"...the nature of the cosmos
(Augustine’s City of God?)" David Van Biema in Time Magazine (May 2, 2005, p. 43) on Augustine's City of God:
"A key concept in Augustine's great
The City of God is that the Christian church is superior and essentially alien Click on the above for a rendition of Appalachian Spring. This year's April - theme is "Mathematics and the Cosmos." For my own views on this theme as it applies to education, see Wag the Dogma. For some other views, see this year's Mathematics Awareness Month site. One of the authors at that site, which is mostly propaganda for the religion of Scientism, elsewhere quotes an ignorant pedagogue: "'The discovery of non-Euclidean geometries
contradicted the "absolute truth" view
of the Platonists.'"
-- Sarah J. Greenwald,
Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics Appalachian State University, Boone, NC Damned nonsense. See Math16.com. Posted 4/30/2005 at 9:00 PM |
Nine is a Vine, continued Larry Gelbart on the film Up Close and Personal: "A Brenda Starr is Born.'' Related material: O'Hara's Fingerpost, Eight is a Gate, Art Wars, In the Details, and the words "White Christmas." Posted 4/30/2005 at 9:00 AM |
Posted 4/29/2005 at 4:07 PM |
Midrash Jazz Quartet
Harvard's Barry Mazur likes to quote Aristotle's Metaphysics. See 1, 2, 3. Here, with an introductory remark by Martha Cooley, is more from the Metaphysics: The central aim of Western religion -- "Each of us has something to offer the Creator...The central aim of Western philosophy -- Dualities of Pythagoras
"Of these dualities, the first is the most important; all the others
may be seen as different aspects of this fundamental dichotomy. To
establish a rational and consistent relationship between the limited
[man, etc.] and the unlimited [the cosmos, etc.] is... the central aim
of all Western philosophy."
"In the garden of Adding
Harvard University, Department of English:
Today's birthday: Jerry Seinfeld. Related material: Is Nothing Sacred? and Symmetries. Posted 4/29/2005 at 10:10 AM |
Black Moses For an explanation of the title, see the previous entry and Robert P. Moses and The Algebra Project. For another algebra project, see Log24 entries of April 14-25 as well as the following "X in a box" figure from March 10, 2005 and April 5, 2005. Those interested in artistic rather than mathematical figures may compare this diagram with that of Samuel Beckett in Quad (1981): Related quotations: Barry Mazur on a seminal paper of algebraist Saunders Mac Lane: The paper was rejected "because the editor thought that it was 'more devoid of content' than any other he had read. 'Saunders wrote back and said, "That’s the point,"' Mazur said. 'And in some ways that’s the genius of it. It’s the barest, most Beckett-like vocabulary that incorporates the theory and nothing else.'" J. Peter May, a professor of mathematics at the University of Chicago quoted in the Chicago Tribune:
"There are some ideas you simply could not think without a vocabulary to think them." Amen. Posted 4/28/2005 at 4:00 PM |
Posted 4/28/2005 at 2:00 PM |
The Ring of Falsehood
In memory of Philip Morrison, bombmaker,
Morrison Scientific American columnist, pioneer of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and author of The Ring of Truth From The Measure of a Life: Does religion play a role in attitudes toward ETIs? Philip Morrison gave his considered opinion... “Well, it might, but I think that it’s just one of the permissive routes; it isn’t an essential factor. My parents were Jewish. Their beliefs were conventional but not very deep. They belonged to the Jewish community; they went to services infrequently, on special occasions—funerals and high holidays”....
Posted 4/26/2005 at 6:29 AM |
Mathematical Style: Mac Lane Memorial, Part Trois (See also Part I and Part II.) "We have seen that there are many diverse styles that lead to success in mathematics. Choose one mathematician... from the ones we studied whose 'mathematical style' you find most rewarding for you.... Identify the mathematician and describe his or her mathematical style."
Also from Appalachian State University (with illustration by Ingmar Bergman):
Posted 4/25/2005 at 10:31 AM |
April 24 Today's sermon: Posted 4/24/2005 at 10:23 AM |
Mac Lane Memorial In memory of Saunders Mac Lane, mathematician, who died Thursday, April 14, 2005: From MacTutor --
"It was during these years [the late 1930's] that he wrote his famous text A Survey of Modern Algebra with G. Birkhoff which was published in 1941. Kaplansky writes in [*] about this text:-
[*] I. Kaplansky, "The early work of Saunders Mac Lane on valuations and fields," in I Kaplansky (ed.), Saunders Mac Lane: Selected Papers (New York - Heidelberg, 1979), 519-524."
Mac Lane is noted for introducing, with Eilenberg, category theory. For some remarks on the place of category theory in the history of mathematics, see Log24 entries of Dec. 3, 2002. Posted 4/22/2005 at 9:00 AM |
Seal The Log24 entry for yesterday, the date of Prince Rainier's funeral, discussed a figure sometimes called "Solomon's seal." Here are some further reflections.
"Time and chance
happeneth to them all." -- Solomon, Ecclesiastes 9:11 Posted 4/16/2005 at 9:00 AM |
In memory of Leonardo and of Chen Yifei (previous entry), a link to the Sino-Judaic Institute's review of Chen's film "Escape to Saturday, December 27, 2003 10:21 PM Toy "If little else, the brain is an educational toy. While it may be a frustrating plaything -- one whose finer points recede just when you think you are mastering them -- it is nonetheless perpetually fascinating, frequently surprising, occasionally rewarding, and it comes already assembled; you don't have to put it together on Christmas morning. The problem with possessing such an engaging toy is that other people want to play with it, too. Sometimes they'd rather play with yours than theirs. Or they object if you play with yours in a different manner from the way they play with theirs. The result is, a few games out of a toy department of possibilities are universally and endlessly repeated. If you don't play some people's game, they say that you have 'lost your marbles,' not recognizing that, while Chinese checkers is indeed a fine pastime, a person may also play dominoes, chess, strip poker, tiddlywinks, drop-the-soap or Russian roulette with his brain. One brain game that is widely, if poorly, played is a gimmick called
'rational "I took the number twenty-four and there's twenty-four ways of expressing the numbers one, two, three, four. And I assigned one kind of line to one, one to two, one to three, and one to four. One was a vertical line, two was a horizontal line, three was diagonal left to right, and four was diagonal right to left. These are the basic kind of directions that lines can take.... the absolute ways that lines can be drawn. And I drew these things as parallel lines very close to one another in boxes. And then there was a system of changing them so that within twenty-four pages there were different arrangements of actually sixteen squares, four sets of four. Everything was based on four. So this was kind of a... more of a... less of a rational... I mean, it gets into the whole idea of methodology." Yes, it does. Friday, December 26, 2003 7:59 PM ART WARS, St. Stephen's Day: The Magdalene Code Got The Da Vinci Code for Xmas. From page 262:
Related Log24 material -- The Da Vinci Code, pages 445-446:
Related Log24 material -- May 25, 2003: Star Wars. Concluding remark of April 15, 2005: For a more serious approach to portraits of redheads, see Chen Yifei's work. Posted 4/15/2005 at 7:11 AM |
From Log24, April 5, 2005: Father Richard John Neuhaus yesterday argued that John Paul II should be called "the Great." Prophetic Humanism. Posted 4/14/2005 at 8:00 AM |
Prophetic Humanism
"The solution is dissolution." -- Murray L. Bob, A Contrarian's Dictionary Strikes Again! For a larger view, see the five Log24 entries ending at midnight Sept. 5-6, 2003: "We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep." (Prospero in The Tempest, IV.i) Posted 4/9/2005 at 11:59 AM |
Skewed Views The Baltimore Sun on Saul Bellow, who died April 5, and women: Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice McDermott said she most admires the way that Mr. Bellow carefully structured his novels and short stories.A great woman artist on skewed views: "That's what you're supposed to do as an artist. We're not here to stick a mirror on you. Anybody can do that," [Julie] Taymor said. "We're here to give you a more cubist or skewed mirror, where you get to see yourself with fresh eyes. That's what an artist does. When you paint the Crucifixion, you're not painting an exact reproduction...."Finally, a skewed view of Pope John Paul II in Paradise: Posted 4/9/2005 at 7:59 AM |
In the Details Wallace Stevens, Professor Eucalyptus said, "The search For reality is as momentous as The search for God." It is the philosopher's search For an interior made exterior And the poet's search for the same exterior made Interior.... ... Likewise to say of the evening star, The most ancient light in the most ancient sky, That it is wholly an inner light, that it shines From the sleepy bosom of the real, re-creates, Searches a possible for its possibleness. Julie Taymor, "Skewed Mirrors" interview: "... they were performing for God. Now God can mean whatever you want it to mean. But for me, I understood it so totally. The detail.... They did it from the inside to the outside. And from the outside to the in. And that profoundly moved me then. It was...it was the most important thing that I ever experienced." Details: The above may be of interest to students of iconology -- what Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code calls "symbology" -- and of redheads. The artist of Details, "Brenda Starr" creator Dale Messick, died on Tuesday, April 5, 2005, at 98. AP Photo Dale Messick in 1982 For further details on April 5, see Art History: The Pope of Hope
Posted 4/7/2005 at 7:26 PM |
Nine is a Vine
"Heaven is a state, a sort of metaphysical state." — John O'Hara, Hope of Heaven, 1938 "Mathematical realism holds that mathematical entities exist independently of the human mind. Thus humans do not invent mathematics, but rather discover it, and any other intelligent beings in the universe would presumably do the same. The term Platonism is used because such a view is seen to parallel Plato's belief in a "heaven of ideas", an unchanging ultimate reality that the everyday world can only imperfectly approximate. Plato's view probably derives from Pythagoras, and his followers the Pythagoreans, who believed that the world was, quite literally, built up by the numbers. This idea may have even older origins that are unknown to us." -- Wikipedia
Amen. Related material: In memory of Jesus of Nazareth, the "true vine," who, some historians believe, died on this date: The Crucifixion of John O'Hara. In memory of the Anti-Vine: See Dogma and Heaven, Hell, and Hollywood. Related material: The Usual Suspects and Thursday, December 26, 2002: Holly for Miss Quinn Tonight's site music is for Stephen Dedalus
Posted 4/7/2005 at 9:00 AM |
ART WARS Toys
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." Last year's suggested ART WARS toy:
This year's suggested ART WARS toy:
Posted 4/7/2005 at 12:00 AM |
Paratext: A Birthday Gift for Barry Levinson (born April 6, or maybe June 2, 1942) The following excerpts from page 162* in three different books with Catholic backgrounds† may or may not prove useful to a film director.
Pocket Catholic Dictionary are from the
definition of "Gifts of the Holy Spirit." * The page number 162 may be regarded, in honor of the late Saul Bellow (see previous entry), as Humboldt's Gift. Posted 4/6/2005 at 12:00 PM |
Final Arrangements, continued: Confession "A corpse will be transported by express!" — Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry (1947) "Then he began to narrate in his original style.... After this came disclosure, confession. Then he accused, fulminated, stammered, blazed, cried out. He crossed the universe like light.... He had no old friends, only ex-friends. He could become terrible, going into reverse without warning. When this happened, it was like being caught in a tunnel by the Express. You could only cling to the walls, or lie between the rails, praying." Posted 4/6/2005 at 2:45 AM |
"Bingo!"
"Call the Vatican. Ask them if anything's missing." -- Analyze This Posted 4/5/2005 at 10:10 PM |
Posted 4/5/2005 at 8:00 PM |
Art History: The Pope of Hope At the Vatican on Shakespeare's Birthday (See Log24.net, Oct. 4, 2002) See also the iconology -- what Dan Brown in The Da Vinci Code calls "symbology" -- of Pandora's Box at Log24.net, March 10, 2005: "Man and woman are a pair of locked caskets, each containing the key to the other." "Karol Wojtyla had looked into He lived on the far side of -- Richard John Neuhaus,
Finnegans Wake, p. 293, "Notice how the Pope turns out to be at the center of the breaking and redefining of the Classical system." "Derrida
on Plato on writing says 'In order for these contrary values
(good/evil, true/false, essence/appearance, inside/outside, etc.) to be
in opposition, each of the terms must be simply EXTERNAL to the other,
which means that one of these oppositions (the opposition between
inside and outside) must already be accredited as the matrix of all
possible opposition.' " -- Peter J. Leithart See also Skewed Mirrors, Sept. 14, 2003 "Evil did not have the last word." -- Richard John Neuhaus, April 4, 2005
"There is never any ending to Paris." -- Ernest Hemingway For the first word, see Louis Armand on Lethe, erinnerung, and riverrun. See also the following passage, linked to on the Easter Vigil, 2005: You will find to the left of the House of Hades a spring, And by the side thereof standing a white cypress. To this spring approach not near. But you shall find another, from the lake of Memory Cold water flowing forth, and there are guardians before it. Say, "I am a child of Earth and starry Heaven; But my race is of Heaven alone. This you know yourselves. But I am parched with thirst and I perish. Give me quickly The cold water flowing forth from the lake of Memory." Posted 4/5/2005 at 3:17 PM |
The Garden of Good and Evil
continued "Just the facts, ma'am" -- Joe Friday See the entry Lucky (?) Numbers of Saturday, April 2, 2005, 11:07 AM ET, for links to a few facts about the historical role of the Number of the Beast in the Pennsylvania Lottery. The Pennsylvania Lottery mid-day drawings take place at about 1:10 PM ET. Pope John Paul II died on Saturday, April 2, at 2:37 PM ET. Thus the final PA drawing of his lifetime was on that Saturday afternoon. The winning mid-day number that day was... 034.
In the I Ching, this is the number of The Power of the Great. Father Richard John Neuhaus yesterday argued that John Paul II should be called "the Great." Neuhaus stated that "If any phrase encapsulates the message that John Paul declared to the world, it is probably 'prophetic humanism.'" If there is such a thing, it is probably best exemplified by the I Ching. For further details, see Hitler's Still Point. Father Neuhaus's argument included the following mysterious phrase: "God's unfolding covenant with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Jesus."Compare the following two passages from Holy Scripture: Genesis 22:13 -- "...behold behind himI Ching Hexagram 34 -- "A goat butts against a hedgeA topic for discussion by the foolish: In the current historical situation,From yet another Holy Scripture, a topic for discussion by the wise: “Anyone can create a pretty little bamboo garden in the world. But I doubt that the gardener would succeed in incorporating the world in his bamboo grove.” Posted 4/5/2005 at 1:28 AM |
Fourth Day of the Fourth Month,
4:04:04 "My wife took, unnoticed, this picture, unposed, of me in the act of writing a novel.... The date (discernible in the captured calendar) is February 27, 1929. The novel, Zashchita Luzhina (The Defense), deals with the defense invented by an insane chess player...." -- Vladimir Nabokov, note to photograph following page 256 in Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited, Vintage International paperback, August 1989 -- Quoted in The Matthias Defense From a site titled Meaning of the Twentieth Century -- "Freeman Dyson has expressed some thoughts on craziness. In a Scientific American article called 'Innovation in Physics,' he began by quoting Niels Bohr. Bohr had been in attendance at a lecture in which Wolfgang Pauli proposed a new theory of elementary particles. Pauli came under heavy criticism, which Bohr summed up for him: 'We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question which divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct. My own feeling is that is not crazy enough.' To that Freeman added: 'When a great innovation appears, it will almost certainly be in a muddled, incomplete and confusing form. To the discoverer, himself, it will be only half understood; to everyone else, it will be a mystery. For any speculation which does not at first glance look crazy, there is no hope!' " -- Kenneth Brower, The Starship and the Canoe, 1979, pp. 146, 147 It is my hope that the speculation, implied in The Matthias Defense,
that the number 162 has astonishing mystical properties (as a page
number, article number, etc.) is sufficiently crazy to satisfy Pauli and his friend Jung as well as the more conventional thinkers Bohr and Dyson. See also The Black Queen and The Eight. In accordance with the theology of the previous entry, based on Zein's list of the most common Chinese characters, here are some meanings of character 162:
[si4] {sì} /to watch/to wait/to examine/to spy/-- ktmatu.com Chinese-English dictionary Posted 4/4/2005 at 4:04 AM |
Lottery Theology,
Day 3 The Pennsylvania Lottery Daily Number for Sunday, April 3, 2005: 689 The most common Chinese characters in order of frequency:
Diagram taken from R. Sing, "Chinese New Year's Dragon Teacher's Guide," in Multicultural Celebrations, by The Boston Children's Museum (Cleveland, Ohio: Modern Curriculum Press, 1992) The two previous PA daily numbers may also be interpreted according to Patrick Zein's list of Chinese characters in order of frequency. April 1: 666 [chuang4] {chuàng} begin/initiate/inaugurate/start/create/ [chuang1] {chuāng} a wound/cut/injury/trauma/ April 2: 613 [ji4] {jì} discipline/age/era/period/order/record/ Posted 4/3/2005 at 11:11 PM |
Wager Pennsylvania Lottery Daily Number for yesterday evening, Saturday, April 2, 2005: 613 Related material: From 6/13 2004 -- An 8-rayed star: Another 8-rayed star: St. Peter's Square in Rome From 6/13 2003 -- A link to a 2001 First Things essay, The End of Endings: "Here is the heart of the
matter:
The underwriting of Hebraic–Hellenic literacy, of the normative analogue between divine and mortal acts of creation, was, in the fullest sense, theological. As was the wager (pronounced lost in deconstruction and postmodernism) on ultimate possibilities of accord between sign and sense, between word and meaning, between form and phenomenality. The links are direct between the tautology out of the Burning Bush, that 'I am' which accords to language the privilege of phrasing the identity of God, on the one hand, and the presumptions of concordance, of equivalence, of translatability, which, though imperfect, empower our dictionaries, our syntax, our rhetoric, on the other. That 'I am' has, as it were, at an overwhelming distance, informed all predication. It has spanned the arc between noun and verb, a leap primary to creation and the exercise of creative consciousness in metaphor. Where that fire in the branches has gone out or has been exposed as an optical illusion, the textuality of the world, the agency of the Logos in logic—be it Mosaic, Heraclitean, or Johannine—becomes 'a dead letter.'That passage bears rereading." -- Richard John Neuhaus quoting George Steiner's Grammars of Creation (Yale University Press, April 1, 2001) Posted 4/3/2005 at 3:26 PM |
From Dogma, a link in yesterday's noon entry: "Sky is high and so am I, If you're a viper -- a vi-paah." -- The Day of the Locust, by Nathanael West (1939), New Directions paperback, 1969, page 162
"Mystery surrounds the death of young actor River Phoenix.... The
actor... was declared dead at 1:51 a.m. PT Sunday. Phoenix died about
50 minutes after collapsing in front of the Viper Room, a new club on
the Sunset Strip...."
On the night of October 30-31, 1993, also known as Devil's
Night, there was a full Hunter's Moon and the Pennsylvania Lottery
number was 666.
"Do Catholics believe that when you die your soul goes up in the sky? To heaven, if they go to heaven?"
666. Posted 4/2/2005 at 11:07 AM |
April 1 at Noon "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, C12, N.Y. Times, 5/20/96 From Nov. 24, 2002: Searched the web for "Joyce and Aquinas" "William T. Noon". Results 1-5 of about 15:
Dogma
See also Monday's entry. Posted 4/1/2005 at 12:00 PM |
April 1 continued "In Finnegans Wake, the number 1132 appears in each chapter in one way or another." -- noseyflynn.com Time of this entry -- 11:32:55. Posted 4/1/2005 at 11:32 AM |
April O'Neil, Issue #1, January 1993 Those desiring more literary depth may consult Nick Tosches, Trinities. Posted 4/1/2005 at 12:00 AM |