zhukovsky's Transformation
The Joukowsky Transform maps the unit circle in the complex plane to a shape very much like an airfoil.

glass of tea
(Why not 'cup'?)because in Europe, as sopposed to in England, tea may be drunk from glassware.

draw pictures . . . flights of arrows . . . vectors without pictures
Vectors can be visualized as arrows in a plane or three-dimensional space; more generally they can be represented as arrays of coefficients, and now they are not limited to three dimensions.

"...according to Spiral Theory, up to infinity."
"And beyond, " added Gunther, nodding earnestly.
Reference to Buzz Lightyear's stock character phrase in 1995's TOY STORY (Pixar/Disney): "To Infinity... and Beyond!" --Btchakir 07:43, 19 December 2006 (PST)

Page 604

nontrivial zeroes
The Riemann zeta function has two classes of zeros, the trivial zeroes being at negative even integers (-2, -4...), the non-trivial complex numbers, believed (but not proven) to have Re(z)=1/2. See Wikipedia.

much-noted talk
At the 1900 International Congress of Mathematicians in Paris, Hilbert proposed a research programme of 23 problems. The Riemann hypothesis is number 8 on the list.

eigenvalues
Wikipedia Dudley Eigenvalue, D.D.S., was a character in V.

Hermitian operator
Wikipedia

spine of reality... "Rückgrat von Wirklichkeit"
Probably a reference to the main diagonal of a Hermitian matrix, which can contain only real numbers. The German phrase is one accurate way to translate the English.

Hilbert-Polya Conjecture
The conjecture that the zeroes of the Riemann function would be the eigenvalues of a Hermitian operator, just what Yashmeen is suggesting.

Page 605

Vance Aychrome
The voracious detective is a stock figure in the mystery genre (Nero Wolfe, Mycroft Holmes, Inspector Dover, D.C.I. Dalziel and others).

Full English Breakfast
Bacon, eggs, tomato, toast... otherwise know as a fry-up.

Pythagorean dietary
(Possible missing word?)

kippers and bloaters
Different words (both Scottish) for smoked herrings

baps
soft bread rolls - another Scottish word

Spong machine
Appropriate technology. An English-made hand-cranked coffee grinder that doesn't light up, lacks a readout to tell when the beans are ready, and signally fails to function before the user wakes up. Only drawback is that some spouses compare its sound to half a load of cobbles being dumped on the roof.

thinned
From full 78. Wikipedia

vegetarian haggis
It exists: Google search

Page 606

Lamont Replevin
"Replevin" is a legal term for a form of civil action to recover possession of property being wrongfully held by another.

Elflock Villa
???

Stuffed Edge, Herts
An imaginary village in the South-East English county of Hertfordshire

kedgeree
A hot breakfast dish of fish, rice, and eggs.

Cesare Lombroso
???

Trans-Oxanian
???

Graeco-Buddhist
???

bad hats
A bad hat is a slang term for a rascal

Page 607

Gas Office
???

communication by means of coal-gas
Cf Nabokov's "Ada". Also inverse of Tesla's energy-transmitter. A parallel to the Tristero, too.

bombs... Suffragettes
(Did they bomb post offices?!?)

Pashto
???

Tadjik
???

Seven Dials
In Covent Garden, London - a place where 7 roads meet. An unsavory assignment for a policeman.

Page 608

"Avoid beans"
Pythagoreans follow a proscription against eating beans.

spotted dick
A suet pudding with raisins or currants

Yarmouth bloater
A cured herring from the port town of Yarmouth.

'shape'
???

blue lamps
Traditionally hung outside police stations in England.

lamé surfaces
???

yarmulke... high crown... dented Trilby style
???

Page 609

Kelly's Suburban Dictionary
The peerless London A to Z did not come along until the 1930s.

wenlets
Politician and journalist William Cobbett (1763-1835) called London "the great wen." It was not a compliment, because wen means a sebaceous cyst. Wenlets are small versions of the "great" wen.

Page 610

daylight oil
???

refused to dim
(Nicely vivid.)

Vontz's Universal Pick
???

alchemized coke
???

Lincrusta-Walton
???

hipshot
???

scalene polygons
Polygons with sides of unequal length.

jet
???

Apotheosis Sparkless Torch
???

Page 611

magnalium
An alloy of magnesium and aluminum.

The Slow and the Stupefied
Daytime soap 'The Young and the Restless'.

gas-head
Cf pothead, acidhead, etc.

Pike's Peak
Lew's old stompinground.

Gus Swallowfield
???

most theft policies
(Fact?)

pantechnicon
A closed van or carryall. (Is TRP trying to put a burr under S. Weisenburger's saddle by bringing this vehicle back? SW's gloss in the GR Companion, at page 19 of the Viking edition, is famously wrong.)

legitimate bill of sale
???

Page 612

Pavonazzetto
???

Phrygian marble
Phrygia is an ancient region of west central Asia Minor, to the south of Bithynia. Marble from there was highly valued.

Atys... Agdistis
???

The Mutilation of Atys
No images: Google image search

Arturo Naunt
???

shocking the bourgeoisie
A popular pastime for young and not-so-young soi-disant radicals ("Epater le bourgeois").

koumiss vessel
???

wrathful deities from Tantric Buddhism
???

Page 613

tiny German hand camera
???

raw light
???

Gasophilia
???

Schwärmer
???

Chidambaram
???

Akaša
???

Atman
???

'Chaos'
???

van Helmont
???

stridently unpopulated
Cf p610.

Annotation Index

Part One: The Light Over the Ranges	1-25, 26-56, 57-80, 81-96, 97-118
Part Two: Iceland Spar	119-148, 149-170, 171-198, 199-218, 219-242, 243-272, 273-295, 296-317, 318-335, 336-357, 358-373, 374-396, 397-428
Part Three: Bilocations	429-459, 460-488, 489-524, 525-556, 557-587, 588-614, 615-643, 644-677, 678-694
Part Four: Against the Day	695-723, 724-747, 748-767, 768-791, 792-820, 821-848, 849-863, 864-891, 892-918, 919-945, 946-975, 976-999, 1000-1017, 1018-1039, 1040-1062
Part Five: Rue du Départ	1063-1085