Provoak Thoughts


The French philosopher Michel Foucault was a well known scholar who made an effort to hide reporters, journalists, and others  from the truth of his upbringing and his family. He was secretive. However, although there are scholars who prefer not to discuss other aspects of their (personal) lives, many simply are ordinary professionals doing a job. I am one who is not completely opposed to discussing aspects of my own life. That said, I shall discuss one story that one of my former professors told me. My mathematics professor shared that he used to have ambitions of becoming a violinist (* note I think of Albert Einstein who stated that he would have been a violinist if he were not a physicist). My professor had a well-known violin teacher where he grew up, in South Africa. My professor said that he was not particularly talented as a violinist and did not excel as a pupil of music. My professor recalled a story which his teacher told him “I have played (a certain piece) hundreds of times in multiple cities all over the world for years. I played it over and over, however I only truly heard the piece for the first time after I had come off stage and had some epiphany after the hundredth (or so) time that I played the piece” after my professor retells this story he ends with “and this is the same with mathematics”. I find this to be beautiful and I’m sure scholars reading this might be able to understand the feeling. I ask- ‘ can a machine ever feel the magic of music as a human being could?’ ‘Could a computer have an epiphany?’

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