Gabriel Ferrater and Robert Musil: between science and literature

Gabriel Ferrater (1922-1972) was interested in mathematics, painting and art criticism. As a poet, he marked a before and after in Catalan poetry in just a few short years. As a translator and publishing consultant, he was influential in the Spanish publishing industry. He devoted the final years of his life to intense research in linguistics. Gabriel Ferrater and Eduard Bonet kept up an intense friendship from 1968 until the poet’s death. This 567-page book, entitled Gabriel Ferrater i Robert Musil: entre les ciències i les lletres and published by Residencia de Investigadores CISC – Generalitat de Catalunya, contains a series of reflections and stories that reveal the thinking of Gabriel Ferrater and place it in the political, cultural and intellectual context of the nineteen sixties. The book highlights Gabriel Ferrater’s mathematical background and experiences taken from his career in mathematics. It also focuses on his philosophical interests as well as the development of modern mathematics, the linguistic turn and the Neopositivism of the Viennese Circle that marked this period, and which are key to understanding his thinking. Gabriel Ferrater admired and emulated the Austrian novelist Robert Musil (1880-1942) and Ulrich, the mathematician and central character of his novel The Man without Qualities. Gabriel Ferrater collaborated with Eduard Bonet in preparing the book Finite Probability Spaces (1969), which was based on notes from statistics courses delivered at ESADE. The novel, The Man without Qualities, includes a critique of Germany’s economic leaders at the beginning of the twentieth century, an issue which is also touched upon in the book Gabriel Ferrater i Robert Musil: entre les ciències i les lletres.