freakish curvatures

a demonstration of the kinship of higher mathematics to certain crochet doilies.

''he was getting an intuitive knack for solving reimannian equations, and astonished professor upham by his comprehension of fourth-dimensional and other problems which had floored the rest of the class. one afternoon there was a discussion of possible freakish curvatures in space, and of theoretical points of approach or even contact between our part of the cosmos and various other regions as distant as the farthest stars or the transgalatic gulfs themselves ...

''gilman's handling of this theme filled everyone with admiration, even though some of his hypothetical illustrations caused an increase in the always plentiful gossip about his nervous and solitary eccentricity. what made the students shake their heads was his sober theory that a man might--given mathematical knowledge admittedly beyond all likelihood of human acquirement--step deliberately from earth to any other celestial body which might lie at one of an infinity of specific points in the cosmic pattern.

''such a step he said would require only two stages; first, a passage out of three dimensional sphere we know, and second, a passage back to the three-dimensional sphere at another point, perhaps one of infinite remoteness. ... gilman could not be very clear about his reasons for this last assumption, but his haziness here was more than overbalanced by his clearness on other complex points. professor upham especially liked his demonstration of the kinship of higher mathematics to certain phases of magical lore transmitted down the ages from an ineffable antiquity--human or prehuman--whose knowledge of the cosmos and its laws was greater than ours.''

h.p.lovecraft, the dreams in the witch house.