Subject: Re: [HM] Emmy Noether at Penn?
From: Jim Reeds (reeds@research.att.com)
Date: Sun Feb 13 2000 - 09:17:04 EST
Colin McLarty asked :
> He, Freyd, wonders if some of these lectures were at Penn.
> Of course Bryn Mawr is not so far from Philadelphia is not
> so far from Bryn Mawr (and surely was on the train route
> between Princeton and Bryn Mawr).
If I parse the "Of course" sentence correctly, this asserts that as
you ride from Princeton to Philadelphia by train, you pass Bryn
Mawr. This does not square with my memory: which is that the
train line Bryn Mawr is on, an east-west commuter route, is not the
same as the line Princeton is on, a north-south intercity link.
You have to change trains.
May I offer a different explanation, based on my own linguistic
experience? When I lived in Rosemont PA (across the street from
Bryn Mawr, where my wife had a post-doc) we told our relatives and
out-of-town friends that we lived in Philadelphia. This is not
even a simplifying fib, as Bryn Mawr and so on are in the greater
Philadelphia region, as the use of figurative language,
"synedoche", where a term for the part refers to the whole, or for
the whole refers to the part. (This is legal in English speech and
letter writing.) Accordingly, "I'm taking a trip to Philadelphia"
CAN mean "I'm taking a trip to Bryn Mawr".
Of course I don't have a clue about the facts of where Noether
lectured.
--
Jim Reeds, AT&T Labs - Research
Shannon Laboratory, Room C229, Building 103
180 Park Avenue, Florham Park, NJ 07932-0971, USA
reeds@research.att.com, phone: +1 973 360 8414, fax: +1 973 360 8178
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