It Is a Story

[Note: These pages were my rough private notes that I made in preparation for the talk I gave. Needless to say, I didn’t cover all this material in my talk. I am willing, but hesitant, to put it on the web because of three reasons, the primary one being that I haven’t yet put in proper references for any of the results cited. The second reason is that in its next draft I will be separating much of the narrative discussion from the mathematical discussion, and breaking this material into two articles, each of which will be a more expanded, and perhaps more useful, version of what is offered here. The narrative discussion will be related to a talk I hope to give at a conference on “Mathematics and Narrative,” in July of this year.]