Mental Health Month, Day 28: The Eightfold Way and For a continuation of the mathematical and religious themes in yesterday's entry, click on the figure below.
Posted 5/28/2003 at 5:55 AM |
Mental Health Month, Day 27: Conspiracy Theory and In our journey through Mental Health Month, we have now arrived at day 27. This number, the number of lines on a non-singular cubic surface in complex projective 3-space, suggests it may be time to recall the following note (a sort of syllabus for an imaginary course) from August 1997, the month that the Mel Gibson film "Conspiracy Theory" was released. Conspiracy Theory 101 Fiction:
Fact:
For a more up-to-date and detailed look at the mathematics mentioned above, see Abstract Configurations by Igor Dolgachev. "Art isn't easy." -- Stephen Sondheim Posted 5/27/2003 at 5:01 AM |
Mental Health Month, Day 26: Many Dimensions, At first blush, it seems unlikely that the number 26=2x13, as a product of only two small primes (and those distinct) has any purely mathematical properties of interest. (On the other hand, consider the number 6.) Parts I and II of "Many Dimensions," notes written earlier today, deal with the struggles of string theorists to justify their contention that a space of 26 dimensions may have some significance in physics. Let them struggle. My question is whether there are any interesting purely mathematical properties of 26, and it turns out, surprisingly, that there are some such properties. All this is a longwinded way of introducing a link to the web page titled "Info on M13," which gives details of a 1997 paper by J. H. Conway*.
There is no obvious connection to physics, although the physics writer John Baez quoted in my previous two entries shares Conway's interest in the Mathieu groups. * J. H. Conway, "M13," in Surveys in Combinatorics, 1997, edited by R. A. Bailey, London Mathematical Society Lecture Note Series, 241, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1997. 338 pp. ISBN 0 521 59840 0. Posted 5/26/2003 at 7:00 PM |
Mental Health Month, Day 26: Many Dimensions, But seriously... John Baez in July 1999: "...it's really the fact that the Leech lattice is 24-dimensional that lets us compactify 26-dimensional spacetime in such a way as to get a bosonic string theory with the Monster group as symmetries." Well, maybe. I certainly hope so. If the Leech lattice and the Monster group turn out to have some significance in theoretical physics, then my own work, which deals with symmetries of substructures of the Leech lattice and the Monster, might be viewed in a different light. Meanwhile, I take (cold) comfort from some writers who pursue the "story" theory of truth, as opposed to the "diamond" theory. See the following from my journal: Evariste Galois and the Rock that Changed Things, and A Time to Gather Stones Together: Readings for Yom Kippur. See, too, this web page on Marion Zimmer Bradley's fictional Matrices, or Blue Star-Stones, and
the purely mathematical site Diamond Theory, which deals with properties of the above "blue matrix" and its larger relatives. Posted 5/26/2003 at 4:25 AM |
Mental Health Month, Day 26: John Baez on why bosonic string theory is said to require 26 dimensions -- "By now, if you're a rigorous sort of pure mathematician, you must be suffering from grave doubts about the sanity of this whole procedure." Doubts? Let us just say I prefer "The G-string is unique in that it combines the properties of all known string theories. It has 26-dimensional modes propagating to the left, 10-dimensional modes propagating to the right, and 2-dimensional modes just sitting around wondering what the hell is going on." Posted 5/26/2003 at 3:14 AM |
STAR WARS From the web page Amande: Le Christ et la Vierge apparurent souvent entourés d'une auréole en forme d'amande: la mandorle. Étymologiquement, le mot amande est une altération de amandala, qui dérive lui-même du latin classique amygdala.... L'amande a... une connotation symbolique, celle du sexe féminin. Elle figure souvent la vulve. Elle est alors en analogie avec la yoni du vocabulaire de l'hindouisme, la vulve ou la matrice, représentée par une amande ou une noix coupée en deux. Screenshot of the online Ariel the Hutt and Princess Amygdala
AMEN. Posted 5/25/2003 at 9:26 PM |
— ART WARS — Mental Health Month, Day 25: Matrix of the Death God Having dealt yesterday with the Death Goddess Sarah, we turn today to the Death God Abraham. (See Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, University of Chicago Press, 1996.) For a lengthy list of pictures of this damned homicidal lunatic about to murder his son, see The Text This Week.
See, too, The Matrix of Abraham, illustrated below. This is taken from a book by R. M. Abraham, Diversions and Pastimes, published by Constable and Company, London, in 1933. The Matrix of Abraham A summary of the religious import of the above from Princeton University Press: "Moslems of the Middle Ages were fascinated by pandiagonal squares with 1 in the center.... The Moslems thought of the central 1 as being symbolic of the unity of Allah. Indeed, they were so awed by that symbol that they often left blank the central cell on which the 1 should be positioned." -- Clifford A. Pickover, The Zen of Magic Squares, Circles, and Stars, Princeton U. Press, 2002, pp. 71-72 Other appearances of this religious icon on the Web: A less religious approach to the icon may be found on page 393 of R. D. Carmichael's Introduction to the Theory of Groups of Finite Order (Ginn, Boston, 1937, reprinted by Dover, 1956). This matrix did not originate with Abraham but, unlike Neo, I have not yet found its Architect. Posted 5/25/2003 at 7:11 PM |
Mental Health Month, Day 24: The Sacred Day of On this day, Gypsies from all over Europe gather in Provence for the sacred day of St. Sarah, also known as Kali. Various representations of Kali exist; there is a novel about the ways men have pictured her:
The above is one of the best descriptions of Kali I know of in literature; another is in a short story by Fritz Leiber, "Damnation Morning." It is not coincidental that one collection of Leiber's writings is called "Dark Ladies." My journal note "Biblical Proportions" was in part inspired by Leiber. Frank Sinatra may have pictured her as Ava Gardner. I think I saw her the night Sinatra died... hence my entries of March 31 and April 2, 2003. It is perhaps not irrelevant that Kali is, among other things, a mother goddess, and that my entry "Raiders of the Lost Matrix" of May 20 deals with this concept and with the number 24. The above religious symbol (see "Damnation Morning") pictures both the axes of symmetry of the square¹ and a pattern with intriguing combinatorial properties². It also is the basis of a puzzle³ I purchased on August 29, 1997 -- Judgment Day in Terminator 2. Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor in that film is an excellent representation of the Dark Lady, both as mother figure and as Death Goddess. Background music: "Bit by bit..." -- Stephen Sondheim... See Sondheim and the Judgment Day puzzle in my entry of May 20. The Lottery Covenant. ¹ A. W. Joshi, Elements of Group Theory for Physicists, Third Edition, Wiley, 1982, p. 5 ² V. K. Balakrishnan, Combinatorics, McGraw-Hill, 1995, p. 180 Posted 5/24/2003 at 1:06 AM |
Mental Health Month, Day 23: The Prime Cut Gospel On Christmas Day, 1949, Lee Marvin, Sissy Spacek in "Prime Cut" Exercises for Mental Health Month: Read this discussion of the phrase, suggested by Spacek's date of birth, "God's gift to men." Read this discussion of the phrase "the same yesterday, today, and forever," suggested by the previous reading. Read the more interesting of these discussions of the phrase "the eternal in the temporal." Read this discussion of eternal, or "necessary," truths versus other sorts of alleged "truths." Read this discussion of unimportant mathematical properties of the prime number 23. Read these discussions of important properties of 23:
Read this discussion of what might be called "contingent," or "literary," properties of the number 23. Read also the more interesting of these discussions of the phrase "the 23 enigma." Having thus acquired some familiarity with both contingent and necessary properties of 23... Read this discussion of Aquinas's third proof of the existence of God. Note that the classic Spacek film "Prime Cut" was released in 1972, the year that Spacek turned 23:
Essay question:
If Jesus was God's gift to man, and (as many men would agree) so was the young Sissy Spacek (also born on Christmas Day), was young Sissy's existence in her 23rd year contingent or necessary? If the latter, should she be recognized as a Person of the Trinity? Quaternity? N-ity?
Talk amongst yourselves. Posted 5/23/2003 at 7:23 PM |
Götterdämmerung As our celebration of Wagner's May 22 birthday draws to a close, let us recall that on this date in 1966 the Beatles released "Paperback Writer" in the US. Perhaps our most notable paperback writer is now Stephen King; in honor of a recurring theme in his Hearts in Atlantis, our site music today is "Twilight Time." Posted 5/23/2003 at 6:01 AM |
Seek and Ye Shall Find: On the Mystical Properties On this date in history: May 22, 1942: Unabomber Theodore John Kaczynski is born in the Chicago suburb of Evergreen Park, Ill., to Wanda Kaczynski and her husband Theodore R. Kaczynski, a sausage maker. His mother brings him up reading Scientific American. From the June 2003 Scientific American: "Seek and ye shall find." - Michael Shermer
Here is a connection to runes:
Here is a connection to Athenian bastions from a UN article on Communist educational theorist Dimitri Glinos:
I offer the above with tongue in cheek as a demonstration that mystical numerology may have a certain heuristic value overlooked by fanatics of the religion of Scientism such as Shermer. For a more serious discussion of runes at the Acropolis, see the photo on page 16 of the May 15, 2003, New York Review of Books, illustrating the article "Athens in Wartime," by Brady Kiesling. Posted 5/22/2003 at 7:29 PM |
Mental Health Month: "And now what you've all been waiting for... -- Colin Hay as Zac in the film "Cosi" "When I sought those who would sympathize with my plans, I had only you, the friends of my particular art, my most personal work and creation, to turn to." -- Wagner's address at the ceremony for the laying of the foundation stone of the Festival Theater in Bayreuth, May 22 (Wagner's birthday), 1872 "The new computer package DISCRETA which was created in Bayreuth is in the process of permanent development." -- "A Computer Approach to the Enumeration of Block Designs Which Are Invariant With Respect to a Prescribed Permutation Group" The above is a preprint from Dresden. See, too, the work of Bierbrauer, who received his doctorate at Mainz in 1977 and taught at Heidelberg from 1977 to 1994. Bierbrauer's lecture notes give a particularly good background for the concepts involved in my Diamond Theory, in the tradition of Witt and Artin. See Introduction to Group Theory by Jürgen Bierbrauer, 138 pp., PostScript Posted 5/22/2003 at 12:25 AM |
The 401 Club: Commentary on "There are dark comedies. There are screwball comedies. But there aren't many dark screwball comedies. And if Nora Ephron's Lucky Numbers is any indication, there's a good reason for that." See also the dark screwball comedy starring Pat Robertson and Michael Eisner, Posted 5/21/2003 at 3:57 PM |
Mental Health Month: Here are the evening lottery numbers for Pennsylvania, the Keystone state, drawn on Monday, May 19, 2003: 401 and 1993. This, by the sort of logic beloved of theologians, suggests we find out the significance of the divine date 4/01/1993. It turns out that April 1, 1993, was the date of the New York opening of the Stephen Sondheim retrospective "Putting It Together." For material related to puzzles, games, Sondheim, and Mental Health Month, see Notes on The figures below illustrate some recurrent themes in these notes. “Not games. Puzzles. Big difference. That’s a whole other matter. All art — symphonies, architecture, novels — it’s all puzzles. The fitting together of notes, the fitting together of words have by their very nature a puzzle aspect. It’s the creation of form out of chaos. And I believe in form.” Posted 5/20/2003 at 8:23 PM |
Raiders of the Lost Matrix "In general, a matrix... is something that provides support or structure, especially in the sense of surrounding and/or shaping. It comes from the Latin word for 'womb,' itself derived from the Latin word for 'mother,' which is mater [as in alma mater]." -- Wikipedia For a mystical interpretation of the above matrix as it relates to the Hebrew words at the center of the official Yale seal, see Talmud.
Posted 5/20/2003 at 3:06 AM |
DAY OF THE MOTHER SHIP I just saw the John Travolta film "Phenomenon" for the first time. (It was on the ABC Family Channel from 8 to 11.) Why is it that tellers of uplifting stories (like Zenna Henderson, in "Day of the Mother Ship, Part I," or the authors of "Phenomenon" or the Bible) always feel they have to throw in some cockamamie and obviously false miracles to hold people's attention? On May 11 (Mother's Day), Mother Nature got my attention with a mighty wind waving the branches of nearby trees, just before a tornado watch was issued for the area I was in. This made me recall a Biblical reference I had come across in researching references to "Our Lady of the Woods" for my Beltane (May 1) entry.
This is what I thought of on May 11 watching branches swaying in the wind on Mother's Day -- which some might regard as a festival of Our Lady of the Woods. John Travolta in "Phenomenon" sees a very similar scene partway through the picture; then, at the end, explains to his girlfriend how the swaying branches made him feel -- without mentioning the branches -- by asking her to describe how she would cradle and rock a child in her arms. At the very end of the film, she herself is reminded of his question by the swaying branches of another tree. Events like these are miracle enough for me. Posted 5/19/2003 at 11:45 PM |
Phaedrus Lives! Fans of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance may recall that it is a sort of elegy for an earlier self named Phaedrus who vanished with the recovery of mental health. Since this is Mental Health Month, the following observations seem relevant. Reading another weblog's comments today, I found the following remark: "...the mind is an amazing thing and it can create patterns and interconnections among things all day it you let it, regardless of whether they are real connections." This, of course, prompted me to look for patterns and interconnections. The first thing I thought of was the fictional mathematician in "A Beautiful Mind" establishing an amazing -- and, within the fiction, real -- connection between the pattern on a colleague's tie and the reflections from a glass. A web search led to a really real connection.... i.e., to a lengthy listserver letter from an author named Christopher Locke, whose work is new to me but also strangely familiar.... I recognize in his writing both some of my own less-than-mentally-healthy preoccupations and also what might be called the spirit of Phaedrus, from Zen and the Art. Here is a link to a cache I made of the Locke letter and a follow-up he wrote detailing his sources: One part of Locke's letter seems particularly relevant in light of yesterday's entries related to the death of June Carter Cash: "Will the circle be unbroken? Amen. Concluding Unscientific Postscript from Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch ("Q"), quoting Socrates's remarks to the original Phaedrus:
This quotation illustrates a connection between Jesus (College) -- from my entry of 3:33 PM Thursday -- and a Nymph -- from my entry of 11:44 PM Friday. See, too, Q's quoting of Socrates's prayer to Pan, as well as the cover of the May 19, 2003, New Yorker:
For a discussion of the music Posted 5/18/2003 at 2:00 PM |
Highballs "If you can bounce high, Magazine purchased at A Whiff of Camelot – New York Times, Song title from the "Gatsby's Restaurant" From The Great Gatsby, Chapter Four: "Highballs?" asked the head waiter. Mimi Beardsley, JFK playmate, On JFK's plane trips: Apparently there was some function.... "Don't forget the coffee!" Posted 5/16/2003 at 11:44 PM |
Enough Commentary on the May 15 death of
In light of yesterday's Jesus College entry While walking out one evening
Posted 5/16/2003 at 3:03 AM |
The Only Pretty Ring Time On May 14 five years ago, the night Sinatra died, the Pennsylvania (State of Grace) lottery evening number was 256: see my note, Symmetries, of April 2, 2003. On May 14 this year, the Pennsylvania lottery evening number was 147. Having, through meditation, perhaps established some sort of minor covenant with whatever supernatural lottery powers may exist, this afternoon I sought the significance of this number in Q's 1939 edition of the Oxford Book of English Verse. It is the number of "It was a Lover and his Lass," a song lyric by William Shakespeare. The song includes the following lines:
For the Sinatra connection, see The selection of Q's book for consultation was suggested by the home page of Simon Nickerson at Jesus College, Cambridge University, and by the dedication page of Q's 1925 Oxford Book of English Prose, which names Nickerson's school. Ian Lee on the communion of saints and the association of ideas: "The association is the idea." For translation of the Greek phrase in Q's 1925 dedication, see Greek and Roman Grammarians Malcolm D. Hyman Posted 5/15/2003 at 3:33 PM |
Birthday Present Today is the birthday of Emile Mathieu. Posted 5/15/2003 at 1:23 PM |
Well Done "So tell me about the matrix reloaded... and what it's like to finish a job well done." -- Weblog entry by Harvard student, May 15, 2003 The matrix reloaded: See chapter VII, "Composition," in Chinese Calligraphy: An Introduction to Its Aesthetic and Technique, by Chiang Yee, Harvard University Press, first published April 21st, 1938. A job well done: "The Best is Yet to Come" Posted 5/15/2003 at 12:00 PM |
Common Sense On the mathematician Kolmogorov: "It turns out that he DID prove one basic theorem that I take for granted, that a compact hausdorff space is determined by its ring of continuous functions (this ring being considered without any topology) -- basic discoveries like this are the ones most likely to have their origins obscured, for they eventually come to be seen as mere common sense, and not even a theorem." -- Richard Cudney, Harvard '03, writing at Xanga.com as rcudney on May 14, 2003 That this theorem is Kolmogorov's is news to me. See
The above references establish that Gelfand is usually cited as the source of the theorem Cudney discusses. Gelfand was a student of Kolmogorov's in the 1930's, so who discovered what when may be a touchy question in this case. A reference that seems relevant: I. M. Gelfand and A. Kolmogoroff, "On rings of continuous functions on topological spaces," Doklady Akad. Nauk SSSR 22 (1939), 11-15. This is cited by Gillman and Jerison in the classic Rings of Continuous Functions. There ARE some references that indicate Kolmogorov may have done some work of his own in this area. See here ("quite a few duality theorems... including those of Banaschewski, Morita, Gel'fand-Kolmogorov and Gel'fand-Naimark") and here ("the classical theorems of M. H. Stone, Gelfand & Kolmogorov"). Any other references to Kolmogorov's work in this area would be of interest. Naturally, any discussion of this area should include a reference to the pioneering work of M. H. Stone. I recommend the autobiographical article on Stone in McGraw-Hill Modern Men of Science, Volume II, 1968. Posted 5/14/2003 at 2:00 PM |
Cubist Catechism For the birthday of Georges Braque From A Wrinkle in Time, by Madeleine L'Engle: "Now we will tesser, we will wrinkle again. Do you understand?" "No," Meg said flatly.... "Oh, dear," Meg sighed. "I guess I am a moron. I just don't get it." "That is because you think of space only in three dimensions," Mrs. Whatsit told her.... Meg sighed. "Just explain it to me." "Okay," Charles said. "What is the first dimension?" "Well -- a line." "Okay. And the second dimension?" "Well, you'd square the line. A flat square would be in the second dimension." "And the third?" "Well, you'd square the second dimension. Then the square wouldn't be flat any more. It would have a bottom, and sides, and a top." "And the fourth?" "Well, I guess if you want to put it into mathematical terms you'd square the square. But you can't take a pencil and draw it the way you can the first three."
Posted 5/13/2003 at 12:06 PM |
Operation Playmate: On this date in 1938, Louis Armstrong and his orchestra recorded "When the Saints Go Marching In." On this date in 1961, Saint Gary Cooper died. From my Jan. 2, 2003, entry: Faces of the Twentieth Century: "I walk, I lift up, I lift up heart, eyes, — Gerard Manley Hopkins,
"Cowboy, take me away. From my March 31, 2003, entry: "During the Gulf War, Playboy magazine's celebrated Centerfolds reached out to U.S. military men and women... with their 'Operation Playmate' project.... Now, in light of the war in Iraq, 'Operation Playmate' has returned." Entertainment Weekly, May 2, 2003: Perhaps, in heaven, Dixie Chick Natalie "Mattress Dancing" Maines will provide terpsichorean instruction.
See, too, my entry for Beltane (May 1), the day that death claimed the 13th Episcopal bishop of New York City. All of these events are not without interest, but it is not easy to fit them into one coherent story, as Robert Penn Warren once requested:
It is perhaps relevant that, as T. S. Eliot well knew, there can be no dance except in time, and that the time of my May 1 entry is 5:13, today's date in another guise. To paraphrase an Eliot line, "Hurry up please, it's 5/13." Posted 5/13/2003 at 11:01 AM |
The Tony Nominations Dannie Abse quoting Robert Penn Warren:
Frank Rich on Bush's Top Gun speech:
Madeleine L'Engle on the religion of Cubism:
¹ See Tony Smith on mathematics. ² See Tony Smith on foreign policy. ³ See Tony Smith on conceptual art. Posted 5/12/2003 at 6:10 PM |
Epiphany 1941:
Posted 5/12/2003 at 2:40 PM |
Death and Truth Material related to my May 9, 2003, notes: Posted 5/12/2003 at 3:33 AM |
Day of the Mother Ship: A Close Encounter of the Third Level
Today is also the feast day of Saint Zenna Henderson, who was born on All Saints' Day, 1917. The Adherents.com website says she was a Mormon, but the printed reference work Contemporary Authors (written when she was still alive and could defend herself against any accusation of Mormonism) says she was a Methodist. Maybe she was just one of The People -- i.e., a Person. "The concept of a person, which we find so familiar in its application to human beings, cannot be clearly and sharply expressed by any word in the vocabulary of Plato and Aristotle; it was wrought with the hammer and anvil* of theological disputes about the Trinity and the Person of Christ." -- Peter Geach, The Virtues, Cambridge U. Press, 1977, p. 75 See also Terpsichore and the Trinity. * For a use of this phrase suited to Mental Health Month, see The Prisoner, Episode Ten. See, too, Inaugural Address. Posted 5/11/2003 at 4:15 PM |
ART WARS: In the dome of the Capitol at Washington, DC, a painting depicts The Apotheosis of Washington. Personally, I prefer the following pair of pictures, which might be titled Apotheosis of the Cube. A New York Times article says Tony Smith's instructions for fabricating Die were as follows: "a six-foot cube of quarter-inch hot-rolled steel with diagonal internal bracing." The transparent cube in the upper picture above shows the internal diagonals. The fact that there are four of these may be used to demonstrate the isomorphism of the group of rotations of the cube with the group of permutations on an arbitrary set of four elements. For deeper results, see Diamond Theory. For an explanation of why our current president might feel that the cube deserves an apotheosis, see the previous entry, "The Rhetoric of Power." See, too, Nabokov's Transparent Things: "Its ultimate vision was the incandescence of a book or a box grown completely transparent and hollow. This is, I believe, it: not the crude anguish of physical death but the incomparable pangs of the mysterious mental maneuver needed to pass from one state of being to another. Easy, you know, does it, son." Posted 5/9/2003 at 7:20 PM |
ART WARS The Rhetoric of Power: From "Secondary Structures," by Tom Moody, Sculpture Magazine, June 2000: "By the early ’90s, the perception of Minimalism as a 'pure' art untouched by history lay in tatters. The coup de grâce against the movement came not from an artwork, however, but from a text. Shortly after the removal of Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc from New York City’s Federal Plaza, Harvard art historian Anna Chave published 'Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power' (Arts Magazine, January 1990), a rousing attack on the boys’ club that stops just short of a full-blown ad hominem rant. Analyzing artworks (Walter de Maria’s aluminum swastika, Morris’s 'carceral images,' Flavin’s phallic 'hot rods'), critical vocabulary (Morris’s use of 'intimacy' as a negative, Judd’s incantatory use of the word 'powerful'), even titles (Frank Stella’s National Socialist-tinged Arbeit Macht Frei and Reichstag), Chave highlights the disturbing undercurrents of hypermasculinity and social control beneath Minimalism’s bland exterior. Seeing it through the eyes of the ordinary viewer, she concludes that 'what [most] disturbs [the public at large] about Minimalist art may be what disturbs them about their own lives and times, as the face it projects is society’s blankest, steeliest face; the impersonal face of technology, industry and commerce; the unyielding face of the father: a face that is usually far more attractively masked.' ” From Maureen Dowd's New York Times column of June 9, 2002: "The shape of the government is not as important as the policy of the government. If he makes the policy aggressive and pre-emptive, the president can conduct the war on terror from the National Gallery of Art."
Related material (update of May 12, 2003): Question: Which of the two theories of truth in reading (2) above is exemplified by Moore's March 24 remarks? Posted 5/9/2003 at 6:30 PM |
ART WARS: While checking the claim of art historian Anna Chave that "the veil is an age-old metaphor used from Plato through Hegel and Heidegger for the concept of truth as aletheia or unveiling," I came across the following essay: Kardon writes very well. A related essay I particularly like is Today's entry on Kardon is part of my "ART WARS" series of journal notes. This title began partly as a joke, but it seems rather appropriate in light of Anna Chave's claim that minimalism in the 1960's was part of the "rhetoric of power." See my later entry today on Tony Smith at the National Gallery. If we are in a war of art, are a powerful weapon. Posted 5/9/2003 at 4:44 PM |
ART WARS: The following flashback to March 2002 seems a suitable entry for May, which is Mental Health Month. Zen and Language Gamesby Steven H. Cullinane
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Rhymes with Puck Readings for May Day, also known as Beltane. I. The Playboy of the Western World
II. Beltane III. A is for Art
Bell/Taine In 1993, The Mathematical Association of America published Constance Reid's THE SEARCH FOR E. T. BELL This is a biography of Eric Temple Bell, a mathematician and writer on mathematics, who also wrote fiction under the name John Taine. On page 194, Reid records a question Bell's son asked as a child. Passing a church and seeing a cross on the steeple, he inquired, "Why is the plus up there?" For an answer that makes some sort of sense
consider the phrase "A is for Art," so aptly illustrated by Olivia Newton-John in "Wrestling Pablo Picasso," then examine the photograph of ballerina Margaret "Puck" Petit on page 195 of Reid's book. Puck, as the mother of Leslie Caron (see Terpsichore's Birthday), clearly deserves an A+. Posted 5/1/2003 at 5:13 PM |