multijimbo

As I work through my backblog, I come across things I started some long time ago and meant to finish long before now.  This is one of those.  Supervillainry, the bane of James Bond and Batman, mocked by many, and yes, somehow my memories of supervillains always come back to Wile E Coyote, super genius, ever incapable of catching the Road Runner.

And so, the question now becomes, what to do. What actually to do.  Let’s suppose that I were so dissatisfied with my job that I was considering the path of supervillainry as a change of career.   An actual change of career.  Something different to do tomorrow, to wake up to tomorrow.   I am aware of the old Taoist saying, the journey of a thousand miles begins with but a single step.   But what of the second step?  The hundredth?  The thousandth or millionth?

As far as I am aware, there is no SPECTRE in the modern world.  There is no secret organisation, no arch villain, no evil super genius planning on world domination.   There is nowhere for me to apply for an entry level position.

What are my options?  The most probable option is to do nothing.  Live my life, stay on the path I currently walk along, and forget this dream of such a drastic career change.  Makes for a boring story, that.  The main character ignores the impetus to change and decides to go into the office the next day, same as always.  Not much of a readership, I expect.  Not much of a following for that line of inaction.

Or I could take the drastic decision to set up such an organisation.  So what if I were to do this. Every supervillain organisation needs to have a mission, a calling, the basic principle that underlies everything.

Though I have a fondness for doomsday devices, I don’t think they’re appropriate for the task at hand.  SPECTRE was driven by a love of money and power, particularly power, but I have no great desire for power.  Rather, I have a desire for change.  I would like the world to be different.  But which of the so many ways to be different do I want to choose?

So let’s combine 2 things.  This idea will no doubt mutate over time, as I back myself into logical corners and need to backtrack back to the safety of something that might work.  How to combine supervillainry and mathematics, that’s the challenge I set for myself.

On the very fanciful end, there is the supervillain with his Banach-Tarski machine, an idea I suspect that someone has used before now.  Or perhaps something more sedate, descending into some labyrinth of the abstract.  So is there a way to combine supervillainry and mathematics?  Let’s see what we can find.

~ by Jim Anderson on 28 February 2016.

Posted in mathematics, writing ephemera
Tags: mathematicians, supervillain