Geometry of Grief by Michael Frame

Author:Michael Frame [Frame, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: MAT000000 Mathematics / General, PSY052000 Psychology / Grief & Loss, BIO026000 Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2021-09-06T00:00:00+00:00

As this sequence of images was projected, one at a time, every person in class stared at the screen, many with mouths open. I’d hear gasps, and more than a little profanity. How did this happen? They wanted to know. Then we introduced more general transformations, combined rotation and reflection with translation and scaling. To find rules for more complicated fractals, like the one shown on the next page, is fairly straightforward after enough practice. Still, every year a dozen or so students would tell me that the ability to find the rules impeded their enjoyment of the shapes themselves. Once they learned to see fractal decompositions, the shapes lost some of their beauty.

So we see irreversibility, but would you call this grief? My students certainly didn’t. If they described their impressions at all, most said they were sad, and a few said they were annoyed that what had been a mystery was now replaced by the effort to identify reflections, rotations, and translations. These beautiful fractals had become little geometry puzzles. No grief here.

Grief requires more than irreversibility. Grief is irreversibility coupled with the emotional weight of the loss and coupled with transcendence. If the thing lost isn’t of immense importance to you, you won’t feel grief at its loss. Few, if any, of my students consider geometry to be one of the most important things in their lives.

But I do. Every new bit of geometry I learn, every door that opens in perceptual space, is accompanied by the closing of other doors. I’ve gradually realized that each of these closed doors forever blocks off a whole world of possibilities; I am unable to look at a new problem in a way unclouded by what I have previously learned. It must be this way: every bit of geometry I learn may enable me to see connections that otherwise would have gone unnoticed, but also it blinds me to connections I might have seen without that bit of geometry. For the loss of these possible worlds, I do indeed grieve. Not as much as I did at the loss of my parents or the cats I’ve outlived, but still, the loss bites, burns, and is irreversible.

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