Researchers predict they’ll be able to start outsourcing more tedious sections of proofs to AI within the next few years. They’re mixed on whether AI will ever be able to prove their most important conjectures entirely: Some are willing to entertain the notion, while others think there are insurmountable technological barriers. But it’s no longer entirely out of the question that the more creative aspects of the mathematical enterprise might one day be automated.
Our tastes are influenced by what we see. Close your eyes and think about the perfect croissant, burnished and golden brown. A juicy tomato, ready to eat, vibrantly red and practically screaming, “I’m ripe!” For those of us who can see, color is one of the most powerful influences that shape our perception of food, and in turn, how it tastes.
Tara Selter runs an antiquarian books business with her husband, Thomas. They live on the outskirts of a town in northern France, although Tara often travels to book fairs here and there, as she has done – to one in Bordeaux – when her life changes. On her way home she stops in Paris to collect some books for clients. She checks in to a hotel on the evening of 17 November, keeps numerous appointments on the 18th, burns her hand while spending the evening with friends and calls Thomas from her room before going to sleep.
But the newspaper she picks up at breakfast the next day is dated the 18th. A simple mistake, she thinks, until someone in the dining room drops a slice of bread and hesitates over what to do with it, just as she watched him do the day before. She checks other newspapers at a kiosk; withdraws cash and studies the receipt; calls her husband, who doesn’t remember the previous night’s conversation. She still has the burn, but everything else she did on the 18th, including the purchasing of books, which she finds back on the shelves of the shops where she bought them, has been reset. For Tara, the 18th of November is happening again.
This would be a formidable challenge for any historian, let alone one still in his thirties. But Bouverie rises to it with aplomb. He has trawled through more than a hundred archives and researched great masses of diaries, memoirs, biographies and monographs. He writes gracefully and engagingly, and brings his subject to life with innumerable anecdotes and quotations. His judgement is level-headed, and he knows how to tell a good story. He has produced a major work of original history that is a pleasure to read.
In this way, there’s not a better time for the publication of Name; the book should be shoved in the face of every pseudo-intellectual reactionary in the New York literary scene participating in the glorification of conservatism in response to the rise of liberalism over the past decade. Debré asserts that neither the Left nor the Right is happy, that we have to strive for something different altogether. Nostalgia for tradition is a misguided attempt for comfort when what we need is the opposite: “Walk into the void, that’s it, that’s what you have to do, get rid of everything, of everything you have, of everything you know, and go toward the unknown,” she advises cosmically, opening a portal with her words.