"On Exactitude in Science" or "On Rigor in Science" (the original Spanish-language title is "Del rigor en la ciencia") is a one-paragraph short story by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, written in the form of a literary forgery. This article is about the international language known as Spanish. ... This article is in need of attention. ... Jorge Luis Borges (bôr′hĕs) (/ˈxoɾ.xe luˈis ˈboɾ.xes/ in IPA) (August 24, 1899 – June 14, 1986) was an Argentine writer who is considered to be one of the foremost writers of the 20th century. ... Adolfo Bioy Casares (September 15, 1914 - March 18, 1999) was an Argentine fiction writer. ... Forgery is the process of making or adapting objects or documents (see false document), with the intention to deceive (fraud is the use of objects obtained through forgery). ...

Plot

The story elaborates on a conceit in Lewis Carroll's Sylvie and Bruno: a fictional map that had "the scale of a mile to the mile." One of Carroll's characters notes some practical difficulties with this map and states that "we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well." Photograph of Lewis Carroll taken by himself, with assistance Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (January 27, 1832 – January 14, 1898), better known by the pen name Lewis Carroll, was a British author, mathematician, logician, Anglican clergyman and photographer. ... Harry Furniss title illustration for Sylvie and Bruno Concluded Sylvie and Bruno, first published in 1889, and its 1893 follow-up Sylvie and Bruno Concluded form the last novel by Lewis Carroll published during his lifetime. ... A map of the world by Johannes Kepler A map is a simplified depiction of a space, a navigational aid which highlights relations between objects within that space. ...

The Borges/Casares story, credited falsely as a quotation from "Suarez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658", imagines an empire where the science of cartography becomes so exact that only a map on the same scale as the empire itself will suffice. "Succeeding Generations... came to judge a map of such Magnitude cumbersome... In the western Deserts, tattered Fragments of the Map are still to be found, Sheltering an occasional Beast or beggar..." [1] Cartography or mapmaking (in Greek chartis = map and graphein = write) is the study and practice of making maps or globes. ...

Publication History

The story was first published in the March 1946 edition of Los Anales de Buenos Aires, año 1, no. 3 under the pseudonym B. Lynch Davis, and was collected later that year in the 1946 second Argentinian edition of Borges's Historia Universal de la Infamia (A Universal History of Infamy). [2] The names "B. Lynch Davis" and "Suarez Miranda" would be combined later that year to form another pseudonym, B. Suarez Lynch, under which Borges and Bioy Casares published Un modelo para la muerte, a collection of detective fiction. A pseudonym (Greek: false name) is a fictitious name used by an individual as an alternative to their legal name (whereas an allonym is the name of another actual person assumed by one person in authorship of a work of art; e. ... 1946 was a common year starting on Tuesday. ...

External links

The story is readily available in its entirety online:

• Translation by Andrew Hurley
• Another Translation by Norman Thomas de Giovanni. This is the translation quoted above; it is published in A Universal History of Infamy (ISBN 0140039597).

• Original Audio "On Rigor in Science"(voice of Jorge Luis Borges)