Home, Cambridge, Paris: A Family

Abstract

As a philosopher of mathematics and science, I have been teaching at the Pennsylvania State University for almost 40 years, and interacting with colleagues at the University of Paris, the University of Rome, the University of London, Cambridge University, Hebrew University and the Leibniz Archives and the University of Hannover. My philosophical focus was always on the growth of knowledge, the creativity of mathematics and the sciences, with issues of proof and justification lurking in the background. I have been especially interested in the way that mathematicians establish correlations and productive ambiguities that link different fields, as well as combining mathematics with the sciences: how do these correlations develop and how do they falter? I have studied the way that mathematical models link the world and formal discourse; how mathematicians make the infinite and the infinitesimal tractable; and how symmetry and periodicity are given mathematical expression, as they are encountered in the world. My historical studies extend generally from around 1600 to the present, in mathematics, though my historical interests in philosophy go further back, to Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle, late antiquity and the Middle Ages. As a literary critic, I have found the same habits of mind that drive mathematical discovery in works of poetry. As a poet, I have also noticed that the vocabulary of mathematics, science and philosophy finds its way into my poems, even when I am writing about everyday matters, matters of the heart. During the same period, I married the medievalist Robert R. Edwards, and raised four children on the outskirts of a college town, re-creating for them the house of childhood and haphazardly cultivating a back yard that really is a middle term between the town and the wild. Between the trees, we see fields of soy and corn, and then the line of the Tussey Ridge, beyond which stretch hundreds of miles of forest.