3 ms·
Simone Weil gets good coverage on HN. Last year I bought a biography of her after reading a thread on HN. She was an interesting character.
by mark_l_watson 6y ago
Simone Weil gets good coverage on HN. Last year I bought a biography of her after reading a thread on HN. She was an interesting character.
- dang 6y agoWhich biography? I read Petrement's bio of her a long time ago (they were school friends IIRC). Her older brother was André Weil of course. As a kid she decided she would never have the talent to be a mathematician because he was so good at it... talk about sample bias. The philosopher George Grant said something like (paraphrasing) "that family had intellectual culture on a level undreamt of in North America". There's a lovely article about the family by André's daughter here: My Father André Weil (2018) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24492000 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24492000 - Sept 2020 (7 comments)
- elric 6y ago"On the abolition of all political parties" is well worth the read. It paints a rather bleak picture of party politics, but when seen through 21st century eyes, it's eerily prophetic.