Florentin Smarandache (1954 - )
Poet, playwright, novelist, writer of prose, tales for children,
translator from many languages, experimental painter, philosopher,
physicist, mathematician1 whose life under the inherent
contradictions of Romanian Stalinism saw him become a paradoxist.
Florentin Smarandache was born December 10, 1954, the only child of a
peasant couple in Balcesti, Valcea, Romania. He graduated in
mathematics from the university at Craiova in 1979, and, after a
short time of working as a software engineer, became first a
mathematics teacher and later a professor in Romania and in
Morocco. However, it was not long before Smarandache, like many
educated Romanians, found himself drawing attention from
Nicolae Ceausescu's totalitarian regime. Matters came to a head in
1986, when he was refused permission to attend the
International Congress of Mathematicians at the
University of California, Berkeley. Smarandache then published a letter
in the Notices of the American Mathematical Society (AMS), highlighting that
his problem was shared by many scientists around the world; they
were not free to travel to further their careers or meet with other
members of the international scientific community. Smarandache became a
dissident and went on hunger strike, which did produce a reaction from the goverment - Smarandache lost his job. For the next two years, he was unable to get work in
Romania, and barely scraped a living giving private tuition to
students. He was no longer able to publish in Romania, so attempted to
get his papers to the outside world through the French School in
Bucharest or even requesting tourists to smuggle them. Many were
discovered by the secret police.
Smarandache realized that he had little choice but to flee Romania.
In 1988, after burying a metal box containing many of his papers
near a peach tree in his parents' vineyard, he escaped to the
political refugee camps in Turkey, leaving behind his seven year
old son Mihai, and his wife who was then pregnant with their second
child. He found work in Turkey in the construction industry,
scavenging, and as a house painter among
others, until finally emigrating to the United States of America in
March 1990, where he was finally reunited with his family two years later, seeing
his second son Silviu for the first time at two and a half years old.
He initially began working in the US as a software engineer for
Honeywell, followed by an adjunct professorship at a community
college which led to him becoming an assistant professor at the
University of New Mexico on the Gallup campus
in 1997. He was promoted to Associate Professor of Mathematics in
2003.
America, nation of every contradiction,
mother of the stateless, deserters, the misfits
forever exiles in themselves.
Florentin Smarandache, Arizona, 1990. From Florentin
Smarandache: In Seven Languages2
Dr. Smarandache has a reputation as one of the most prolific
authors, not only in his chosen field of mathematics, but also in the
world of theoretical physics. It is perhaps more surprising though
to see he is also known for literature and art. He is fluent in
Romanian, English, and French, and his publications have
appeared in journals all over the world. No matter the topic,
Florentin Smarandache's work has an identity of its own,
unconventional and often confrontational, but always with a common
thread - unusually gifted with lateral thinking and blessed with a
love of the paradox. He has appeared in the
Guinness Book of World Records, after publishing twenty books
in the year 2000. The Smarandache Notions Journal constantly seeks
articles from diverse authors considering any of the wide range of
subjects he has studied.
And that metal box under the peach tree? Smarandache was able to
return after the Ceausescu regime was overthrown, and recover it,
although the papers in it constituted a mere fraction of his work while in
Romania, much of which has been lost forever.
Mathematics
Smarandache's name can be found attached to many concepts in
mathematics. He investigated a function in 1990 which has since come
to bear his name, although it had been studied by authors such as
Édouard Lucas over a century before. The Smarandache function
μ(n) considers the smallest number m for which n divides m
factorial. However, there are many other number sequences that
bear his name, or are considered "Smarandache-like". Many of these
sequences are constructional, produced by simple definitions but seem
to lack existing mathematical tools for analysis. An example is the
blastoff number sequence (more correctly called the "reversed
Smarandache concatenated numbers")
1, 21, 321, 4321, 54321, .... 10987654321, 1110987654321, ...
which, though easy to describe, is notoriously difficult to analyse
(because the individual
decimal representations of numbers have
different numbers of digits, there appears to be no
formula).
Sequences like this are fertile ground for
researchers and
recreational mathematics alike. Many of these concepts are well
within the grasp of enthusiastic
amateurs, who can often find their
number theory work published in the
Smarandache Notions Journal.
Geometry (or even anti-geometry) is also an area studied
extensively by Smarandache and his peers. Smarandache commented on the
parallel axiom of Euclidean geometry, and concluded just as many
authors have that the parallel postulate could be replaced to give
non-Euclidean geometry. However, Smarandache continued further, and
allowed replacement of any, or even all, of the axioms, even with
complete opposites. Every possible choice of axioms produces a
framework for theorem proving.
Logic and set theory have also been studied by Dr. Smarandache,
where his concept of neutrosophy allows analysis of concepts such as
fuzzy logic. Instead of restricting membership of a set to a "true" or
"false", or measurement of a probability to be some number between 0
and 1, Smarandache includes a notion of indeterminacy, and builds a
complete theory on top of this.
Physics
It seems a logical progression then that, along with his work on
indeterminates in mathematics, Smarandache has studied the
uncertain subject of
quantum mechanics. In particular, Smarandache is associated with
four quantum paradoxes that follow when applying the Sorites
paradox at the particle level:
- Invisibility. That a collection of invisible particles is at
some time visible.
- Uncertainty. That small particles, governed by the
Heisenberg uncertainty principle, can be assembled into large
matter, that is deterministic.
- Instability. That stable matter is formed from unstable
particles.
- Short Living. That long-living matter is made up of
short-living elementary particles.
Considerably more controversy is attracted to Florentin Smarandache
however by his promotion of the hypothesis that there is no
speed limit in the Universe. Albert Einstein's
Theory of Relativity had followed from the assumption that the
speed of light were constant, and that nothing could be accelerated
beyond it, furthermore, no effect of an action could propagate at
superluminal velocities. However, certain effects such as
quantum entanglement seem to allow such transmission of information,
apparently faster than light. Many authors have tried to unify the
predictions of relativity with the phenomenon of
quantum non-locality, while authors such as Smarandache suggest
there is no reason they have to, and quantum effects may be independent
or even contradictory to those predicted by relativity. Smarandache
has experienced some difficulties getting papers that challenge
relativity into print, to the point where he has claimed the existence
of an international mafia in science3 that defends
relativity much like classical mechanics before it.
Friend, what is the speed of light?
I don't know neither the speed of the light,
nor the speed of the darkness.
Florentin Smarandache, Vreme de Saga (Time for
Jokes)4
Literature
It is often unusual to find a scientist that also attains
considerable critical acclaim as a poet or playwright, but
Florentin Smarandache has achieved precisely that. In 1980, he founded
the Paradoxism movement with several other young Romanian writers.
Much like Dadaism (and fellow Romanian Tristan Tzara), the
Paradoxism movement aimed for "non-literature" through surrealism
and through every possible self-contradiction in language, such as the
oxymoron and, of course, the paradox. Among other things, the work
symbolizes the contradictions of the system that published it, which
claimed freedom while the Romanian people were certainly under
oppression. It certainly did not hurt that the regime could not
claim the abstract nature of the works contained anything political. Smarandache himself received literary prizes in Romania in
1981 and 1982, and his work received international attention in
the 1990s, culminating in a nomination for the
Nobel Prize in Literature in 1999.
Smarandache's poetry is typically short and simple on the surface,
often a one liner but occasionally using other familiar structures
such as the haiku to great effect. The paradoxism is present both at
the small level and the entire level of the work, and manages to
incorporate a great deal of food for thought. Furthermore,
Smarandache's poetry crosses cultural boundaries very well (after all,
a paradox remains a paradox, no matter the language), and has been
translated into several languages aside from the Romanian, French, and
English that the author writes in. Most notable translations have
included Esperanto, and, particularly in the light of
important world events, Arabic.
Smarandache has also written for theatre as well, where, in a
paradoxical twist that he himself no doubt respects, some of his work
that may confuse adults is very appealing for children. His trilogy
Trickster's Famous Deeds manages to combine Romanian
folklore, contemporary situations, and science fiction, and
is targeted at children of primary school or elementary school ages.
At the other extreme, Smarandache has penned some avant-garde plays
that experiment with the medium. In An Upside-Down World, the
individual scenes are written to be rearranged into any of billions
of possible permutations, each yielding a different story. The
Country of The Animals includes no dialogue, and was awarded at the
International Theatrical Festival of Casablanca in 1995.
Art, or is it?
Florentin Smarandache has also applied his paradoxist outlook to
the art world as well. He made a somewhat tongue-in-cheek
observation that schools of modern art such as Neo-Dada could make
claims that "anything could be art", and therefore Smarandache came
up with Outer-Art, pushing this to its logical extreme with the
manifesto of making art as ugly as possible, as wrong as possible,
or as bad as possible... and, generally speaking, as impossible as
possible!5 to such an extent that the modern art experts would
interpret as... extraordinary(!)5.
His Outer-Art experiments have, understandably, produced quite a
wide range of responses. The moderator of the "goodart"
eGroup was incited to incinerate the first album
of Outer-Art by the group's members, something which Smarandache claims
to be twice proud for!5. Others, meanwhile, may
study it and see, much like Smarandache's poetry, there is more than
meets the eye. He has certainly achieved his paradox - someone who
specifically claims no artistic skills, with the aim of producing the
worst art possible, has his art works on display in The Florentin
Smarandache Papers special collections at Arizona State University,
the state university in Austin, Texas, in his native Romania in the
national archives and literary museum, and the Musee de Bergerac
in France.
Conclusion
Probably the best summary of Florentin Smarandache comes from the man
himself, in his own words. These seem to sum up the paradoxical nature
of his work, but as with all his poetry, there is more to them than meets the eye.
Look for solutions from problems.
Look for problems from solutions.
Florentin Smarandache, Cantece de Mahala (Suburban
Songs)6
Sources
1 Smarandache, F. Autobiographical Profile,
http://www.ad-astra.ro/whoswho/view_profile.php?user_id=91&lang=en ,
viewed on July 20, 2005.
2 Smarandache, F. In Seven Languages,
reviewed in the New Hope International Review On-Line,
http://www.nhi.clara.net/bs0038.htm ,
viewed on July 20, 2005.
3 Smarandache, F. Letter of Florentin Smarandache,
http://archivefreedom.org/freedom/Smarandache.html ,
viewed on July 20, 2005.
4 Smarandache, F. Vreme de Saga,
reviewed in the New Hope International Review On-Line,
http://www.nhi.clara.net/bs0038.htm ,
viewed on July 20, 2005.
5 Smarandache, F. A Manifesto and Anti-Manifesto for OUTER-ART,
http://www.agonia.net/index.php/article/62582/index.html ,
viewed on July 20, 2005.
6 Smarandache, F. Cantece de Mahala,
reviewed in the New Hope International Review On-Line,
http://www.nhi.clara.net/bs0038.htm
viewed on July 20, 2005.
Weisstein, Eric W., et al. Smarandache Function.
From MathWorld--A Wolfram Web Resource.
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/SmarandacheFunction.html ,
viewed on July 20, 2005.
De Geest, P. All the prime factors of the Reversed
Smarandache Concatenated Numbers up to the first not factored,
http://www.worldofnumbers.com/revfact.htm ,
viewed on July 20, 2005.
Asalt Association, Outer Art,
http://asalt.tripod.com/g_smara01.htm ,
viewed on July 20, 2005.
Carr, S. et al. Smarandache Notions Journal,
http://www.gallup.unm.edu/~smarandache/ , viewed on July 20, 2005.
Includes selected articles below.
Niculescu, G. (editor). Quantum Smarandache Paradoxes,
Smarandache Notions Journal.
Smarandache. F. There Is No Speed Barrier In The Universe,
Smarandache Notions Journal
Vasilu. F. Florentin Smarandache, a poet with the Dot under the i,
Smarandache Notions Journal