In following a Wikipedia rabbit-trail about the stunning mathematician
Ramanujan, I came across the
Iyengar, a caste of Tamil Brahmins. Scroll down to the section "Schism," to see something similar to a classic Christian controversy. I liked the image of the cat-people versus the monkey-people.
Coincidentally, I recently read the memoir of the mathematician Ken Ono: My Search for Ramanujan: How I Learned to Count. His father, a prominent math professor whose math prowess took him from Japan to the US, decided early on that Ken would be the mathematician in the family, and subjected his son to an unrelenting barrage of math instruction with much more negative than positive feedback. Ken's mother was a Tiger mother to the nth.
ReplyDeleteFrom the Amazon blurb:
"The son of a prominent Japanese mathematician who came to the United States after World War II, Ken Ono was raised on a diet of high expectations and little praise. Rebelling against his pressure-cooker of a life, Ken determined to drop out of high school to follow his own path. To obtain his father’s approval, he invoked the biography of the famous Indian mathematical prodigy Srinivasa Ramanujan, whom his father revered, who had twice flunked out of college because of his single-minded devotion to mathematics.
No comment other than thank you for consistently great posts.
ReplyDeleteOnce you start looking it's amazing how much Gnostism you can see now.
ReplyDelete