Ah, good old Eckhart Hall, with carved reliefs of Newton and Gauss above its entrance. As well as Mathematics it once housed Astronomy - there’s an observatory in the turret at the top of the buiding. And there’s a library inside on, I believe, the second floor, where I, a mere humanist, found a congenial setting in which to read the Adventures of Don Quixote. My apartment mate, a serious mathematician, put the library to better uses than me.
It was he who told me, when he took his Ph.D. at Princeton, that John Milnor and the other worthies of that illustrious department used to say that at Chicago they liked their math to be hard but that it was not elegant, that it lacked the spirit of sprezzatura. However, no one accused it, as I believe you are slyly doing, of being trivial. Still, it’s interesting that schools have different cultures in the higher reaches of mathematics as much as they do in their undergraduate styles. In fact those differing mathematical styles seem to mimic the differing undergrad styles. Chicago has always been suspicious of things that are easy and too graceful.
I can only judge the mathematical part of this from a distance. However, it was interesting to me to note in the two new Cormac McCarthy linked novels, “The Passenger” and “Stella Maris,” that the math prodigy in those novels took all her degrees from Chicago. McCarthy was at work on them for thirteen years during which he made his intellectual home among the big STEM guns of the Santa Fe Institute and seems himself to have become something of a STEM deep-thinker. His choice of Chicago as the school to which to send his genius heroine was hardly an uninformed accident. ln fairness it should be said that this character is also a bit, well, eccentric, another reason to send her to the gothic domain of Eckhart Hall.
In your visit, Vulcan, I hope you went round to the other side of Eckhart and took a gander at Botany Pond. Many a kiss has been exchanged on the little bridge leading to the island on which the turtles sun and the mother ducks lead their broods.