"… if your requirement for success is to be like Steve Jobs,
good luck to you."
— "Transformation at Yahoo Foiled by Marissa Mayer’s
Inability to Bet the Farm," New York Times online yesterday
"Design is how it works." — Steve Jobs
Related material: Posts tagged Ambassadors.
"The positional meaning of a symbol derives from
its relationship to other symbols in a totality, a Gestalt,
whose elements acquire their significance from the
system as a whole."
— Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols , Ithaca, NY,
Cornell University Press, 1967, p. 51, quoted by
Beth Barrie in "Victor Turner."
(Turner pioneered the use of the term "symbology,"
a term later applied by Dan Brown to a fictional
scholarly pursuit at Harvard.)
* A scholarly pursuit at Hogwarts.
See a search for Nocciolo in this journal.
An image from that search —
Recall also Hamlet's
"O God… bad dreams."
See a search for "large Desargues configuration" in this journal.
The 6 Jan. 2015 preprint "Danzer's Configuration Revisited,"
by Boben, Gévay, and Pisanski, places this configuration,
which they call the Cayley-Salmon configuration , in the
interesting context of Pascal's Hexagrammum Mysticum .
They show how the Cayley-Salmon configuration is, in a sense,
dual to something they call the Steiner-Plücker configuration .
This duality appears implicitly in my note of April 26, 1986,
"Picturing the smallest projective 3-space." The six-sets at
the bottom of that note, together with Figures 3 and 4
of Boben et. al. , indicate how this works.
The duality was, as they note, previously described in 1898.
Related material on six-set geometry from the classical literature—
Baker, H. F., "Note II: On the Hexagrammum Mysticum of Pascal,"
in Principles of Geometry , Vol. II, Camb. U. Press, 1930, pp. 219-236
Richmond, H. W., "The Figure Formed from Six Points in Space of Four Dimensions,"
Mathematische Annalen (1900), Volume 53, Issue 1-2, pp 161-176
Richmond, H. W., "On the Figure of Six Points in Space of Four Dimensions,"
Quarterly Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics , Vol. 31 (1900), pp. 125-160
Related material on six-set geometry from a more recent source —
Cullinane, Steven H., "Classical Geometry in Light of Galois Geometry," webpage
In memory of ballet designer
Yolanda Sonnabend, who
reportedly died at 80 on Nov. 9,
see posts on Apollo, Ballet Blanc,
maps of New Haven, etc., etc., etc.
(A Prequel to Dirac and Geometry)
"So Einstein went back to the blackboard.
And on Nov. 25, 1915, he set down
the equation that rules the universe.
As compact and mysterious as a Viking rune,
it describes space-time as a kind of sagging mattress…."
— Dennis Overbye in The New York Times online,
November 24, 2015
Some pure mathematics I prefer to the sagging Viking mattress —
Readings closely related to the above passage —
Thomas Hawkins, "From General Relativity to Group Representations:
the Background to Weyl's Papers of 1925-26," in Matériaux pour
l'histoire des mathématiques au XXe siècle: Actes du colloque
à la mémoire de Jean Dieudonné, Nice, 1996 (Soc. Math.
de France, Paris, 1998), pp. 69-100.
The 19th-century algebraic theory of invariants is discussed
as what Weitzenböck called a guide "through the thicket
of formulas of general relativity."
Wallace Givens, "Tensor Coordinates of Linear Spaces," in
Annals of Mathematics Second Series, Vol. 38, No. 2, April 1937,
pp. 355-385.
Tensors (also used by Einstein in 1915) are related to
the theory of line complexes in three-dimensional
projective space and to the matrices used by Dirac
in his 1928 work on quantum mechanics.
For those who prefer metaphors to mathematics —
Rota fails to cite the source of his metaphor.
|
This post's title was suggested by the previous post
and by today's news of a notable sale of a one-copy
record album, "Once Upon a Time in Shaolin."
See as well posts from Tuesday, March 11, 2014,
the day Emma Watson unveiled a new trailer —
Some background for my post of Nov. 20,
"Anticommuting Dirac Matrices as Skew Lines" —
His earlier paper that Bruins refers to, "Line Geometry
and Quantum Mechanics," is available in a free PDF.
For a biography of Bruins translated by Google, click here.
For some additional historical background going back to
Eddington, see Gary W. Gibbons, "The Kummer
Configuration and the Geometry of Majorana Spinors,"
pages 39-52 in Oziewicz et al., eds., Spinors, Twistors,
Clifford Algebras, and Quantum Deformations:
Proceedings of the Second Max Born Symposium held
near Wrocław, Poland, September 1992 . (Springer, 2012,
originally published by Kluwer in 1993.)
For more-recent remarks on quantum geometry, see a
paper by Saniga cited in today's update to my Nov. 20 post.
A recent not-too-bright book from Princeton —
Some older, brighter books from Tony Zee —
Fearful Symmetry (1986) and
Quantum Field Theory in a Nutshell (2003).
* Continued.
For the title phrase, see Encyclopedia of Mathematics .
The zero system illustrated in the previous post*
should not be confused with the cinematic Zero Theorem .
* More precisely, in the part showing the 15 lines fixed under
a zero-system polarity in PG(3,2). For the zero system
itself, see diamond-theorem correlation.
(Continued from November 13)
The work of Ron Shaw in this area, ca. 1994-1995, does not
display explicitly the correspondence between anticommutativity
in the set of Dirac matrices and skewness in a line complex of
PG(3,2), the projective 3-space over the 2-element Galois field.
Here is an explicit picture —
References:
Arfken, George B., Mathematical Methods for Physicists , Third Edition,
Academic Press, 1985, pages 213-214
Cullinane, Steven H., Notes on Groups and Geometry, 1978-1986
Shaw, Ron, "Finite Geometry, Dirac Groups, and the Table of
Real Clifford Algebras," undated article at ResearchGate.net
Update of November 23:
See my post of Nov. 23 on publications by E. M. Bruins
in 1949 and 1959 on Dirac matrices and line geometry,
and on another author who gives some historical background
going back to Eddington.
Some more-recent related material from the Slovak school of
finite geometry and quantum theory —
The matrices underlying the Saniga paper are those of Pauli, not
those of Dirac, but these two sorts of matrices are closely related.
For the connection of the title, see the post of Friday, November 13th, 2015.
For the essentials of this connection, see the following two documents —
Anyone who clicked on the Dirac search at the end of
the previous post, "Dirac's Diamond," may wonder why the
"Solomon's Cube" post of 11 AM Sunday, March 1, 2009,
appeared in the Dirac search results, since there is no
apparent mention of Dirac in that Sunday post.
<!– See also "a linear transformation of V6… which preserves
the Klein quadric; in this way we arrive at the isomorphism of
Sym(8) withthe full orthogonal group O+(6; 2)." in "The
Classification of Flats in PG(9,2) which are External to the
Grassmannian G1,4,2 Authors: Shaw, Ron;
 Maks, Johannes; Gordon, Neil; Source: Designs,
Codes and Cryptography, Volume 34, Numbers 2-3, February
2005 , pp. 203-227; Publisher: Springer.  For more details,
see "Finite Geometry, Dirac Groups and the Table of Real
Clifford Algebras," by R. Shaw (U. of Hull), pp. 59-99 in
Clifford Algebras and Spinor Structures, by By Albert
Crumeyrolle, Rafał Abłamowicz, Pertti Lounesto,
published by Springer, 1995. –>
Note that the six anticommuting sets of Dirac matrices listed by Arfken
correspond exactly to the six spreads in the above complex of 15 projective
lines of PG(3,2) fixed under a symplectic polarity (the diamond theorem
correlation ). As I noted in 1986, this correlation underlies the Miracle
Octad Generator of R. T. Curtis, hence also the large Mathieu group.
References:
Arfken, George B., Mathematical Methods for Physicists , Third Edition,
Academic Press, 1985, pages 213-214
Cullinane, Steven H., Notes on Groups and Geometry, 1978-1986
Related material:
The 6-set in my 1986 note above also appears in a 1996 paper on
the sixteen Dirac matrices by David M. Goodmanson —
Background reading:
Ron Shaw on finite geometry, Clifford algebras, and Dirac groups
(undated compilation of publications from roughly 1994-1995)—
"… ein Buch muß die Axt sein für das gefrorene Meer in uns." — Franz Kafka
Adam Bernstein in The Washington Post yesterday on the late actress Betsy Drake —
" She also wrote a novel, Children, You Are Very Little (1971),
about a 10-year-old girl who goes to outrageous comic lengths
to defy the mean adults in her life and unite her broken family.
A Time magazine reviewer praised its 'flair and ferocity.'
'Adults demand that children understand what they’re trying to say,'
Ms. Drake remarked at the time, 'but too often they interpret a child’s
most serious moments as stupid or cute or funny. So children, in
self-defense, learn to play for the laugh. It’s a style of craziness,
a style of survival, a style of distancing. I learned this style as a child
but I’m not really impressed with my comic or ironic side. I’d much
rather write straight out of despair.' "
The New York Times in 2014 on Drake's friend, painter Bernard Perlin —
" His early gallery work reflected the realist influence of Ben Shahn,
who had been a colleague at the United States Office of War Information
in 1942 and 1943. Perhaps Mr. Perlin’s most notable work from this period
is 'Orthodox Boys,' from 1948, which depicts two Jewish boys discussing
a Jewish text in front of a wall covered with graffiti. "
Midrash for Perlin —
See this morning's previous post on two un-orthodox Jewish boys and an
un-orthodox text.
"The old, slow art of the eye and the hand, united in service
to the imagination, is in crisis. It’s not that painting is 'dead'
again—no other medium can as yet so directly combine
vision and touch to express what it’s like to have a particular
mind, with its singular troubles and glories, in a particular
body. But painting has lost symbolic force and function in a
culture of promiscuous knowledge and glutting information."
— Peter Schjeldahl in The New Yorker ,
issue dated Jan. 5, 2015
Cover of a 1980 book on computer music that contains a
helpful article on Walsh functions —
See, in this book, "Walsh Functions: A Digital Fourier Series,"
by Benjamin Jacoby (BYTE , September 1977). Some context:
Symmetry of Walsh Functions.
Excerpts from a search for Steve + Jobs in this journal —
The previous post quoted a passage from Turing's Cathedral ,
a 2012 book by George Dyson —
It should be noted that Dyson's remarks on "two species of
bits," space, time, "structure and sequence" and logic gates
are from his own idiosyncratic attempt to create a philosophy
based on the workings of computers. These concepts are not,
so far as I can tell, part of anyone else's approach to the subject.
For a more standard introduction to how computers work, see
(for instance) a book by an author Dyson admires:
The Pattern on the Stone , by W. Daniel Hillis (Basic Books, 1998).
PREFACE: MAGIC IN THE STONE
I etch a pattern of geometric shapes onto a stone.
To the uninitiated, the shapes look mysterious and
complex, but I know that when arranged correctly
they will give the stone a special power, enabling it
to respond to incantations in a language no human
being has ever spoken. I will ask the stone questions
in this language, and it will answer by showing me a
vision: a world created by my spell, a world imagined
within the pattern on the stone.
A few hundred years ago in my native New England,
an accurate description of my occupation would have
gotten me burned at the stake. Yet my work involves
no witchcraft; I design and program computers. The
stone is a wafer of silicon, and the incantations are
software. The patterns etched on the chip and the
programs that instruct the computer may look
complicated and mysterious, but they are generated
according to a few basic principles that are easily
explained. . . . .
Hillis's title suggests some remarks unrelated to computers —
See Philosopher + Stone in this journal.
“… the A B C of being….” — Wallace Stevens
Scholia —
Compare to my own later note, from March 4, 2010 —
“It seems that Guitart discovered these ‘A, B, C’ generators first,
though he did not display them in their natural setting,
the eightfold cube.” — Borromean Generators (Log24, Oct. 19)
See also Raiders of the Lost Crucible (Halloween 2015)
and “Guitar Solo” from the 2015 CMA Awards on ABC.
In memory of Princeton mathematician John Nash
"For the past six years all over the world
experts in the branch of abstract algebra
called group theory have been struggling
to capture a group known as the monster."
—Martin Gardner, Scientific American , June 1980
"When the Hawkline Monster moved to get a better view
of what was happening, the shadow, after having checked
all the possibilities of light, had discovered a way that it
could shift itself in front of the monster, so that the monster
at this crucial time would be blinded by darkness for a few
seconds, did so, causing confusion to befall the monster.
This was all that the shadow could do and it hoped that this
would give Greer and Cameron the edge they would need
to destroy the Hawkline Monster using whatever plan they
had come up with, for it seemed that they must have a plan
if they were to have any chance at all with the monster and
they did not seem like fools.
When Cameron yelled at Greer, the shadow interpreted this
as the time to move and did so. It obscured the vision of the
Hawkline Monster for a few seconds, knowing full well that if
the monster were destroyed it would be destroyed, too, but
death was better than going on living like this, being a part of
this evil."
— Richard Brautigan, The Hawkline Monster , 1974
From the post For Scientific Witch Hunters of October 30,
an illustration from The Boston Globe —
From the post Colorful Story (All Souls' Day),
an Illustration from Google Book Search —
Earlier in Brautigan's tale …
" Everybody started to leave the parlor to go downstairs
and pour out the Hawkline Monster but just as
they reached the door and one of the Hawkline women
had her hand on the knob, Cameron said, 'Hold it for a
second. I want to get myself a little whiskey.' "
This is a sequel to the previous post and to the Oct. 24 post
Two Views of Finite Space. From the latter —
” ‘All you need to do is give me your soul:
give up geometry and you will have this
marvellous machine.’ (Nowadays you
can think of it as a computer!) “
"The office of color in the color line
is a very plain and subordinate one.
It simply advertises the objects of
oppression, insult, and persecution.
It is not the maddening liquor, but
the black letters on the sign
telling the world where it may be had."
— Frederick Douglass, "The Color Line,"
The North American Review , Vol. 132,
No. 295, June 1881, page 575
Or gold letters.
From a search for Seagram in this journal —
"The colorful story of this undertaking begins with a bang."
— Martin Gardner on the death of Évariste Galois
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
on the date Friday, April 5, 2013 —
“First published Tue Sep 24, 1996;
substantive revision Fri Apr 5, 2013”
This journal on the date Friday, April 5, 2013 —
The object most closely resembling a “philosophers’ stone”
that I know of is the eightfold cube .
For some related philosophical remarks that may appeal
to a general Internet audience, see (for instance) a website
by I Ching enthusiast Andreas Schöter that displays a labeled
eightfold cube in the form of a lattice diagram —
Related material by Schöter —
A 20-page PDF, “Boolean Algebra and the Yi Jing.”
(First published in The Oracle: The Journal of Yijing Studies ,
Vol 2, No 7, Summer 1998, pp. 19–34.)
I differ with Schöter’s emphasis on Boolean algebra.
The appropriate mathematics for I Ching studies is,
I maintain, not Boolean algebra but rather Galois geometry.
See last Saturday’s post Two Views of Finite Space.
Unfortunately, that post is, unlike Schöter’s work, not
suitable for a general Internet audience.
The cover of the K. O. Friedrichs book From Pythagoras to Einstein
shown in the previous post suggests a review (click the Log24
images for webpages where they can be manipulated) ….
The "more sophisticated" link in the first image above
leads to a webpage by Alexander Bogomolny,
"Pythagoras' Theorem by Tessellation," that says
"This is a subtle and beautiful proof."
Bogomolny refers us to the Friedrichs book, from which one of
the illustrations of the proof by tessellation is as follows —
For a quite different use of superposition, see
The Lindbergh Manifesto (May 19, 2015).
Yesterday's nonsense from The New York Times suggests
a better example of cultural criticism is needed. Try this …
The opening paragraph of "The many faces of Pablo Picasso,"
by Peter Conrad, at theguardian.com on Saturday,
7 February, 2009, 19.01 EST* —
"Picasso," the surrealist poet Paul Eluard said,
"paints like God or the devil." Picasso favoured
the first option. "I am God," he was once heard
telling himself. He muttered the mantra three
times, boasting of his power to animate and
enliven the visible world. Any line drawn by
his hand pulsed with vitality; when he looked
at it, a bicycle seat and its handlebar could
suddenly turn into the horned head of a bull.
But he also took a diabolical pleasure in
warping appearances, deforming faces and
twisting bodies, subjecting reality to a
tormenting inquisition.
As noted here, yesterday was the birth date (in 1811) of Galois.
It was also the birth date (in 1881) of Picasso.
Related material from the 2009 date* of the Conrad article —
The Log24 post "Childish Things." For those who deeply
dislike Picasso, there is also an 1880 opening illustration
to Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen —
Story the First,
Which Describes a Looking-Glass
and the Broken Fragments
"You must attend to the commencement
of this story, for when we get to the end
we shall know more than we do now about
a very wicked hobgoblin; he was one of the
very worst, for he was a real demon."
Houghton Mifflin edition of 1880, Riverside Press, Cambridge
Click the above illustration for related posts in this journal.
* Also dated the following day, to correspond to the 00.01 GMT publication
time of The Guardian 's Sunday version, The Observer , in which it appeared.
The above illustrations are
from posts tagged
"Universe of Discourse."
Happy birthday to Évariste Galois, who may
prefer a mathematical, not religious,
interpretation of the above Celtic cross.
The following slides are from lectures on “Advanced Boolean Algebra” —
The small Boolean spaces above correspond exactly to some small
Galois spaces. These two names indicate approaches to the spaces
via Boolean algebra and via Galois geometry .
A reading from Atiyah that seems relevant to this sort of algebra
and this sort of geometry —
” ‘All you need to do is give me your soul: give up geometry
and you will have this marvellous machine.’ (Nowadays you
can think of it as a computer!) “
Related material — The article “Diamond Theory” in the journal
Computer Graphics and Art , Vol. 2 No. 1, February 1977. That
article, despite the word “computer” in the journal’s title, was
much less about Boolean algebra than about Galois geometry .
For later remarks on diamond theory, see finitegeometry.org/sc.
* See "Square Inch Space" in this journal.
Happy birthday to the late Michael Crichton (Harvard ’64).
See also Diamond Theory Roulette —
Part of the ReCode Project (http://recodeproject.com). Based on "Diamond Theory" by Steven H. Cullinane, originally published in "Computer Graphics and Art" Vol. 2 No. 1, February 1977. Copyright (c) 2013 Radames Ajna — OSI/MIT license (http://recodeproject/license).
Related remarks on Plato for Harvard’s
Graduate School of Design —
See also posts from the above publication date, March 31,
2006, among posts now tagged “The Church in Philadelphia.”
Software writer Richard P. Gabriel describes some work of design
philosopher Christopher Alexander in the 1960's at Harvard:
A more interesting account of these 35 structures:
"It is commonly known that there is a bijection between
the 35 unordered triples of a 7-set [i.e., the 35 partitions
of an 8-set into two 4-sets] and the 35 lines of PG(3,2)
such that lines intersect if and only if the corresponding
triples have exactly one element in common."
— "Generalized Polygons and Semipartial Geometries,"
by F. De Clerck, J. A. Thas, and H. Van Maldeghem,
April 1996 minicourse, example 5 on page 6.
For some context, see Eightfold Geometry by Steven H. Cullinane.
"Perhaps an insane conceit …." Perhaps.
Related remarks on algebra and space —
"The Quality Without a Name" (Log24, August 26, 2015).
Elijah Wood in "The Last Witch Hunter" —
See Graham Priest in this journal.
See also Coxeter + Discursive.
This post continues recent thoughts on the work of René Guitart.
A 2014 article by Guitart gives a great deal of detail on his
approach to symmetric generation of the simple group of order 168 —
“Hexagonal Logic of the Field F8 as a Boolean Logic
with Three Involutive Modalities,” pp. 191-220 in
The Road to Universal Logic:
Festschrift for 50th Birthday of
Jean-Yves Béziau, Volume I,
Editors: Arnold Koslow, Arthur Buchsbaum,
Birkhäuser Studies in Universal Logic, dated 2015
by publisher but Oct. 11, 2014, by Amazon.com.
See also the eightfold cube in this journal.
I found today that the following reference to my work —
Steven H. Cullinane.
Geometry of the I Ching. 2006 [text]
— was placed by Anthony Judge in a draft webpage
dated 24 August 2015.
Today's previous Log24 post, Zen and the Art,
suggests some context I prefer to the colorful
remarks of Judge — namely, a Log24 search for
See esp. a post from the date of the Judge webpage,
24 August 2015, titled
From slides dated June 28, 2008 —
Compare to my own later note, from March 4, 2010 —
It seems that Guitart discovered these "A, B, C" generators first,
though he did not display them in their natural setting,
the eightfold cube.
Some context: The epigraph to my webpage
"A Simple Reflection Group of Order 168" —
"Let G be a finite, primitive subgroup of GL(V) = GL(n,D) ,
where V is an n-dimensional vector space over the
division ring D . Assume that G is generated by 'nice'
transformations. The problem is then to try to determine
(up to GL(V) -conjugacy) all possibilities for G . Of course,
this problem is very vague. But it is a classical one,
going back 150 years, and yet very much alive today."
— William M. Kantor, "Generation of Linear Groups,"
pp. 497-509 in The Geometric Vein: The Coxeter Festschrift ,
published by Springer, 1981
A Unified Field —
Click the above image for further details.
See also a search in this journal for Jorie Graham.
Related dramatic dialogue for Emma Stone and
Joaquin Phoenix, actors in "Irrational Man" —
"Are you aware of what's going on at that table?"
Philosophical backstory by Hans Christian Andersen —
"He was quite frightened, and he tried to repeat the Lord's Prayer;
but all he could do, he was only able to remember the multiplication table."
There are various ways to coordinatize a 3×3 array
(the Chinese "Holy Field'). Here are some —
See Cullinane, Coxeter, and Knight tour.
The title is a phrase from R. D. Laing's book The Politics of Experience .
(Published in the psychedelic year 1967. The later "contrapuntal interweaving"
below is of a less psychedelic nature.)
An illustration of the "interweaving' part of the title —
The "deep structure" of the diamond theorem:
.
The word "symplectic" from the end of last Sunday's (Oct. 11) sermon
describes the "interwoven" nature of the above illustration.
An illustration of the "contrapuntal" part of the title (click to enlarge):
"Andersen's weavers, as one commentator points out,
are merely insisting that 'the value of their labor be
recognized apart from its material embodiment.' The
invisible cloth they weave may never manifest itself in
material terms, but the description of its beauty
('as light as spiderwebs' and 'exquisite') turns it into
one of the many wondrous objects found in Andersen's
fairy tales. It is that cloth that captivates us, making us
do the imaginative work of seeing something beautiful
even when it has no material reality."
— The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen ,
edited with an introduction and notes by Maria Tatar
See also Symplectic in this journal.
From The Snow Queen , by Hans Christian Andersen —
|
SEVENTH STORY. What Took Place in the Palace of the Snow Queen, and What Happened Afterward The walls of the palace were of driving snow, and the windows and doors of cutting winds. There were more than a hundred halls there, according as the snow was driven by the winds. The largest was many miles in extent; all were lighted up by the powerful Aurora Borealis, and all were so large, so empty, so icy cold, and so resplendent! Mirth never reigned there; there was never even a little bear-ball, with the storm for music, while the polar bears went on their hindlegs and showed off their steps. Never a little tea-party of white young lady foxes; vast, cold, and empty were the halls of the Snow Queen. The northern-lights shone with such precision that one could tell exactly when they were at their highest or lowest degree of brightness. In the middle of the empty, endless hall of snow, was a frozen lake; it was cracked in a thousand pieces, but each piece was so like the other, that it seemed the work of a cunning artificer. In the middle of this lake sat the Snow Queen when she was at home; and then she said she was sitting in the Mirror of Understanding, and that this was the only one and the best thing in the world. Little Kay was quite blue, yes nearly black with cold; but he did not observe it, for she had kissed away all feeling of cold from his body, and his heart was a lump of ice. He was dragging along some pointed flat pieces of ice, which he laid together in all possible ways, for he wanted to make something with them; just as we have little flat pieces of wood to make geometrical figures with, called the Chinese Puzzle. Kay made all sorts of figures, the most complicated, for it was an ice-puzzle for the understanding. In his eyes the figures were extraordinarily beautiful, and of the utmost importance; for the bit of glass which was in his eye caused this. He found whole figures which represented a written word; but he never could manage to represent just the word he wanted–that word was "eternity"; and the Snow Queen had said, "If you can discover that figure, you shall be your own master, and I will make you a present of the whole world and a pair of new skates." But he could not find it out. "I am going now to warm lands," said the Snow Queen. "I must have a look down into the black caldrons." It was the volcanoes Vesuvius and Etna that she meant. "I will just give them a coating of white, for that is as it ought to be; besides, it is good for the oranges and the grapes." And then away she flew, and Kay sat quite alone in the empty halls of ice that were miles long, and looked at the blocks of ice, and thought and thought till his skull was almost cracked. There he sat quite benumbed and motionless; one would have imagined he was frozen to death. …. |
Related material:
This journal on March 25, 2013:
Norwegian Sculpture Biennial 2015 catalog, p. 70 —
" 'Ambassadørene' er fysiske former som presenterer
ikk-fysiske fenomener. "
Translation by Google —
" 'Ambassadors' physical forms presents
nonphysical phenomena. "
Related definition —
Are the "line diagrams" of the diamond theorem and
the analogous "plane diagrams" of the eightfold cube
nonphysical entities? Discuss.
An eightfold cube appears in this detail
of a photo by Josefine Lyche of her
installation "4D Ambassador" at the
Norwegian Sculpture Biennial 2015 —
(Detail from private Instagram photo.)
Catalog description of installation —
Google Translate version —
In a small bedroom to Foredragssalen populate
Josefine Lyche exhibition with a group sculptures
that are part of the work group 4D Ambassador
(2014-2015). Together they form an installation
where she uses light to amplify the feeling of
stepping into a new dimension, for which the title
suggests, this "ambassadors" for a dimension we
normally do not have access to. "Ambassadors"
physical forms presents nonphysical phenomena.
Lyches works have in recent years been placed
in something one might call an "esoteric direction"
in contemporary art, and defines itself this
sculpture group humorous as "glam-minimalist."
She has in many of his works returned to basic
geometric shapes, with hints to the occult,
"new space-age", mathematics and where
everything in between.
See also Lyche + "4D Ambassador" in this journal and
her website page with a 2012 version of that title.
"The close of trading today will spell a new era for Google
as the search giant becomes a part of new holding company
Alphabet Inc." — ABC News, 1:53 PM ET today
From an Aug. 10, 2015, letter by Larry Page announcing the change:
Other business philosophy:
Strategy Rules: Five Timeless Lessons from
Bill Gates, Andy Grove, and Steve Jobs
by David B. Yoffie, Michael A. Cusumano
On Sale: 04/14/2015
A not-so-timeless lesson: a synchronicity check
(of this journal, not of the oeuvre of Joseph Jaworski) —
04/14/2015 — Sacramental Geometry.
See searches for "theta characteristics" in Google and in this journal.
A definition of particular interest for finite geometry —
The Grushevsky-Manni paper above was submitted to the arXiv
on 9 Dec. 2012. For some synchronistically related remarks
suitable for Michaelmas, see this journal on that date.
From a post of July 24, 2011 —
A review —
“The story, involving the Knights Templar, the Vatican, sunken treasure,
the fate of Christianity and a decoding device that looks as if it came out of
a really big box of medieval Cracker Jack, is the latest attempt to combine
Indiana Jones derring-do with ‘Da Vinci Code’ mysticism.”
A feeble attempt at a purely mathematical "decoding device"
from this journal earlier this month —
For some background, see a question by John Baez at Math Overflow
on Aug. 20, 2015.
The nonexistence of a 24-cycle in the large Mathieu group
might discourage anyone hoping for deep new insights from
the above figure.
See Marston Conder's "Symmetric Genus of the Mathieu Groups" —
Click to enlarge:
For the hypercube as a vector space over the two-element field GF(2),
see a search in this journal for Hypercube + Vector + Space .
For connections with the related symplectic geometry, see Symplectic
in this journal and Notes on Groups and Geometry, 1978-1986.
For the above 1976 hypercube (or tesseract ), see "Diamond Theory,"
by Steven H. Cullinane, Computer Graphics and Art , Vol. 2, No. 1,
Feb. 1977, pp. 5-7.
This suggests the recent link (in the Sept. 22 post Geometry for Jews)
to the post Red October (Oct. 2, 2012). That post mentioned the first
version of Hotel Transylvania.
See also Mary Karr's look at American culture in today's NY Times
Sunday Book Review .
Remarks by an ignorant professor quoted here
yesterday suggest a Log24 search for "Lost in Translation."
That search yields instances of the following figure:
See also the post Red October (Oct. 2, 2012).
The latest Visual Insight post at the American Mathematical
Society website discusses group actions on the McGee graph,
pictured as 24 points arranged in a circle that are connected
by 36 symmetrically arranged edges.
Wikipedia remarks that …
"The automorphism group of the McGee graph
is of order 32 and doesn't act transitively upon
its vertices: there are two vertex orbits of lengths
8 and 16."
The partition into 8 and 16 points suggests, for those familiar
with the Miracle Octad Generator and the Mathieu group M24,
the following exercise:
Arrange the 24 points of the projective line
over GF(23) in a circle in the natural cyclic order
( ∞, 1, 2, 3, … , 22, 0 ). Can the McGee graph be
modeled by constructing edges in any natural way?
In other words, if the above set of edges has no
"natural" connection with the 24 points of the
projective line over GF(23), does some other
set of edges in an isomorphic McGee graph
have such a connection?
Update of 9:20 PM ET Sept. 20, 2015:
Backstory: A related question by John Baez
at Math Overflow on August 20.
Related material:
From the website of the American Mathematical Society today,
a column by John Baez that was falsely backdated to Sept. 1, 2015 —
Compare and contrast this Baez column
with the posts in the above
Log24 search for "Symplectic."
Updates after 9 PM ET Sept. 17, 2015 —
Related wrinkles in time:
Baez's preceding Visual Insight post, titled
"Tutte-Coxeter Graph," was dated Aug. 15, 2015.
This seems to contradict the AMS home page headline
of Sept. 5, 2015, that linked to Baez's still earlier post
"Heawood Graph," dated Aug. 1. Also, note the
reference in "Tutte-Coxeter Graph" to Baez's related
essay — dated August 17, 2015 —
Or: Ten Years and a Day
In memory of film director Robert Wise,
who died ten years ago yesterday.
A search in this journal for "Schoolgirl" ends with a post
from Sept. 10, 2002, The Sound of Hanging Rock.
See as well a Log24 search for "Strangerland"
(a 2015 film about a search for a schoolgirl) and
a Log24 search for "Weaving."
Related mathematics: Symplectic.
Some related images (click to enlarge) —
Sarah Larson in the online New Yorker on Sept. 3, 2015,
discussed Google’s new parent company, “Alphabet”—
“… Alphabet takes our most elementally wonderful
general-use word—the name of the components of
language itself*—and reassigns it, like the words
tweet, twitter, vine, facebook, friend, and so on,
into a branded realm.”
Emma Watson in “The Bling Ring”
This journal, also on September 3 —
| Thursday, September 3, 2015
Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 7:20 AM For the title, see posts from August 2007 Related theological remarks: Boolean spaces (old) vs. Galois spaces (new) in |
* Actually, Sarah, that would be “phonemes.”
See also Weyl + Palermo in this journal —
* The title refers to the previous post, on a current New Yorker cartoon.
For the title, see posts from August 2007 tagged Gyges.
Related theological remarks:
Boolean spaces (old) vs. Galois spaces (new) in
“The Quality Without a Name”
(a post from August 26, 2015) and the…
Related literature: A search for Borogoves in this journal will yield
remarks on the 1943 tale underlying the above film.
Or: A Shema for Sacks.
"We’ve already seen the hexagon painted over a
propaganda poster. It’s obviously a mark of defiance,
or maybe a geometry lesson. It’s still not clear.
Hey, it’s that clown dictator again. Who’s his stylist?"
Thesis and antithesis at last night's
MTV video music awards:
A geometric synthesis —
Related material —
The Wrench and the Nut (Aug. 24) and Cryptomorphisms.
"We tell ourselves stories in order to live." — Joan Didion
A post from St. Augustine's day, 2015, may serve to
illustrate this.
The post started with a look at a painting by Swiss artist
Wolf Barth, "Spielfeld." The painting portrays two
rectangular arrays, of four and of twelve subsquares,
that sit atop a square array of sixteen subsquares.
To one familiar with Euclid's "bride's chair" proof of the
Pythagorean theorem, "Spielfeld" suggests a right triangle
with squares on its sides of areas 4, 12, and 16.
That image in turn suggests a diagram illustrating the fact
that a triangle suitably inscribed in a half-circle is a right
triangle… in this case, a right triangle with angles of 30, 60,
and 90 degrees… Thus —
In memory of screenwriter John Gregory Dunne (husband
of Joan Didion and author of, among other things, The Studio )
here is a cinematric approach to the above figure.
The half-circle at top suggests the dome of an observatory.
This in turn suggests a scene from the 2014 film "Magic in
the Moonlight."
As she gazes at the silent universe above
through an opening in the dome, the silent
Emma Stone is perhaps thinking,
prompted by her work with Spider-Man …
"Drop me a line."
As he gazes at the crack in the dome,
Stone's costar Colin Firth contrasts the vastness
of the Universe with the smallness of Man, citing …
"the tiny field F2 with two elements."
In conclusion, recall the words of author Norman Mailer
that summarized his Harvard education —
"At times, bullshit can only be countered
with superior bullshit."
Observatory scene from "Magic in the Moonlight"
"The sixteen nodes… can be parametrized
by the sixteen points in affine four-space
over the tiny field F2 with two elements."
The title phrase, paraphrased without quotes in
the previous post, is from Christopher Alexander's book
The Timeless Way of Building (Oxford University Press, 1979).
A quote from the publisher:
"Now, at last, there is a coherent theory
which describes in modern terms
an architecture as ancient as
human society itself."
Three paragraphs from the book (pp. xiii-xiv):
19. Within this process, every individual act
of building is a process in which space gets
differentiated. It is not a process of addition,
in which preformed parts are combined to
create a whole, but a process of unfolding,
like the evolution of an embryo, in which
the whole precedes the parts, and actualy
gives birth to then, by splitting.
20. The process of unfolding goes step by step,
one pattern at a time. Each step brings just one
pattern to life; and the intensity of the result
depends on the intensity of each one of these
individual steps.
21. From a sequence of these individual patterns,
whole buildings with the character of nature
will form themselves within your thoughts,
as easily as sentences.
Compare to, and contrast with, these illustrations of "Boolean space":
(See also similar illustrations from Berkeley and Purdue.)
Detail of the above image —
Note the "unfolding," as Christopher Alexander would have it.
These "Boolean" spaces of 1, 2, 4, 8, and 16 points
are also Galois spaces. See the diamond theorem —
The Wrench and the Nut
From Schicksalstag 2012 —
The Quality
with No Name
 |
And what is good, Phaedrus,
and what is not good —
Need we ask anyone
to tell us these things?
— Epigraph to
Zen and the Art of
Motorcyle Maintenance
Related material from Wikipedia today:
See as well a search in this journal for “Permutation Group” + Wikipedia .
(This post was updated on Jan. 10, 2016.)
See galois.io .
(That URL forwards to http://finite-geometry.github.io/galois/ .)
Recommended for editing: c9.io .
The phrase “the permutation group Sn” refers to a
particular group of permutations that act on an
n -element set N— namely, all of them. For a given n ,
there are, in general, many permutation groups that
act on N. All but one are smaller than Sn .
In other words, the phrase “the permutation group Sn”
does not imply that “Sn ” is a symbol for a structure
associated with n called “the permutation group.”
It is instead a symbol for “the symmetric group,” the largest
of (in general) many permutation groups that act on N.
This point seems to have escaped John Baez.
For two misuses by Baez of the phrase “permutation group” at the
n-Category Café, see “A Wrinkle in the Mathematical Universe”
and “Re: A Wrinkle…” —
“There is such a thing as a permutation group.”
— Adapted from A Wrinkle in Time , by Madeleine L’Engle
Sir Laurence Olivier, in "Term of Trial" (1962), dangles
a participle in front of schoolboy Terence Stamp:
"Walking to school today
my arithmetic book
fell into the gutter"
Were Stamp a Galois, the reply might be "Try this one, sir."
But first, a word from our sponsa* …
Sir Laurence Olivier in "Term of Trial" (1962),
a film starring Sarah Miles as a schoolgirl —
* Bride in Latin. See also "bride's chair,"
a phrase from mathematical pedagogy.
(A sequel to Space Station 1976)
For Kathleen Gibbons* —
* Note Gibbons's work on "Discrete phase space based on finite fields."
(A review)
The ABC of things —
The ABC of words —
A nutshell —
Book lessons —
Today is reportedly the anniversary of the death,
in Paris in 1822, of Jean Robert Argand.
Some related material …
"Wessel's fame as a mathematician rests solely
on this paper, which was published in 1799,
giving for the first time a geometrical interpretation
of complex numbers. Today we call this geometric
interpretation the Argand diagram but Wessel's
work came first. It was rediscovered by Argand
in 1806 and again by Gauss in 1831. ….
Of course it is not unreasonable to call the
geometrical interpretation of complex numbers
the Argand diagram since it was Argand's work
which was influential. It was so named before
the world of mathematics learnt of Wessel's prior
publication. In fact Wessel's paper was not
noticed by the mathematical community until 1895…."
See also Tilting at Whirligigs (Log24 on March 8, 2008)
and The Galois Quaternion.
Spielerei —
"On the most recent visit, Arthur had given him
a brightly colored cube, with sides you could twist
in all directions, a new toy that had just come onto
the market."
— Daniel Kehlmann, F: A Novel (2014),
translated from the German by
Carol Brown Janeway
Nicht Spielerei —
A figure from this journal at 2 AM ET
on Monday, August 3, 2015
Also on August 3 —
FRANKFURT — "Johanna Quandt, the matriarch of the family
that controls the automaker BMW and one of the wealthiest
people in Germany, died on Monday in Bad Homburg, Germany.
She was 89."
MANHATTAN — "Carol Brown Janeway, a Scottish-born
publishing executive, editor and award-winning translator who
introduced American readers to dozens of international authors,
died on Monday in Manhattan. She was 71."
Related material — Heisenberg on beauty, Munich, 1970
"The ORCID organization offers an open and
independent registry intended to be the de facto
standard for contributor identification in research
and academic publishing. On 16 October 2012,
ORCID launched its registry services… and
started issuing user identifiers." — Wikipedia
This journal on the above date —
A more recent identifier —
Related material —
See also the recent posts Ein Kampf and Symplectic.
* Continued.
See "Symplectic" in this journal. Some illustrations —
Midrash —
"Adorned with cryptic stones and sliding shines,
An immaculate personage in nothingness,
With the whole spirit sparkling in its cloth,
Generations of the imagination piled
In the manner of its stitchings, of its thread,
In the weaving round the wonder of its need,
And the first flowers upon it, an alphabet
By which to spell out holy doom and end,
A bee for the remembering of happiness."
— Wallace Stevens, "The Owl in the Sarcophagus"
"Little emblems of eternity"
— Phrase by Oliver Sacks in today's
New York Times Sunday Review
Some other emblems —
Note the color-interchange
symmetry of each emblem
under 180-degree rotation.
Click an emblem for
some background.
From an explanation of the Web app IFTTT —
"IF This Then That" —
"If you are a programmer you can think of it as a loop*
that checks for a certain condition… to run one or
multiple actions if the condition is met."
After Completion (from Friday night, and 1989) —
Advertisement —
"On February 19, 2015, IFTTT renamed
their original application to IF…."
From Tuesday's post on the death of E. L. Doctorow —
“…right through hell
there is a path…”
— Malcolm Lowry
* More precisely, a conditional or conditional loop .
This post was suggested by a book title in
the previous post: "Pieces of the Action."
A group action is a mathematical concept.
Related meditation:
"The number 9, that is to say, relates traditionally
to the Great Goddess of Many Names (Devi,
Inanna, Ishtar, Astarte, Artemis, Venus, etc.)
as matrix of the cosmic process, whether in the
macrocosm or in a microcosmic field of manifestation."
— Joseph Campbell,
The Inner Reaches of Outer Space
Examples:
|
Tom Stoppard, Jumpers —
“Heaven, how can I believe in Heaven?”
“To begin at the beginning: Is God?…” “Leave a space.” |
See as well a search for "Heaven.gif" in this journal.
For the more literate among us —
… and the modulation from algebra to space.
The Fano Plane —
"A balanced incomplete block design , or BIBD
with parameters b , v , r , k , and λ is an arrangement
of b blocks, taken from a set of v objects (known
for historical reasons as varieties ), such that every
variety appears in exactly r blocks, every block
contains exactly k varieties, and every pair of
varieties appears together in exactly λ blocks.
Such an arrangement is also called a
(b , v , r , k , λ ) design. Thus, (7, 3, 1) [the Fano plane]
is a (7, 7, 3, 3, 1) design."
— Ezra Brown, "The Many Names of (7, 3, 1),"
Mathematics Magazine , Vol. 75, No. 2, April 2002
W. Cherowitzo uses the notation (v, b, r, k, λ) instead of
Brown's (b , v , r , k , λ ). Cherowitzo has described,
without mentioning its close connection with the
Fano-plane design, the following —
"the (8,14,7,4,3)-design on the set
X = {1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8} with blocks:
{1,3,7,8} {1,2,4,8} {2,3,5,8} {3,4,6,8} {4,5,7,8}
{1,5,6,8} {2,6,7,8} {1,2,3,6} {1,2,5,7} {1,3,4,5}
{1,4,6,7} {2,3,4,7} {2,4,5,6} {3,5,6,7}."
We can arrange these 14 blocks in complementary pairs:
{1,2,3,6} {4,5,7,8}
{1,2,4,8} {3,5,6,7}
{1,2,5,7} {3,4,6,8}
{1,3,4,5} {2,6,7,8}
{1,3,7,8} {2,4,5,6}
{1,4,6,7} {2,3,5,8}
{1,5,6,8} {2,3,4,7}.
These pairs correspond to the seven natural slicings
of the following eightfold cube —
Another representation of these seven natural slicings —
These seven slicings represent the seven
planes through the origin in the vector
3-space over the two-element field GF(2).
In a standard construction, these seven
planes provide one way of defining the
seven projective lines of the Fano plane.
A more colorful illustration —
"Historically, the idea of a concept script
derives from the Leibnizian project of developing
a so-called 'universal characteristic'
(characteristica universalis )…."
— Dorothea Lotter, "Gottlob Frege: Language,"
in Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Frege as quoted by Lotter —
"Arithmetical, geometrical and chemical symbols
can be regarded as realizations of the Leibnizian
conception in particular fields. The concept script
offered here adds a new one to these – indeed,
the one located in the middle, adjoining all the others."
Wittgenstein —
"Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment
of our intelligence by means of our language."
"Die Philosophie ist ein Kampf gegen die Verhexung
unsres Verstandes durch die Mittel unserer Sprache."
— Philosophical Investigations (1953), Section 109
Frege, Preface to the Begriffsschrift —
"If it is one of the tasks of philosophy
to break the domination of words over the human spirit
by laying bare the misconceptions
that through the use of language
often almost unavoidably arise
concerning the relations between concepts
and by freeing thought from that with which only
the means of expression of ordinary language,
constituted as they are, saddle it,
then my ideography, further developed for these purposes,
can become a useful tool for the philosopher."
"Wenn es eine Aufgabe der Philosophie ist,
die Herrschaft des Wortes über den menschlichen Geist
zu brechen, indem sie die Täuschungen aufdeckt,
die durch den Sprachgebrauch über die Beziehungen der Begriffe
oft fast unvermeidlich entstehen,
indem sie den Gedanken von demjenigen befreit, womit ihn allein
die Beschaffenheit des sprachlichen Ausdrucksmittels behaftet,
so wird meine Begriffsschrift, für diese Zwecke weiter ausgebildet,
den Philosophen ein brauchbares Werkzeug werden können."
A post of July 7, Haiku for DeLillo, had a link to posts tagged "Holy Field GF(3)."
As the smallest Galois field based on an odd prime, this structure
clearly is of fundamental importance.
It is, however, perhaps too small to be visually impressive.
A larger, closely related, field, GF(9), may be pictured as a 3×3 array…
|
… hence as the traditional Chinese Holy Field.
Marketing the Holy Field
The above illustration of China's Holy Field occurred in the context of
Log24 posts on Child Buyers. For more on child buyers, see an excellent
condemnation today by Diane Ravitch of the U. S. Secretary of Education.
Some context for yesterday's post on a symplectic polarity —
This 1986 note may or may not have inspired some remarks
of Wolf Barth in his foreword to the 1990 reissue of Hudson's
1905 Kummer's Quartic Surface .
See also the diamond-theorem correlation.
(Continued from Friday, June 26, 2015)
In memory of an architect —
Donald Wexler, an architect whose innovative steel houses
and soaring glass-fronted terminal at the Palm Springs
International Airport helped make Palm Springs, Calif.,
a showcase for midcentury modernism, died on Friday
[June 26, 2015] at his home in Palm Desert. He was 89.
— William Grimes in this morning's New York Times
For a different sort of architecture in Palm Desert, see…
(A sequel to Expanding the Spielraum (Feb. 3, 2015))
"Knowledge, wisdom even, lies in depth, not extension."
— Tim Parks in The New York Review of Books ,
5 PM ET on June 26, 2015
See also Log24 posts on the following figure —
"It is as if one were to condense
all trends of present day mathematics
onto a single finite structure…."
— Gian-Carlo Rota, foreword to
A Source Book in Matroid Theory ,
Joseph P.S. Kung, Birkhäuser, 1986
"There is such a thing as a matroid."
— Saying adapted from a novel by Madeleine L'Engle
Related remarks from Mathematics Magazine in 2009 —
See also the eightfold cube —
.
The previous post's link to The Lindbergh Manifesto
and Thursday's post on Basel-born artist Wolf Barth
suggest the following —
See as well a June 14 New York Times
piece on Art Basel.
The logo of the University of Basel …
… suggests a review of The Holy Field —
.
There is such a thing as geometry.*
* Proposition adapted from A Wrinkle in Time , by Madeleine L'Engle.
The title of the previous post, "Slow Art," is a phrase
of the late art critic Robert Hughes.
Example from mathematics:
Click the Barth passage to see it with its surrounding text.
Related material:
See that phrase in this journal.
See also last night's post.
The Greek letter Ω is customarily used to
denote a set that is acted upon by a group.
If the group is the affine group of 322,560
transformations of the four-dimensional
affine space over the two-element Galois
field, the appropriate Ω is the 4×4 grid above.
… was added to the Wikipedia article Finite geometry.
(Shown above is a slightly newer image, changed to reflect
the Wikipedia article's remarks on the schoolgirl problem.)
“Was ist Raum, wie können wir ihn
erfassen und gestalten?”
The Theory and
Organization of the
Bauhaus (1923)
This post was suggested by the Bauhaus song
"Bela Lugosi's Dead" at the beginning of the
1983 Tony Scott classic "The Hunger."
Omega is a Greek letter, Ω , used in mathematics to denote
a set on which a group acts.
For instance, the affine group AGL(3,2) is a group of 1,344
actions on the eight elements of the vector 3-space over the
two-element Galois field GF(2), or, if you prefer, on the Galois
field Ω = GF(8).
Related fiction: The Eight , by Katherine Neville.
Related non-fiction: A remark by Werner Heisenberg
in this journal on Saturday, June 6, 2015, the eightfold cube ,
and the illustrations below —
|
Mathematics
The Fano plane block design |
Magic
The Deathly Hallows symbol— |
"Those that can be obtained…." —
Related music video: Waterloo.
* "In defense of the epistemic view of quantum states:
a toy theory," by Robert W. Spekkens, Perimeter Institute
for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, Canada
Click the above image for the IMDb page from which it is taken.
"Course material associated with Jack Edmonds’ lectures
can be found here."
See also High Concept (Jan. 21, 2015) —
Image from the end of the 2012 film "Travelling Salesman"
— and another eye in a triangle …
From the Log24 post Prize (June 7, 2015)
For geeks* —
" Domain, Domain on the Range , "
where Domain = the Galois tesseract and
Range = the four-element Galois field.
This post was suggested by the previous post,
by a Log24 search for Knight + Move, and by
the phrase "discouraging words" found in that search.
* A term from the 1947 film "Nightmare Alley."
Princeton University's president on June 2, 2015 —
“Dream Audaciously,” Eisgruber Urges Graduates
Related news —
Film director Christopher Nolan at Princeton on June 1, 2015:
“In these graduation speeches, generally, you have the
speaker say something along the lines of, ‘You need to
chase your dreams,’ ” Nolan said. “But I’m not going to
say that because I don’t believe it. I don’t want you to
chase your dreams. I want you to chase your realities.
And I want to say: Don’t chase your realities at the
expense of your dreams, but as the foundation of your
dreams.”
"If you have built castles in the air,
your work need not be lost;
that is where they should be.
Now put the foundations under them.”
— Henry David Thoreau
A review describes the main character in the 1981 novel
The Knife in My Hands —
"His other peculiar characteristic is a fascination, developed during
his university years, with the Cabala and, like a miniature Lowry,*
he spends much of his time wandering drunkenly through its
labyrinthine mysteries."
AA motto: "Principles before personalities."
* Related material: Back to the Real.
Background — A search for the title in this journal.
Grothendieck was at times excited about space:
"The notion of space is certainly one of the oldest
in mathematics. It is fundamental to our 'geometric'
perspective on the world, and has been so tacitly
for over two millenia. It's only over the course of the
19th century that this concept has, bit-by-bit, freed
itself from the tyranny of our immediate perceptions
(that is, one and the same as the 'space' that
surrounds us), and of its traditional theoretical
treatment (Euclidean), to attain to its present
dynamism and autonomy. In our own times it has
joined the ranks of those notions that are most freely
and universally employed in mathematics, and is
familiar, I would say, to every mathematician
without exception. It has become a concept of multiple
and varied aspects, of hundreds of thousands of faces…."
— fermentmagazine.org/rands/promenade12.html
An aspect not so familiar: Diamond Space.
(A sequel to the previous post, Tell )
Inscapes
An illustration (click image for further details) —
Related reading
From my JSTOR shelf —
Click the above image for a related Log24 post, Groups Acting.
The most recent version of a passage
quoted in posts tagged "May 19 Gestalt" —
"You've got to pick up every stitch." — Donovan
"Creation is the birth of something, and
something cannot come from nothing."
— Photographer Peter Lindbergh at his website
From a biography of Lindbergh —
"… it took Lindbergh awhile to find his true métier.
Born in Krefeld, Germany, in 1944….
Barely out of his teens, he became a painter who
embraced conceptual art and — for reasons he
has since forgotten — adopted the professional
name « Sultan. » Lindbergh… was a few years
short of his 30th birthday when he turned to
photography…."
— "The Man Who Loves Women," by Pamela Young,
Toronto Globe & Mail , September 19, 1996
A Lindbergh work (at right below) from his conceptual-art days —
For a connection between the above work by Paul Talman and the
above "Mono Type 1" of Lindbergh, see…
Yesterday morning's quote from The Politics of Experience :
"Creation ex nihilo has been pronounced impossible even for
God. But we are concerned with miracles."
Related material:
Curtis + Turyn in this journal and Sidney Harris on theology —
See Found Symbol in this journal.
See also the Imperial College theorem symbol
and a page from Imperial College about
group actions on a space Ω —
For Han Solo, some less imperial symbology —
Detail of a CKEditor plugin screenshot:
horizontal line, smiley, special characters,
and iframe area.
Notes on space for day 13 of May, 2015 —
The 13 symmetry axes of the cube may be viewed as
the 13 points of the Galois projective space PG(2,3).
This space (a plane) may also be viewed as the nine points
of the Galois affine space AG(2,3) plus the four points on
an added "line at infinity."
Related poetic material:
The ninefold square and Apollo, as well as …
See Stevens + New Haven.
* The above figure may be viewed as
the Chinese “Holy Field” or as the
Chinese character for “Well”
inscribed in a square.
Review:
Illustrating the Spiegel-Spiel des Gevierts
|
"At the point of convergence
by Octavio Paz, translated by |
Friday December 5, 2008
|
Illustrations from a post of Feb. 17, 2011:
Plato’s paradigm in the Meno —
Changed paradigm in the diamond theorem (2×2 case) —
If The New York Times interviewed Ultron for its
Sunday Book Review "By the Book" column —
What books are currently on your night stand?
Steve Fuller's Thomas Kuhn: A Philosophical History for Our Times
Gerald Holton's Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought
John Gray's The Soul of the Marionette
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