Log24

Friday, December 14, 2018

Small Space Odyssey

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:00 am

References in recent posts to physical space and 
to mathematical space suggest a comparison.

Physical space is well known, at least in the world
of mass entertainment.

Mathematical space, such as the 12-dimensional
finite space of the Golay code, is less well known.

A figure from each space —

The source of the Conway-Sloane brick —

Quote from a mathematics writer —

“Looking carefully at Golay’s code is like staring into the sun.”

— Richard Evan Schwartz

The former practice yields reflections like those of Conway and Sloane.
The latter practice is not recommended.

Wednesday, December 12, 2018

Kummerhenge Continues.

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 7:24 pm

Those pleased by what Ross Douthat today called
"The Return of Paganism" are free to devise rituals
involving what might be called "the sacred geometry
of the Kummer 166  configuration."

As noted previously in this journal, 

"The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation."

— T. S. Eliot in Four Quartets

Geometric incarnation and the Kummer configuration

See also earlier posts also tagged "Kummerhenge" and 
another property of the remarkable Kummer 166 

The Kummer 16_6 Configuration and the Nordstrom-Robinson Code

For some related literary remarks, see "Transposed" in  this journal.

Some background from 2001 —

An Inscape for Douthat

Some images, and a definition, suggested by my remarks here last night
on Apollo and Ross Douthat's remarks today on "The Return of Paganism" —

Detail of Feb. 20, 1986, note by Steven H. Cullinane on Weyl's 'relativity problem'

Kibler's 2008 'Variations on a theme' illustrated.

In finite geometry and combinatorics,
an inscape  is a 4×4 array of square figures,
each figure picturing a subset of the overall 4×4 array:


 

Related material — the phrase
"Quantum Tesseract Theorem" and  

A.  An image from the recent
      film "A Wrinkle in Time" — 

B.  A quote from the 1962 book —

"There's something phoney
in the whole setup, Meg thought.
There is definitely something rotten
in the state of Camazotz."

Sunday, December 9, 2018

Quaternions in a Small Space

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 2:00 pm

The previous post, on the 3×3 square in ancient China,
suggests a review of group actions on that square
that include the quaternion group.

Click to enlarge

Three links from the above finitegeometry.org webpage on the
quaternion group —

Related material —

Iain Aitchison on the 'symmetric generation' of R. T. Curtis

See as well the two Log24 posts of December 1st, 2018 —

Character and In Memoriam.

Friday, December 7, 2018

The Angel Particle

(Continued from this morning)

Majorana spinors and fermions at ncatlab

The Gibbons paper on the geometry of Majorana spinors and the Kummer configuration

"The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation."

— T. S. Eliot in Four Quartets

Geometric incarnation and the Kummer configuration

See also other Log24 posts tagged Kummerhenge.

Tuesday, December 4, 2018

Melbourne Noir

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:30 am

 March 8, 2018, was the date of death for Melbourne author Peter Temple.

Monday, December 3, 2018

The Relativity Problem at Hiroshima

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 6:21 pm

“This is the relativity problem:  to fix objectively a class of
equivalent coordinatizations and to ascertain the group of
transformations S mediating between them.”

— Hermann Weyl, The Classical Groups ,
Princeton University Press, 1946, p. 16

Iain Aitchison's 'dice-labelled' cuboctahedron at Hiroshima, March 2018

See also Relativity Problem and Diamonds and Whirls.

Sunday, December 2, 2018

Symmetric Generation …

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:00 pm

Continued .   See as well a Log24 search for "Symmetric Generation."

Iain Aitchison on symmetric generation of M24

Iain Aitchison on symmetric generation of M24

Update of 2 PM ET —

Symmetry at Hiroshima

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 6:43 am

A search this morning for articles mentioning the Miracle Octad Generator
of R. T. Curtis within the last year yielded an abstract for two talks given
at Hiroshima on March 8 and 9, 2018

http://www.math.sci.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/
branched/files/2018/abstract/Aitchison.txt

 

Iain AITCHISON

Title:

Construction of highly symmetric Riemann surfaces, related manifolds, and some exceptional objects, I, II

Abstract:

Since antiquity, some mathematical objects have played a special role, underpinning new mathematics as understanding deepened. Perhaps archetypal are the Platonic polyhedra, subsequently related to Platonic idealism, and the contentious notion of existence of mathematical reality independent of human consciousness.

Exceptional or unique objects are often associated with symmetry – manifest or hidden. In topology and geometry, we have natural base points for the moduli spaces of closed genus 2 and 3 surfaces (arising from the 2-fold branched cover of the sphere over the 6 vertices of the octahedron, and Klein's quartic curve, respectively), and Bring's genus 4 curve arises in Klein's description of the solution of polynomial equations of degree greater than 4, as well as in the construction of the Horrocks-Mumford bundle. Poincare's homology 3-sphere, and Kummer's surface in real dimension 4 also play special roles.

In other areas: we have the exceptional Lie algebras such as E8; the sporadic finite simple groups; the division algebras: Golay's binary and ternary codes; the Steiner triple systems S(5,6,12) and S(5,8,24); the Leech lattice; the outer automorphisms of the symmetric group S6; the triality map in dimension 8; and so on. We also note such as: the 27 lines on a cubic, the 28 bitangents of a quartic curve, the 120 tritangents of a sextic curve, and so on, related to Galois' exceptional finite groups PSL2(p) (for p= 5,7,11), and various other so-called `Arnol'd Trinities'.

Motivated originally by the `Eightfold Way' sculpture at MSRI in Berkeley, we discuss inter-relationships between a selection of these objects, illustrating connections arising via highly symmetric Riemann surface patterns. These are constructed starting with a labeled polygon and an involution on its label set.

Necessarily, in two lectures, we will neither delve deeply into, nor describe in full, contexts within which exceptional objects arise. We will, however, give sufficient definition and detail to illustrate essential inter-connectedness of those exceptional objects considered.

Our starting point will be simplistic, arising from ancient Greek ideas underlying atomism, and Plato's concepts of space. There will be some overlap with a previous talk on this material, but we will illustrate with some different examples, and from a different philosophical perspective.

Some new results arising from this work will also be given, such as an alternative graphic-illustrated MOG (Miracle Octad Generator) for the Steiner system S(5,8,24), and an alternative to Singerman – Jones' genus 70 Riemann surface previously proposed as a completion of an Arnol'd Trinity. Our alternative candidate also completes a Trinity whose two other elements are Thurston's highly symmetric 6- and 8-component links, the latter related by Thurston to Klein's quartic curve.

See also yesterday morning's post, "Character."

Update: For a followup, see the next  Log24 post.

Friday, November 30, 2018

Latin-Square Structure

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — m759 @ 2:56 am

Continued from March 13, 2011

"…as we saw, there are two different Latin squares of order 4…."
— Peter J. Cameron, "The Shrikhande Graph," August 26, 2010

Cameron counts Latin squares as the same if they are isotopic .
Some further context for Cameron's remark—

A new website illustrates a different approach to Latin squares of order 4 —

https://shc7596.wixsite.com/website .

Thursday, November 29, 2018

The White Cube

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — m759 @ 9:57 am

Clicking on Zong in the above post leads to a 2005 article
in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society .

See also the eightfold  cube and interality .

Wednesday, November 28, 2018

Geometry and Experience

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:18 am

Einstein, "Geometry and Experience," lecture before the
Prussian Academy of Sciences, January 27, 1921–

This view of axioms, advocated by modern axiomatics, purges mathematics of all extraneous elements, and thus dispels the mystic obscurity, which formerly surrounded the basis of mathematics. But such an expurgated exposition of mathematics makes it also evident that mathematics as such cannot predicate anything about objects of our intuition or real objects. In axiomatic geometry the words "point," "straight line," etc., stand only for empty conceptual schemata. That which gives them content is not relevant to mathematics.

Yet on the other hand it is certain that mathematics generally, and particularly geometry, owes its existence to the need which was felt of learning something about the behavior of real objects. The very word geometry, which, of course, means earth-measuring, proves this. For earth-measuring has to do with the possibilities of the disposition of certain natural objects with respect to one another, namely, with parts of the earth, measuring-lines, measuring-wands, etc. It is clear that the system of concepts of axiomatic geometry alone cannot make any assertions as to the behavior of real objects of this kind, which we will call practically-rigid bodies. To be able to make such assertions, geometry must be stripped of its merely logical-formal character by the coordination of real objects of experience with the empty conceptual schemata of axiomatic geometry. To accomplish this, we need only add the proposition: solid bodies are related, with respect to their possible dispositions, as are bodies in Euclidean geometry of three dimensions. Then the propositions of Euclid contain affirmations as to the behavior of practically-rigid bodies.

Geometry thus completed is evidently a natural science; we may in fact regard it as the most ancient branch of physics. Its affirmations rest essentially on induction from experience, but not on logical inferences only. We will call this completed geometry "practical geometry," and shall distinguish it in what follows from "purely axiomatic geometry." The question whether the practical geometry of the universe is Euclidean or not has a clear meaning, and its answer can only be furnished by experience.  ….

Later in the same lecture, Einstein discusses "the theory of a finite
universe." Of course he is not using "finite" in the sense of the field
of mathematics known as "finite geometry " — geometry with only finitely
many points.

Nevertheless, his remarks seem relevant to the Fano plane , an
axiomatically defined entity from finite geometry, and the eightfold cube ,
a physical object embodying the properties of the Fano plane.

 I want to show that without any extraordinary difficulty we can illustrate the theory of a finite universe by means of a mental picture to which, with some practice, we shall soon grow accustomed.

First of all, an observation of epistemological nature. A geometrical-physical theory as such is incapable of being directly pictured, being merely a system of concepts. But these concepts serve the purpose of bringing a multiplicity of real or imaginary sensory experiences into connection in the mind. To "visualize" a theory therefore means to bring to mind that abundance of sensible experiences for which the theory supplies the schematic arrangement. In the present case we have to ask ourselves how we can represent that behavior of solid bodies with respect to their mutual disposition (contact) that corresponds to the theory of a finite universe. 

Saturday, November 24, 2018

Portfolio

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — m759 @ 6:29 pm

A new portfolio site:

Portfolio on art and geometry of Steven H. Cullinane

Friday, November 16, 2018

The Transposed Squares

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — m759 @ 9:12 pm
 
 

I.e. (click to enlarge) —

 

Tuesday, November 13, 2018

Blackboard Jungle Continues.

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 6:19 pm

From the 1955 film "Blackboard Jungle" —

From a trailer for the recent film version of A Wrinkle in Time

Detail of the phrase "quantum tesseract theorem":

From the 1962 book —

"There's something phoney
in the whole setup, Meg thought.
There is definitely something rotten
in the state of Camazotz."

Related mathematics from Koen Thas that some might call a
"quantum tesseract theorem" —

Some background —

Koen Thas, 'Unextendible Mututally Unbiased Bases' (2016)

See also posts tagged Dirac and Geometry. For more
background on finite  geometry, see a web page
at Thas's institution, Ghent University.

Thursday, November 8, 2018

Reality vs. Axiomatic Thinking

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:16 pm

From https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/…

A  Few  of  My  Favorite  Spaces:
The Fano Plane

The intuition-challenging Fano plane may be
the smallest interesting configuration
of points and lines.

By Evelyn Lamb on October 24, 2015

"…finite projective planes seem like
a triumph of purely axiomatic thinking
over any hint of reality. . . ."

For Fano's axiomatic  approach, see the Nov. 3 Log24 post
"Foundations of Geometry."

For the Fano plane's basis in reality , see the eightfold cube
at finitegeometry.org/sc/ and in this journal.

See as well "Two Views of Finite Space" (in this journal on the date 
of Lamb's remarks — Oct. 24, 2015).

Some context:  Gödel's Platonic realism vs. Hilbert's axiomatics
in remarks by Manuel Alfonseca on June 7, 2018. (See too remarks
in this journal on that date, in posts tagged "Road to Hell.")

Geometry Lesson

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:00 am

From "The Trials of Device" (April 24, 2017) —

Wittgenstein's pentagram and 4x4 'counting-pattern'

Pentagon with pentagram    

See also Wittgenstein in a search for "Ein Kampf " in this journal.

Tuesday, November 6, 2018

On Mathematical Beauty

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 2:18 am

A phrase from the previous post —
"a size-eight dame in a size-six dress" —
suggests a review . . .

See as well the diamond-theorem correlation and . . .

Why PSL(2,7) is isomorphic to GL(3.2)

Saturday, November 3, 2018

Foundations of Geometry

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — m759 @ 1:40 pm

"costruire (o, dirò meglio immaginare) un ente" — Fano, 1892

"o, dirò meglio, costruire" — Cullinane, 2018

Tuesday, October 23, 2018

Plan 9 from Inner Space

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — m759 @ 9:57 am

Click the image for some context.

Saturday, October 20, 2018

Configuration

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — m759 @ 10:30 pm

See also Stella Octangula.

Saturday, September 29, 2018

“Ikonologie des Zwischenraums”

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 9:29 am

The title is from Warburg. The Zwischenraum  lines and shaded "cuts"
below are to be added together in characteristic two, i.e., via the
set-theoretic symmetric difference  operator.

Some small Galois spaces (the Cullinane models)

Saturday, September 22, 2018

Minimalist Configuration

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 11:03 pm

From the previous post

From Wikipedia

From Log24

The Venturi Manifesto

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:00 pm

Venturi reportedly died on Tuesday, September 18.*

See also this journal on that date.

* Fact check:

Symmetric Generation, by Curtis

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 10:15 am

Norwegian artist Josefine Lyche —

Lyche's shirt honors the late Kurt Cobain.

"Here we are now, entertain us."

Friday, September 21, 2018

ABC Art

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 4:36 am

Monday, September 17, 2018

Lying at the Axis

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 12:00 am

Or:  Zero Dark Zero

" Lying at the axis of everything, zero is both real and imaginary. Lovelace was fascinated by zero; as was Gottfried Leibniz, for whom, like mathematics itself, it had a spiritual dimension. It was this that let him to imagine the binary numbers that now lie at the heart of computers: 'the creation of all things out of nothing through God's omnipotence, it might be said that nothing is a better analogy to, or even demonstration of such creation than the origin of numbers as here represented, using only unity and zero or nothing.' He also wrote, 'The imaginary number is a fine and wonderful recourse of the divine spirit, almost an amphibian between being and nonbeing.' "

— A footnote from page 229 of Sydney Padua's
    April 21, 2015, book on Lovelace and Babbage

Saturday, September 15, 2018

Axioms

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:50 am

Tieszen— 'Kurt Godel and Phenomenology' — 1992

Update of 10:18 AM the same day —

See also Logicomix  in this  journal and, at Harvard,

http://www.math.harvard.edu/~mazur/

  • September 6, 2018:  Eric Maskin, Amartya Sen and I
    are giving a course this semester: 'Axiomatic Reasoning'
    (PHIL 273B). Introduction to Axiomatic Reasoning gives a
    general sense of what we intend to cover.

Update of 10:48 AM the same day —

http://www.log24.com/log/pix18/180915-Tieszen_died-March-28-2017.jpg

See Log24 on the date of Tieszen's death.

Eidetic Reduction in Geometry

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: , , , , — m759 @ 1:23 am
 

"Husserl is not the greatest philosopher of all times.
He is the greatest philosopher since Leibniz."

Kurt Gödel as quoted by Gian-Carlo Rota

Some results from a Google search —

Eidetic reduction | philosophy | Britannica.com

Eidetic reduction, in phenomenology, a method by which the philosopher moves from the consciousness of individual and concrete objects to the transempirical realm of pure essences and thus achieves an intuition of the eidos (Greek: “shape”) of a thing—i.e., of what it is in its invariable and essential structure, apart …

Phenomenology Online » Eidetic Reduction

The eidetic reduction: eidos. Method: Bracket all incidental meaning and ask: what are some of the possible invariate aspects of this experience? The research …

Eidetic reduction – New World Encyclopedia

Sep 19, 2017 – Eidetic reduction is a technique in Husserlian phenomenology, used to identify the essential components of the given phenomenon or experience.

Terminology: Eidos

For example —

The reduction of two-colorings and four-colorings of a square or cubic
array of subsquares or subcubes to lines, sets of lines, cuts, or sets of
cuts between the subsquares or subcubes.

See the diamond theorem and the eightfold cube.

* Cf. posts tagged Interality and Interstice.

Friday, September 14, 2018

Denkraum

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 1:00 am

http://www.log24.com/log/pix18/180914-Warburg_Denkraum-Google-result.jpg

I Ching Geometry search result

Underlying the I Ching  structure  is the finite affine space
of six dimensions over the Galois field with two elements.

In this field,  "1 + 1 = 0,"  as noted here Wednesday.

See also other posts now tagged  Interstice.

http://www.log24.com/log/pix18/180914-Warburg-Wikipedia.jpg

Thursday, September 13, 2018

Iconology of the Interstice

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 6:25 am

The title is from the 2013 paper by Latsis in the previous post.

http://www.log24.com/log/pix18/180913-For_June_16-2018-Instagram.jpg

The symmetries of the interstices at right underlie
the symmetries of the images at left.

Sunday, September 9, 2018

Plan 9 Continues.

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:00 am

"The role of Desargues's theorem was not understood until
the Desargues configuration was discovered. For example,
the fundamental role of Desargues's theorem in the coordinatization
of synthetic projective geometry can only be understood in the light
of the Desargues configuration.

Thus, even as simple a formal statement as Desargues's theorem
is not quite what it purports to be. The statement of Desargues's theorem
pretends to be definitive, but in reality it is only the tip of an iceberg
of connections with other facts of mathematics."

— From p. 192 of "The Phenomenology of Mathematical Proof,"
by Gian-Carlo Rota, in Synthese , Vol. 111, No. 2, Proof and Progress
in Mathematics
(May, 1997), pp. 183-196. Published by: Springer.

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20117627.

Related figures —

Note the 3×3 subsquare containing the triangles ABC, etc.

"That in which space itself is contained" — Wallace Stevens

Saturday, September 1, 2018

Ron Shaw — D. 21 June 2016

The date of Ron Shaw's 2016 death appears to be June 21:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix18/180901-Ron_Shaw-d_21_June_2016-LMS-500w.jpg

All other Internet sources I have seen omit the June 21 date.

This  journal on that date —

http://www.log24.com/log/pix18/180901-The_Central_Structure-21_June_2016.jpg

Saturday, December 23, 2017

The Right Stuff

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 1:12 pm

A figure related to the general connecting theorem  of Koen Thas —

Anticommuting Dirac matrices as spreads of projective lines

Ron Shaw on the 15 lines of the classical generalized quadrangle W(2), a general linear complex in PG(3,2)

See also posts tagged Dirac and Geometry in this  journal.

Those who prefer narrative to mathematics may, if they so fancy, call
the above Thas connecting theorem a "quantum tesseract theorem ."

Thursday, December 21, 2017

For Winter Solstice 2017

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 10:30 am

A review —

Some context —

Webpage demonstrating symmetries of 'Solomon's Cube'

Monday, December 18, 2017

Mathematics and Art

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — m759 @ 5:09 pm

From the American Mathematical Society homepage today —

From concinnitasproject.org

"Concinnitas  is the title of a portfolio of fine art prints. . . .
The portfolio draws its name from a word famously used
by the Renaissance scholar, artist, architect, and philosopher
Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472) to connote the balance of
number, outline, and position (in essence, number, geometry,
and topology) that he believed characterize a beautiful work of art."

The favicon of the Concinnitas Project —

The structure of the Concinnitas favicon —

This structure is from page 15 of
"Diamond Theory," a 1976 preprint —

 .

Wheelwright and the Dance

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — m759 @ 1:00 pm

The page preceding that of yesterday's post  Wheelwright and the Wheel —

See also a Log24 search for 
"Four Quartets" + "Four Elements".

A graphic approach to this concept:

"The Bounded Space" —

'Space Cross' from the Cullinane diamond theorem

"The Fire, Air, Earth, and Water" —

Logo for 'Elements of Finite Geometry'

Saturday, December 16, 2017

Dagger Definitions (Review)

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 11:30 am

The previous post suggests a review of
the philosophical concept of universals —

A part of the above-mentioned 2011 "Saturday evening's post" that is
relevant to the illustration at the end of today's previous post —

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110101-Singer377abridged.jpg

Note the whatness of Singer's  dagger definitions —

Sunday, December 10, 2017

Geometry

Google search result for Plato + Statesman + interlacing + interweaving

See also Symplectic in this journal.

From Gotay and Isenberg, “The Symplectization of Science,”
Gazette des Mathématiciens  54, 59-79 (1992):

“… what is the origin of the unusual name ‘symplectic’? ….
Its mathematical usage is due to Hermann Weyl who,
in an effort to avoid a certain semantic confusion, renamed
the then obscure ‘line complex group’ the ‘symplectic group.’
… the adjective ‘symplectic’ means ‘plaited together’ or ‘woven.’
This is wonderfully apt….”

IMAGE- A symplectic structure -- i.e. a structure that is symplectic (meaning plaited or woven)

The above symplectic  figure appears in remarks on
the diamond-theorem correlation in the webpage
Rosenhain and Göpel Tetrads in PG(3,2). See also
related remarks on the notion of  linear  (or line ) complex
in the finite projective space PG(3,2) —

Anticommuting Dirac matrices as spreads of projective lines

Ron Shaw on the 15 lines of the classical generalized quadrangle W(2), a general linear complex in PG(3,2)

Thursday, November 30, 2017

The Matrix for Quantum Mystics

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 10:29 pm

Scholia on the title — See Quantum + Mystic in this journal.

The Matrix of Lévi-Strauss

"In Vol. I of Structural Anthropology , p. 209, I have shown that
this analysis alone can account for the double aspect of time
representation in all mythical systems: the narrative is both
'in time' (it consists of a succession of events) and 'beyond'
(its value is permanent)." — Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1976

I prefer the earlier, better-known, remarks on time by T. S. Eliot
in Four Quartets , and the following four quartets (from
The Matrix Meets the Grid) —

.

From a Log24 post of June 26-27, 2017:

A work of Eddington cited in 1974 by von Franz

See also Dirac and Geometry and Kummer in this journal.

Ron Shaw on Eddington's triads "associated in conjugate pairs" —

For more about hyperbolic  and isotropic  lines in PG(3,2),
see posts tagged Diamond Theorem Correlation.

For Shaw, in memoriam — See Contrapuntal Interweaving and The Fugue.

Friday, November 24, 2017

The Matrix Meets the Grid

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:00 pm

The Matrix —

  The Grid —

  Picturing the Witt Construction

     "Read something that means something." — New Yorker  ad

Thursday, November 16, 2017

A Line at Infinity

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — m759 @ 12:00 pm

Lost Horizon

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — m759 @ 11:29 am

Related material —

The following image in this journal

  .

Saturday, November 4, 2017

Seven-Cycles in an Octad

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 8:00 pm

Figures from a search in this journal for Springer Knight
and from the All Souls' Day post The Trojan Pony

     Binary coordinates for a 4x2 array  Chess knight formed by a Singer 7-cycle

For those who prefer pure abstraction to the quasi-figurative
1985 seven-cycle above, a different 7-cycle for M24 , from 1998 —


Compare and contrast with my own "knight" labeling
of a 4-row 2-column array (an M24 octad, in the system
of R. T. Curtis)  by the 8 points of the projective line
over GF(7),  from 2008 —

'Knight' octad labeling by the 8 points of the projective line over GF(7)

Thursday, November 2, 2017

The Trojan Pony

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 7:31 pm

From a search in this journal for Springer Knight

     Binary coordinates for a 4x2 array  Chess knight formed by a Singer 7-cycle

Related material from Academia —

Nash and Needleman, 'On Magic Finite Projective Space,' Dec. 4, 2014

See also Log24 posts from the above "magic" date,
December 4, 2014, now tagged The Pony Argument.

Saturday, October 28, 2017

Lowell Brown at Vanity Fair

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 8:18 pm

A sequel to the post  CP  is for Consolation Prize  (Sept. 3, 2016)

An image from Log24 on this date last year:

A recent comment on a discussion of CP symmetry

Friday, October 27, 2017

To Forge a Head

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 12:25 pm

The title was suggested by a 2014 Vanity Fair  piece
by James Toback (Harvard '66).

"He squinted at this vision of a Qualityless world for a while,
conjured up more details, thought about it, and then squinted
some more and thought some more and then finally circled
back to where he was before.

Squareness.

That's the look. That sums it. Squareness. When you subtract
quality you get squareness. Absence of Quality is the essence
of squareness."

— Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

And when you add  quality?

A related Zen joke from Final Club (June 19, 2017) —

.

Tuesday, October 24, 2017

Visual Insight

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — m759 @ 1:00 pm

The most recent post in the "Visual Insight" blog of the
American Mathematical Society was by John Baez on Jan. 1, 2017


A visually  related concept — See Solomon's Cube in this  journal.
Chronologically  related — Posts now tagged New Year's Day 2017.
Solomon's cube is the 4x4x4 case of the diamond theorem — 

Monday, October 23, 2017

Plan 9 Continues

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — m759 @ 9:00 pm

Click for some background

Another approach, for Dan Brown fans —

In the following passage, Brown claims that an eight-ray star
with arrowheads at the rays' ends is "the mathematical symbol for
entropy."  Brown may have first encountered this symbol at a 
questionable "Sacred Science" website.  Wikipedia discusses
some even less  respectable uses of the symbol.

Thursday, October 19, 2017

Design Grammar***

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 10:22 pm

The elementary shapes at the top of the figure below mirror
the looking-glass property  of the classical Lo Shu square.

The nine shapes at top left* and their looking-glass reflection
illustrate the looking-glass reflection relating two orthogonal
Latin squares over the three digits of modulo-three arithmetic.

Combining these two orthogonal Latin squares,** we have a
representation in base three of the numbers from 0 to 8.

Adding 1 to each of these numbers yields the Lo Shu square.

Mirror symmetry of the ninefold Lo Shu magic square

* The array at top left is from the cover of
Wonder Years:
Werkplaats Typografie 1998-2008
.

** A well-known construction.

*** For other instances of what might be
called "design grammar" in combinatorics,
see a slide presentation by Robin Wilson.
No reference to the work of Chomsky is
intended.

Graphic Design: Fast Forward

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 8:18 pm
 

Typographical: » 

Eightfold Cube:

 

Wednesday, October 18, 2017

Dürer for St. Luke’s Day

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 1:00 pm

Structure of the Dürer magic square 

16   3   2  13
 5  10  11   8   decreased by 1 is …
 9   6   7  12
 4  15  14   1

15   2   1  12
 4   9  10   7
 8   5   6  11
 3  14  13   0 .

Base 4 —

33  02  01  30
10  21  22  13
20  11  12  23 
03  32  31  00 .

Two-part decomposition of base-4 array
as two (non-Latin) orthogonal arrays

3 0 0 3     3 2 1 0
1 2 2 1     0 1 2 3
2 1 1 2     0 1 2 3
0 3 3 0     3 2 1 0 .

Base 2 –

1111  0010  0001  1100
0100  1001  1010  0111
1000  0101  0110  1011
0011  1110  1101  0000 .

Four-part decomposition of base-2 array
as four affine hyperplanes over GF(2) —

1001  1001  1100  1010
0110  1001  0011  0101
1001  0110  0011  0101
0110  0110  1100  1010 .

— Steven H. Cullinane,
  October 18, 2017

See also recent related analyses of
noted 3×3 and 5×5 magic squares.

Monday, October 16, 2017

Highway 61 Revisited

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 10:13 am

"God said to Abraham …." — Bob Dylan, "Highway 61 Revisited"

Related material — 

See as well Charles Small, Harvard '64, 
"Magic Squares over Fields" —

— and Conway-Norton-Ryba in this  journal.

Some remarks on an order-five  magic square over GF(52):

"Ultra Super Magic Square"

on the numbers 0 to 24:

22   5   18   1  14
  3  11  24   7  15
  9  17   0  13  21
10  23   6  19   2
16   4  12  20   8

Base-5:

42  10  33  01  24 
03  21  44  12  30 
14  32  00  23  41
20  43  11  34  02
31  04  22  40  13 

Regarding the above digits as representing
elements of the vector 2-space over GF(5)
(or the vector 1-space over GF(52)) 

All vector row sums = (0, 0)  (or 0, over GF(52)).
All vector column sums = same.

Above array as two
orthogonal Latin squares:
   
4 1 3 0 2     2 0 3 1 4
0 2 4 1 3     3 1 4 2 0 
1 3 0 2 4     4 2 0 3 1         
2 4 1 3 0     0 3 1 4 2
3 0 2 4 1     1 4 2 0 3

— Steven H. Cullinane,
      October 16, 2017

Sunday, October 15, 2017

Saturday Night Not-So-Live

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — m759 @ 11:59 pm

Hillel Italie at AP News —

"Richard Wilbur, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and translator
who intrigued and delighted generations of readers and theatergoers
through his rhyming editions of Moliere and his own verse on memory,
writing and nature, died. He was 96.

Wilbur died Saturday night [Oct. 14, 2017] in Belmont, Massachusetts,
with his family by his side, according to friend and fellow poet, Dana Gioia."

Images from the post "Center" in this journal on Saturday afternoon —

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110203-Scholia.jpg.

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold"

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

Saturday, October 14, 2017

Center

Rosalind Krauss in 1978

"To get inside the systems of this work,
whether LeWitt's or Judd's or Morris's,
is precisely to enter
a world without a center,
a world of substitutions and transpositions
nowhere legitimated by the revelations
of a transcendental subject. This is the strength
of this work, its seriousness, and its claim to modernity." 

Wikipedia

"The center of
the quaternion group,
Q8 = {1, −1, i, −i, j, −j, k, −k} ,
is {1, −1}."

Illustration from a post of Feb. 3,  2011

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110203-Scholia.jpg.

Thursday, October 12, 2017

East Meets West

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 8:09 pm

Tuesday, October 10, 2017

Another 35-Year Wait

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 9:00 pm

The title refers to today's earlier post "The 35-Year Wait."

A check of my activities 35 years ago this fall, in the autumn
of 1982, yields a formula I prefer to the nonsensical, but famous,
"canonical formula" of Claude Lévi-Strauss.

The Lévi-Strauss formula

My "inscape" formula, from a note of Sept. 22, 1982 —

S = f ( f ( X ) ) .

Some mathematics from last year related to the 1982 formula —

Koen Thas, 'Unextendible Mututally Unbiased Bases' (2016)

See also Inscape in this  journal and posts tagged Dirac and Geometry.

Dueling Formulas

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: , , , , — m759 @ 12:35 pm

Continued from the previous post and from posts
now tagged Dueling Formulas

The four-diamond formula of Jung and
the four-dot "as" of Claude Lévi-Strauss:

Simplified versions of the diamonds and the dots
 

The Ring of the Diamond Theorem          ::

I prefer Jung. For those who prefer Lévi-Strauss —

     First edition, Cornell University Press, 1970.

A related tale — "A Meaning, Like."

The 35-Year Wait

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — m759 @ 11:17 am

From the Web this morning —

A different 35-year wait:

A monograph of August 1976 —

Thirty-five years later, in a post of August 2011, "Coordinated Steps" —

'The Seven Dwarfs and their Diamond Mine

"SEE HEAR READ" — Walt Disney Productions

Some other diamond-mine productions —

 Image -- The cast of 1937's 'King Solomon's Mines' goes back to the future

Monday, October 9, 2017

Still Point for a Dance

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 12:00 pm

"At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance."

— T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

See also a recurrent image
from this journal —

IMAGE- The ninefold square .

Sunday, October 8, 2017

Origin

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — m759 @ 12:07 pm

'Origin' (NOT by Dan Brown)

http://www.log24.com/log/pix12/120108-CardinalPreoccupied.jpg

"The Cardinal seemed a little preoccupied today."

Saturday, October 7, 2017

Byte Space

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 7:59 pm

The Eightfold Cube

"Before time began,
there was the Cube."

Optimus Prime

Broken Symmetries

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 11:00 am

From posts tagged Design Deadline

A quotation from Lefebvre:

"… an epoch-making event so generally ignored
that we have to be reminded of it at every moment.
The fact is that around 1910 a certain space was shattered…
the space… of classical perspective and geometry…."

— Page 25 of The Production of Space 
    (Blackwell Publishing, 1991)

This suggests, for those who prefer Harvard's past glories
to its current state, a different Raum  from the Zeit  1910.

In January 1910 Annals of Mathematics , then edited at Harvard,
published George M. Conwell's "The 3-space PG (3, 2) and Its Group."
This paper, while perhaps neither epoch-making nor shattering, has
a certain beauty. For some background, see this journal on February 24, 2009.

Wednesday, October 4, 2017

Text and Context

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 11:00 am

Text —

"A field is perhaps the simplest algebraic structure we can invent."

— Hermann Weyl, 1952

Context —

See also yesterday's Personalized Book Search.

Full text of Symmetry  – Internet Archive —

https://archive.org/details/Symmetry_482

A field is perhaps the simplest algebraic 143 structure
we can invent. Its elements are numbers. Characteristic
for its structure are the operations of addition and 

From a Log24 search for Mathematics+Nutshell —

IMAGE- History of Mathematics in a Nutshell

Tuesday, January 1, 2013

The Simplest Situation

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — m759 @ 6:00 pm

Thanks to a Harvard math major for the following V. I. Arnold quote 
in a weblog post yesterday titled "Abstraction and Generality"—

"… the author has attempted to adhere to the principle of
minimal generality, according to which every idea should first
be clearly understood in the simplest situation;*
only then can the method developed be extended to
more complicated cases.

— Vladimir I. Arnold, Lectures on Partial Differential Equations
(Russian edition 1997; English translation 2004),
Preface to the second Russian edition

Thanks also to the math major for his closing post today.

* For instance… Natalie Angier's New Year's meditation
    on a Buddha Field

"… the multiverse as envisioned in Tibetan Buddhism,
'a vast system of 1059 [sic ; corrected to 10^59 on Jan. 3]
universes, that together are called a Buddha Field,' said
Jonathan C. Gold, who studies Buddhist philosophy at
Princeton."

— versus a search in this journal for "Japanese character" that yields

  
 Japanese character
          for "field"

Thursday, December 5, 2002

Thursday December 5, 2002

Sacerdotal Jargon

From the website

Abstracts and Preprints in Clifford Algebra [1996, Oct 8]:

Paper:  clf-alg/good9601
From:  David M. Goodmanson
Address:  2725 68th Avenue S.E., Mercer Island, Washington 98040

Title:  A graphical representation of the Dirac Algebra

Abstract:  The elements of the Dirac algebra are represented by sixteen 4×4 gamma matrices, each pair of which either commute or anticommute. This paper demonstrates a correspondence between the gamma matrices and the complete graph on six points, a correspondence that provides a visual picture of the structure of the Dirac algebra.  The graph shows all commutation and anticommutation relations, and can be used to illustrate the structure of subalgebras and equivalence classes and the effect of similarity transformations….

Published:  Am. J. Phys. 64, 870-880 (1996)


The following is a picture of K6, the complete graph on six points.  It may be used to illustrate various concepts in finite geometry as well as the properties of Dirac matrices described above.

The complete graph on a six-set


From
"The Relations between Poetry and Painting,"
by Wallace Stevens:

"The theory of poetry, that is to say, the total of the theories of poetry, often seems to become in time a mystical theology or, more simply, a mystique. The reason for this must by now be clear. The reason is the same reason why the pictures in a museum of modern art often seem to become in time a mystical aesthetic, a prodigious search of appearance, as if to find a way of saying and of establishing that all things, whether below or above appearance, are one and that it is only through reality, in which they are reflected or, it may be, joined together, that we can reach them. Under such stress, reality changes from substance to subtlety, a subtlety in which it was natural for Cézanne to say: 'I see planes bestriding each other and sometimes straight lines seem to me to fall' or 'Planes in color. . . . The colored area where shimmer the souls of the planes, in the blaze of the kindled prism, the meeting of planes in the sunlight.' The conversion of our Lumpenwelt went far beyond this. It was from the point of view of another subtlety that Klee could write: 'But he is one chosen that today comes near to the secret places where original law fosters all evolution. And what artist would not establish himself there where the organic center of all movement in time and space—which he calls the mind or heart of creation— determines every function.' Conceding that this sounds a bit like sacerdotal jargon, that is not too much to allow to those that have helped to create a new reality, a modern reality, since what has been created is nothing less."

Tuesday, September 3, 2002

Tuesday September 3, 2002

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 6:00 pm

Today's birthday: James Joseph Sylvester

"Mathematics is the music of reason." — J. J. Sylvester

Sylvester, a nineteenth-century mathematician, coined the phrase "synthematic totals" to describe some structures based on 6-element sets that R. T. Curtis has called "rather unwieldy objects." See Curtis's abstract, Symmetric Generation of Finite Groups, John Baez's essay, Some Thoughts on the Number 6, and my website, Diamond Theory. See also the abstract of a December 7, 2000, talk, Mathematics and the Art of M. C. Escher, in which Curtis notes that graphic designs can "often convey a mathematical idea more eloquently than pages of symbolism."

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