Beautiful souls

The beautiful soul and the intellect wanes like the moon. Becoming empty, grey haired, and wrinkled it dies. 

For the harmony of the world is made manifest in Form and Number, and the heart and soul and all poetry of Natural Philosophy are embodied in the concept of mathematical beauty. 1... 

The construction of pictures has hitherto been foolishly traditional. Painters have shown us the objects and the people placed before us we shall henceforward put the spectator within the center of the picture.. .. In order to conceive and understand the novel beauties of a Futurist picture, the soul must be purified, become again pure. The eye must be freed from its veil of atavism and culture. Your eyes, accustomed to semi-darkness, will soon open to more radiant visions of light. ... 

As he remarked that I found it difficult to walk upon the lilies, roses, jasmines, carnations, tuberoses, and a prodigious variety of other flowers, most beautiful and curious to behold, which blossomed even upon the road, he inquired, with a smile, if I feared to harm those plants. I answered that I was well aware they were devoid of a sensitive soul, but seeing they were most rare in my own country, I shrank from trampling them underfoot. Then,... 

During his visit to our department in 1999,1 was quite taken by his interest in the work of synthetic inorganic chemists and spectroscopists. Frank told me he regarded himself as a theoretician for experimentalists, and hence the title of this obituary. His heart beat a little bit faster when shown a beautiful spectrum, and he could communicate this was an integral factor in his success. His series of lectures met with such applause that many entreated him, with much importunity, to write a book on the Jahn-Teller effect. He said he would give serious consideration to the matter. Sadly, this endeavour was never undertaken. In 1997, his intellectual soul-mate Mary O Brien had died. On 13 April 2001, he wrote to me thus, I surely do miss Mary, as I m sure you do too. After her death, I found that my interest in many of the questions we had pursued more or less in parallel simply crashed, and I have not been able to do much to reinvigorate them since. ... 

God in materializing Himself, to speak thus, by the Creation of the World, did not think that it was enough to have made such beautiful things, He wished to place upon it the seal of His divinity, and to manifest Himself still more perfectly by the formation of Man. To this end, He made him in His image, and in that of the World. He gave him a soul, a mind and a body and of these three things, united in the same subject, He constituted humanity. 

---