Tag: Sylvia Karasu
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Pursuing “conclusions infinite”: The divine inspiration of Georg Cantor
Sylvia KarasuNew York, New York, United States There is a “fine line between brilliance and madness”: the distinction, for example, between a “revolutionary” mathematical theory and psychotic thinking may well have to do with what can be done with the theory, i.e., its “significant results.”1 “The mentally ill mathematician” is like the “knight errant, mortified…
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The madness of hunger
Sylvia KarasuNew York City, New York, USA Erysichthon was arrogant and contemptuous of the gods, so Ovid tells us in Book VIII of his Metamorphoses.1 Despite clear warnings, and acting with “pure malice,”2 he chopped down Ceres’ beloved oak. The enormous tree, closely identified with Ceres herself, groaned aloud as blood gushed from its “wounded…
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“I shouldn’t know you again if we did meet”: prosopagnosia
Sylvia KarasuNew York City, New York, United States Watching Black Narcissus, the eerily unsettling film1 about an order of nuns cloistered in an isolated, windswept convent perched within the Himalayas, I am struggling to differentiate one nun from another. I see the nuns’ faces clearly but their hair is not visible. Hair is the first…
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About face: From revulsion to compassion
Sylvia R. KarasuNew York City, New York, United States “I was too ugly to go to school,” writes Lucy Grealy in her painful memoir Autobiography of a Face.1 At the age of nine, Grealy was diagnosed with a rare Ewing’s sarcoma of her jaw that necessitated disfiguring surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. “I was my face,”…