Symbolic ILLogic

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Tech Market 1980s:

VR holding his newborn son in his arms and his elder son Sri Raam (3) tagging along.

N: What is the name you gave your second son?

VR: Shiva

N: Not Lakshman?

VR: No, thanx!

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That about sums up the wariness of Pure Mathematicians (as against the Impure ones like at IIT KGP) falling into a serial trap while naming the elements of a newly discovered set.

My Math Teacher at our University used to tell us that he would never name his elements a, b, c,...but k, p, d,...in a random disorderly fashion.

VR was a Chemical Engineer though...had he named his first son Duryodhan, you wouldn't catch him naming his second as Dushasan...no way...

Mankind has a weakness for symbols and names. For a variety of reasons.

Take the Indian Flag (Tricolor or Tiranga).

Listen to our Philosopher-President S. Radhakrishnan explaining the meaning of the three colors and the wheel:

"...Bhagwa or the saffron colour denotes renunciation or disinterestedness. Our leaders must be indifferent to material gains and dedicate themselves to their work. The white in the centre is light, the path of truth to guide our conduct. The green shows our relation to (the) soil, our relation to the plant life here, on which all other life depends. The "Ashoka Chakra" in the centre of the white is the wheel of the law of dharma. Truth or satya, dharma or virtue ought to be the controlling principle of those who work under this flag. Again, the wheel denotes motion. There is death in stagnation. There is life in movement. India should no more resist change, it must move and go forward. The wheel represents the dynamism of a peaceful change...."

...........Wikipedia

But our Social Studies Teacher in our High School, Raghava Rao, used to dictate something like that as the right Answer to the Question; but wink and say:

"Everyone knows that the Saffron is to appease Hindus, White Christians, Green Muslims and the Blue Wheel Buddhists...but don't tell anyone that I told you this!"

Just look at the variety of dress codes and facial and occipital hairdos of various religions. Just terrific. All of them must be symbolic of something or the other I guess. And in each, there are a hundred variations.

The fact is that although at the Big Bang absolute Unity and Unification may have prevailed, right now on the rind of this planet, it is Variety that rules us and we better celebrate it.

There are, I read, 1439 or so species of butterfly in India alone...I mean the winged ones, not counting the second genus of Webster:

"2 : something that resembles or suggests a butterfly; especially : a person chiefly occupied with the pursuit of pleasure"

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Around the year 2000, myself at KGP and Edwin at MIT used to chat online about everything under the sky. And being a devout enlightened Christian, he was appalled by the variety of gods we have here. A typical dialogue used to go like this:

Edwin: We see that you have a large number of cartoon-gods. How many do you have?

Me: About 3 crore at the last count. How many do you have?

Edwin: Oh, just one God

Me: Then why are there 150 odd rival denominations of Churches?

Edwin: $$$$$

I suppose each of our gods is a symbol...of something or the other; they can hardly be real in the sense of your baby whom you want to be like yourself...more or less.

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There seems to be a terrific shortage of symbols in tensor analysis though.

SDM used to smile wryly and say:

"We seem to have run out of the Greek alphabet also".

And some mathematical symbols look outright nonsense but Convention and Convenience seems to have prevailed:

All students question their Calculus Teacher:

"Why don' you cancel the 'd' in the numerator and denominator of dy/dx?"

And she would quail.

There you are! Englishmen also have a dearth of symbols:

'Quail' has to service not only for

"to recoil in dread or terror : cower quail before financial ruin — Samuel Butler †1902 >"

but also for

"any of small gallinacious birds"

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