Apparently I have a blog now. As you may have noticed, it's called Noctes Mathematicae (Mathematical Nights), a reference to the Noctes Atticae (Attic Nights) of Aulus Gellius. The Attic Nights is a collection of notes about a variety of topics that Gellius thought other ancient Roman scholars like himself might be interested in, and when I first started reading it I was struck by how similar it is to a modern blog1. But that, on its own, wasn't enough to make me want to name my own blog after it.
To understand my choice of title, we need to look at why Gellius decided to call his work Attic Nights:
...And since, as I have said, I began to amuse myself by assembling these notes during the long winter nights which I spent on a country-place in the land of Attica, I have therefore given them the title of Attic Nights, making no attempt to imitate the witty captions which many other writers of both languages have devised for works of this kind.2
When I first decided to create this site, I was planning to just call it "Avery's Blog", making no attempt to imitate the witty captions which many other writers have devised for their blogs. This reminded me of the excerpt above, and the idea of Gellius compiling his notes during long winter nights reminded me of my own late nights spent procrastinating on pointless projects when I should have been doing math or computer science homework. When you combine this with the fact that I like wordplay and Latin, and the fact that I plan to write about whatever disjointed topics happen to interest me, just as Gellius did, it's easy to see why the title Noctes Mathematicae is a good fit for me.
Is it ironic that my witty3 title was inspired by a passage in which Gellius explicitly denies creating a witty title? Yes. But the same might hold for Gellius' work as well. Amiel D. Vardi states that "attractive as Gellius' explanation [for choosing his title] may be, it raises some serious difficulties and should not be taken at face value," and argues that the title Attic Nights is "novel and ingenious enough to attract attention, while at the same time conveying polymathy, thereby both advertising the work and hinting at its genre."4
So, does my choice of a Latin title referencing classical literature and mentioning mathematics "convey polymathy"? Is it also "ingenious"? Am I really that pretentious? The answer to at least one of these questions is yes.
- Or, at least, my idealized view of what a blog should be. ↩
- From J. C. Rolfe's 1927 translation, now public domain, obtained from Lacus Curtius ↩
- [CITATION NEEDED] ↩
- Vardi, Amiel D. "Why Attic Nights? Or What's in a Name?." The Classical Quarterly 43.1 (1993): 298-301. jstor link ↩