“I should like to study mathematics – to know about the stars”: From Katherine HIlbery in Virginia Woolf’s “Night and Day” (1919) to Jakob Bernoulli and Thomas Pynchon

In Virginia Woolf's "Night and Day" (1919), Katherine Hilbery has a "purely imaginary dialogue" in which she hesitantly reveals "her ambition" to herself and her imaginary interlocutor: "I should like [...] to study mathematics – to know about the stars." This wish recalls something said by the Basel mathematician Jakob Bernoulli (1654-1705): "Invito patre sidera verso." I first came across Bernoulli's motto in Thomas Pynchon's "Mason & Dixon" (1997), where it is quoted in an English translation: "Against my father's wishes, I study the stars." I later used it as an epigraph to a poem I wrote for my mathematician father's 70th birthday, "Ars Conjectandi" (the title of Bernoulli's book on probability). (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 22 November 2024)