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Stephenson:Neal:Cryptonomicon:13:ze Pine Barrens?(Alan Sinder)

(Redirected from Rudolf von Hacklheber)

This is a Cryptonomicon page for Rudolf von Hacklheber

Stephensonia

*There's no doubt who became the third wheel here -- I think the name comes from the SJSU professor and author Rudy Rucker...

“… It got Lawrence to thinking. From an evolution standpoint, what was the point of having people around who were not inclined to have offspring? There must be some good, and fairly subtle, reason for it.

The only thing he could work out was that it was groups of people--societies--rather than individual creatures, who were now trying to out-reproduce and/or kill each other, and that, in a society, there was plenty of room for someone who didn't have kids as long as he was up to something useful.

Alan and Rudy and Lawrence rode south, anyway, looking for the Pine Barrens. After a while the towns became very far apart, and the horse farms gave way to a low stubble of feeble, spiny trees that appeared to extend all the way to Florida--blocking their view, but not the head wind. "Where are the Pine Barrens I wonder?" Lawrence asked a couple of times. He even stopped at a gas station to ask someone that question. His companions began to make fun of him.

"Vere are ze Pine Barrens?" Rudy inquired, looking about quizzically.

"I should look for something rather barren-looking, with numerous pine trees," Alan mused.

There was no other traffic and so they had spread out across the road to pedal three abreast, with Alan in the middle.

"A forest, as Kafka would imagine it," Rudy muttered.

By this point Lawrence had figured out that they were, in fact, in the Pine Barrens. But he didn't know who Kafka was. "A mathematician?" he guessed.

"Zat is a scary sing to sink of," Rudy said. …”*

Authored entries

Rudolf von Hacklheber

Rudy is first introduced on page 13 as the third cyclist joining Lawrence and Alan on their outing to the Pine Barrens. Lawrence astutely concludes that "Alan's penis scheme must have finally found a taker" with Rudy. The discussion with Rudy introduces a lot of connected ideas very quickly: * Principia Mathematica, both Newton's and Russell and Whitehead's * Binary notation * Universal Language which Leibniz worked on with Daniel who worked with Wilkins * Leibniz' interest in the I Ching, which connects to Eliza * Riemann, Euler, Gödel, Einstein and Euclid.

Alan and Rudy bickeringly explain a number of deep concepts to Lawrence to help "pull him onto the train". One of the concepts is Leibniz's formula for calculating π:

\pi = 4 \sum_{n=0}^\infty \frac{(-1)^n}{2n+1}

Which would connect implicitly to Archimedes who had achieved the first theoretical (rather than measured) means of approximating π. Now Archimedes lived in Siracusa which is where the Fount of Arethusa is located. Arethusa is Rudy's cipher based on the Riemann Zeta Function which would seem to connect back to Leibniz's formula in this way:

\pi = \sqrt{6\zeta(2)} (from [planetmath])

This is a formula to find π by determining the value of the Riemann Zeta function at s = 2. So Arethusa connects the ancient world of greek mathematics with Rudy's most advanced cryptosystem which will soon baffle Alan and Lawrence.

Wikipedia:Franz Kafka excerpt

Franz Kafka (July 3, 1883 - June 3, 1924), was a novelist who was born and lived in Prague, Bohemia, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He is by English speakers generally considered neither a Czech author, since he wrote exclusively in German, nor a German author since he spent almost his entire life in Bohemia.

Kafka also links Rudy to Rudy Rucker.

The von Hacklhebers show up in The Baroque Cycle in the person of Lothar von Hacklheber.