| There are two kinds of weird: good weird and bad weird. This story
is the third kind. I mean, what can you say about a story in which the
Yiddishe mystic Izzy encounters
the demon spirit who created the Law of Excluded Middle (which guarantees
that Izzy's math grad student daughter in-law either is or is not pregnant)
and defeats him by using his knowledge of obscure laws relating to the
hotel trade?
There is quite a bit of discussion about Brouwer's Fixed Point Theorem,
which states that every continuous map of a topological n-ball into itself
has at least one point which is its own image. (Since continuity isn't
discussed in the story, the statements of the theorem there are not
technically true, but it's just a story for Willy's sake!) The main
focus seems to be on the fact that the Law of Excluded Middle was needed
for the proof, and that this would not have been the case but for the evil
Manichee Smith, who now wants to kill Izzy!
This story was published in Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine,
June 1996
(pp 86-106).
Izzy was introduced earlier in Herbrand's Conjecture and
the White Sox Scandal. If you haven't had enough of them yet, Izzy and company return in Hamisch in Avalon. |
