Reason and Rhyme
"Philosophers ponder the idea of identity: what it is to give something
a name on Monday and have it respond to that name on Friday...."
-- Bernard Holland in The New York Times Monday, Ma…
Women's History Month continues... Ontology
Alignment "He had with him a small red book of Mao's poems, and as he
talked he
squared it on the table, aligned it with the table edge first
vertically and then …
Last Words (continued from St. Luke's Day,
2004) Galatians 4:4 But when the fulness of the time was come.... Luke
2:13 And suddenly there was with the angel a…
Note: Carmichael's reference is to
A. Emch, "Triple and multiple systems, their geometric configurations
and groups," Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 31 (1929), 25–42.
"There is such a thing as a tesseract."
-- A Wr…
Darkness at Noon,
continued
It turns out that Medawar (see previous entry) also wrote a deeply
hostile review of Koestler's The Act of Creation. (See Pluto's
Republic.)
There are plenty more like Medawar, so it…
A Prince of Darkness "What did he fear? It
was not a fear or dread, It was a nothing that he
knew too well. It was all a nothing and a man was a nothing too. It was
only that and light was all it needed and a certa…
A Living Church
A skeptic's remark:
"...the mind is an amazing thing and it can create patterns and
interconnections among things all day if you let it, regardless of
whether they are real connectio…
Rhinestone Cowboy By GREG RISLING Associated
Press Writer LOS ANGELES -- Singer
Buck Owens, the flashy rhinestone cowboy who shaped the sound of
country music... died Saturday. He was 76.
From Log24, Feb. 2, 2003:
…
'Nauts
(continued from
Life of the Party, March 24)
Exhibit A --
From a Princeton student
(see Activity, March 24):
Exhibit B --
From today's Sunday comics:
Exhibit C --
From a Smith studen…
Midnight in the Garden
continued
Questions posed by
Roberta Smith in the
New York Times
of Jan. 13, 2006:
"'What is art?' may be the
art world's most relentlessly asked
question. But a more pertinent on…
Built
In memory of Rolf Myller,
who died on Thursday,
March 23, 2006, at
Mount Sinai Hospital
in Manhattan:
Myller was,
according to the
New York Times, an architect
whose eclectic pursuits
includ…
Women's History Month continues...
Activity
From the New York Times on the First of May, 1999:
Combinatorics in higher mathematics is the study of permutations and
combinations of elements in finite sets. In…
Life of the Party
From Stephen King's Dreamcatcher:
From Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man:
Related material: "... it's going to be accomplished in steps, this
establishment of the Talented in the …
Dreaming Game
A phrase from yesterday's entry:
Lust und Freud. This phrase, together with the concluding song from the
recent film "Good Night and Good Luck," suggests the following links
(the first two from …
Welcome to the
Hotel Hassler The Name The Novelist"Hassler's narrative style and
implied values are old-fashioned but
solid. He acknowledges evil and portrays it convincingly...." --Library
Journal…
Happy Birthday, Hassler Whitney
In honor of the late Hassler Whitney, mathematician and mountaineer,
here is a link to the five Log24 entries ending with White, Geometric,
and Eternal (Dec. 20, 2003).
Rela…
Former President
of Dartmouth Dies
From today's New York Times:
"In one widely publicized episode, in 1988, he condemned The Dartmouth
Review, a conservative student newspaper, for ridiculing blacks, gay
men a…
The Kennedy School Lead article in today's
Harvard Crimson:
"In a scathing attack on what they termed the 'Israel Lobby,' the
Kennedy School's Stephen M. Walt and the University of Chicago's …
Storyboard
From last year's
Guy Fawkes Day entries:
"Contrapuntal Themes
in a Shadowland" and
"Area Catholics Receive
St. Thomas Aquinas Awards."
From last year's
Halloween season:
…
Readings for
St. Joseph's Day
Cut Numbers and
In the Hand of Dante,
both by Nick Tosches,
and Symmetry,
by Hermann Weyl:
Related material:
Kernel of Eternity
(a Log24 entry of June 9, 2005)
and th…
ART WARS:
The Crimson Passion continues...
How to Grow
a Crimson Clover Published in the Harvard Crimson
on Thursday, March 16, 2006, 6:24 PM
by Patrick R. Chesnut,
Crimson staff writer …
Dogma in the
State of Grace
"Words and numbers are of equal value,for, in the cloak of
knowledge,one is warp and the other woof."
-- The princesses Rhyme and Reason
in The Phantom Tollbooth,by Norton Juster, 1961…
George W. Mackey,
Harvard mathematician,
is dead at 90.
Mackey was born, according to Wikipedia, on Feb. 1, 1916. He died,
according to Harvard University,
on the night of March 14-15, 2006. He was the author…
Women's History Month
continues...
Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres,
quarum unam incolunt
Belgae,
aliam Aquitani, tertiam qui ipsorum
lingua Celtae, nostra
Galli appellantur.
-- Julius Caesar, De Be…
Club From today's Harvard Crimson:
Two members of the Harvard Class of 2007 "scarf down pie at the Math
Department's 'pi'-eating contest at 3:14 p.m. yesterday in celebration
of Pi Day. Participants had thre…
Frame
Fearful Symmetry
and Minkowski Space-Time
(For the tigers of Princeton,
a selection suggested by
the work of Richard Parker on Lorentzian lattices)
Burning Bright Click on pictures
for details.
Christ at the
Lapin Agile "The Christ by Wasley,
on wall under his right arm
the Picasso painting."
Le Républicain Lorrain du 14 janvier 2001 Le Lapin Agile veille
sur la Butte …
A Circle of Quiet
From the Harvard Math Table page:
"No Math table this week. We will reconvene next week on March 14 for
a special Pi Day talk by Paul Bamberg."
Paul Bamberg
Transcript of the movie "P…
Seed
"This outer automorphism [of S6] can be regarded as the seed from which
grow
about half of the sporadic simple groups, starting with the Mathieu
groups M12 and M24."
-- Noam Elkies, Harvard Math Table, …
Holy the Firm
by Annie Dillard Esoteric Christianity, I read, posits a
substance. It is a created substance, lower than metals and
minerals on a "spiritual scale" and lower than salts and earths,
occurring …
Women's History Month continues...
Raiders of the Lost
Stone
In honor of the upcoming program
on Women and Mathematics
at the Institute for Advanced Study
and of Sharon Stone's 2005 lect…
Finitegeometry.org Update
(Revised May 21, 2006)
Finitegeometry.org now has permutable
JavaScript views of the 2x2x2 and 4x4x4 design cubes. Solomon's
Cube presented a claim that the 4x4x4 design cube retains sy…
Women's History Month continues.
Contender
Miss O'Hara
on the Oscars:
"Cinderella Man: To me, this is the best film of 2005 (qualifier: I
have not yet seen Walk the Line). Cinderella Man
is a terrific film…
Found in Translation
From "Space, Time, and Scarlett" (Log24, Feb. 9): "Her hair is Harlow
gold...."
For Scarlett on James Merrill's birthday
(which he …
Women's History Month continues.
Global and Local:
One Small Step
Audrey Terras, University of Maryland '64:
We cannot discuss the proof here as it requires some knowledge of zeta
functions of curves over finit…
In and OutJohn Updike in
The New Yorker:
"Birthday, death-day -- what day is not both?" Annie Dillard in For the
Time Being: "in and out of
time"Born on this date:
Tom Wolfe
Died on this date:
…
Father Figure
Women's History Month
continues...
"My father is, of course,
as mad as a hatter."
-- Diana Rigg in "The Hospital,"
as transcribed at
script-o-rama.com
"A vesicle pisces…
Deaconess
"Teach us to care and not to care."-- T. S. Eliot, "Ash Wednesday"
Related material:
Beth Israel Deaconess,
The House of God,
and, from Is Nothing Sacred?,
the following quotations--
…
Women's History Month continues:
Raiders of the Lost...
(cont. from Feb. 17)
For Harrison Ford
and Meg Ryan,
a quotation from
Sir Walter Raleigh,
via Susanna Moore
and Elizabeth Tallent:
…