Math Camp
This is an email that I completed on Friday, August 14, 2009 at 2:28 PM. I have done minimal editing, only making quotation marks directional, setting appropriate text in italics, replacing sequential hyphens with a dash, and activating one link.
Links relevant to the email are to photographs from the Nesin Mathematics Village itself and Tire
What I call “Math camp” is the summer school at the Nesin Mathematics Village, near the real village of Şirince, in the hills above the town of Selçuk, in the İzmir (Smyrna) province of Turkey. Three kilometers from Selçuk are the ruins of Ephesus; up in the hills is the supposed last dwelling place of the Virgin Mary. So the town gets a lot of Christian tourists. Şirince has one mosque and the ruins of two churches, the latter having served the local Greeks before the Population Exchange. Tourists come to Şirince to wander the old cobblestone streets and perhaps buy olive oil soap and fruit wine.
The math village was named for the late writer and dissident Aziz Nesin by his son Ali. Ali tries to carry on the legacy of his father, as by maintaining his father's orphanage in Istanbul, despite attempts by the state to take it over. Ali is keeping his father's books in print, and indeed these are a source of income for the orphanage. But Ali also makes a name for himself by teaching and otherwise promoting mathematics in Turkey. One way of doing this is editing a popular mathematics magazine. Another is math camp.
Ali Nesin built his Math Village in Şirince because his friend Sevan Nişan had a hotel there and had indeed helped put the village on the tourism map. The two had become friends in military prison, where they had been thrown for some kind of insubordination. Being on site, wealthy, and experienced with construction, Sevan was instrumental in getting the Math Village built. Unfortunately he and Ali now seem to have had a falling out. Sevan had already broken up with his wife Müjde, by emptying on her a jar of his own excrement. This was in the national papers, but neither member of the couple would say what had precipitated this event.
One comes to math camp for the love of mathematics. There are no examinations, no grades, and no credits. We teachers are not paid in money. It is ample payment just to live in this setting, a twenty minute walk on a dirt road from Şirince, in houses constructed from stone quarried nearby. Indeed, the stone seems to have come from the other side of a rock outcropping visible from the Math Village. Now the visible face features also a scaffolding: word is that Sevan Nişanyan is having a mausoleum for himself carved into the rock. But Ayşe thought of a possibility that one hopes is true: When the stonework is over, it might be revealed as a monument to the Armenians killed in the Genocide.
It is of course it is a pleasure to have interested students. There are currently three lecture spaces at math camp. One of them is under a permanent roof—through which, however, grows a pine tree. The two other lecture spaces are outdoors under canvas canopies. I am assigned one of the latter spaces, from 6 to 8 p.m. I had about two dozen students on Monday, but half that on Tuesday. On Wednesday, I had a dozen students again, not all the same as on Tuesday. For the second hour on Wednesday, half of the students didn't return: I heard later that they had gone instead to watch the sunset at the place (near the Mausoleum) from which the Aegean Sea is visible. Well, these students have four two-hour lectures they can listen to in a day, starting with my spouse's at 8 a.m. Almost thirty students get up to hear her talk about “Groups and geometry”: today (Friday) she derived the symmetry groups 0f the Platonic solids.
Ayşe works through the mathematics at a pace that seems slow to me. Probably it is good for me to see her do this. In my own first lecture, I gave two of Archimedes's methods of “quadrature of the parabola,” along with the definition of proportion in Euclid. My course was to be on “Non-standard Analysis,” which aims to justify Leibniz's approach to calculus. I wanted on the first day to observe that the ideas of calculus went back much earlier; plus, I was going to use the “Archimedean axiom” later in my course anyway.
Ayşe lectures in Turkish, but writes on the blackboard in English. I use English in both ways. Most students here are from English-language universities anyway. One of them is not, and cannot speak English, but still comes to my course. Last night at dinner she was asking me all about my life with Ayşe. The student's name happens also to be Ayşe. It seems I am her first opportunity to talk with a foreigner; also she wonders what her future with her own boyfriend might be. As Somerset Maugham writes in The Razor's Edge, women are always happen to listen when you discourse on love. In telling my own story, I learned that “fall in love” is not an idiom in Turkish. Also I was confused by one of the student Ayşe's questions. When I talked about the visit of my sister and her husband to Turkey 11 years ago, the student Ayşe thought they may have come, as representatives of my family, to ask Ayse's family if I could marry her.
Yesterday, Thursday, was a day off from lectures. Last year on break day, I arranged a trip for several of us to visit the ancient Ionian sites of Priene, Didyma, and Miletus. This year, Ayşe and I visited Turkish, but pre-Ottoman, sites. I had a book detailing some parts of a “Museum With No Frontiers: Islamic Art in the Mediterranean”: Early Ottoman Art: the Legacy of the Emirates. A few of the listed sites were in Tire. This town of 50,000 could be reached by dolmuş from Selçuk. We went there and found a pleasant town full of old mosques and caravansarays dating back to the 14th century. Back then, the sons of the Turkish emir Aydin were in power. Eventually the Ottomans took over, though after Tamerlane defeated Sultan Beyazit at the Battle of Ankara in 1402, the sons of Aydin came to power again for a while.
We stumbled on one caravansaray that might still be said to be in use as such. At least, it was being used to keep horses. The man there said the age of the place was unknown, though a book we found later at Tourism Information dated construction to 1525. This made it too young for our Museum With No Frontiers book. We managed to find the 15th-century caravansaray discussed there, but it was a ruin fit for nothing. However, some of the floor of the upper level was still intact, and a man invited us up. He raised chickens there. He showed us the old rope-making equipment still in use by some craftsmen, though not himself. In the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, ships were hauled over land to bypass the Greek blockade of the Golden Horn; the requisite ropes, said our host, came from Tire.
Our host gave us some hot peppers and mint that he had growing in pots. We later added these to our lunch (fresh green beans, dry beans, şakşuka, and yoğurt at an unpretentious restaurant).
The Wikipedia article on Lamartine has a long quote from the French poet in praise of Muhammad. The article doesn't mention what we learned yesterday in Tire: that Lamartine had lived there for a few years, with the support of the Ottoman sultan. We found the house, next to a parking lot designated for tour busses; but the site was in ruins and not labelled. Through a nearby gateway, we found a dairy, with cows at the trough; a man there directed us to the owner of the feed shop around the corner. We found him, sitting with his friends on chairs out on the sidewalk. The men addressed us in German and called me Hans when we walked up. They invited us to sit.
Aydın said one of his ancestors had owned Lamartine's house; now he shared ownership with two siblings and six cousins. Tea was ordered for us. Aydın was pleased to talk about life. He said he was a farmer; but I suppose he was a gentleman farmer. He observed that fuel and water were expensive, but crop prices were cheap, so he made no money; however, he didn't seem bitter or otherwise particularly upset about it. One of his sons had studied engineering in our university in Ankara and was now working for a firm in Austria. The other son stopped by and sat with us; he had visited New York and Miami, though not my home town of Washington.
Learning about the Nesin Mathematics Village, Aydin's friend Necdet told the story that we already knew: When called on to choose a last name, Ali Nesin's father Aziz observed, for example, that cowards gave themselves the name “Brave.” “What are you?” Aziz asked himself. In Turkish, that question is Nesin? We were sitting across from the Tire Museum. We hadn't been able to see its indoor archeological collection, this having been under renovation; but we could see the ethnographic collection, featuring mainly Ottoman clothing of the nineteenth century, but also a rear-view full length painting of an unclothed woman, perhaps at the bath. There was no label, and a museum worker couldn't say anything about it.
In the museum garden were stones from various eras. Many were graven with Greek letters, but one had Armenian. There were also many Turkish tombstones.
Saying goodbye to Aydın and his friends, we caught the dolmuş back to Selçuk and then Şirince. Now I shall have a siesta before the 4 p.m. class taught by one of my own former undergraduate students, who is now working on a doctorate at CUNY.
