See The Silver Table (Nov. 12, 2003).
Monday, April 27, 2015
The Beast from Hell’s Kitchen
A comment on the Scholarly Kitchen piece from
this morning's previous post —
This suggests …
The Beast from Hell's Kitchen
For some thoughts on mapping trees into
linear arrays, see The Forking (March 20, 2015).
See also Pitchfork in this journal.
Hell’s Kitchen
A heavenly image from yesterday's
Sunday Dinner link "milestone award"—
An Oprah-related quote from the Tuesday, April 7,
ceremonial dedication of the Maya Angelou stamp—
“They say Easter was Sunday, but we are still
having church,” promised MSNBC talk show
host Melissa Harris-Perry, the ceremony’s emcee…."
In that spirit … a different sort of kitchen —
Sunday, April 26, 2015
Sunday Dinner:
A Search for The One.
"It was a bright cold day in April,
and the clocks were striking thirteen."
Norwegian Woods
The title appears as a joint heading for three reviews
of Norway-related books on the front page of the print
version of today's New York Times Sunday Book Review .
See as well Josefine Lyche in this journal.
Saturday, April 25, 2015
Faustian Merry-Go-Round
Thanks to David Lavery for the following:
"Voilà! Stevens has managed to create out of nothing a palpable imaginative space, an interiority without material dimensions, replete with its own achieved and accomplished music. And in truth, in a world of Heisenbergian uncertainties and shifting star masses, it may be enough for the dizzying, ever-shifting merry-go-round of the Faustian mind simply to slow down and let itself come to rest, at least for the moment." — Paul Mariani, "God and the Imagination," Aug. 10, 1996 |
http://imagejournal.org/page/journal/articles/issue-18/mariani-essays
Ghosts and Shadows
For Poetry Month
From the home page of Alexandre Borovik:
Book in progress: Shadows of the Truth
This book (to be published soon) can be viewed
as a sequel to Mathematics under the Microscope ,
but with focus shifted on mathematics as it was
experienced by children (well, by children who
became mathematicians). The cover is designed
by Edmund Harriss.
See also Harriss's weblog post of Dec. 27, 2008, on the death
of Harold Pinter: "The Search for the Truth Can Never Stop."
This suggests a review of my own post of Dec. 3, 2012,
"The Revisiting." A figure from that post:
A Matrix for Corliss
See Richard Corliss's 1999 review of "The Matrix," "Popular Metaphysics."
See as well the previous Log 24 post and the following publisher's
book description —
Harvard Heart of Gold by Dustin Aguilar
You may be a storybook character after all!!!
This philosophic, fantastical journey is a new-fangled fairy-tale
where fun and unusual happenings are all too common, and
you—the reader—become a character just like Harvard or Kansas
and are subject to the all-knowing, all-powerful, author of the story.
This daring piece tests the bounds of reality and subtly suggests
that you should question everything you know —
While most people in this story believe they are real-life, walking
talking humans, a small, somewhat violent sect of society has
realized they are actually part of a book. They lash out and
demand that the story have a happy ending, and they'll whomever
they have to. [Sic] An enormous battle erupts catching Harvard
and Kansas trapped in the middle forced to rely on their cunning
and a little help from an extra-large talking tarantula to save the day.
Friday, April 24, 2015
For Hughes and Crombie*
Recommended —
Links to the poems: "Storm Beach" and "For You."
* See "The Space of Horizons" and A Search for Crombie.
Love and Darkness, 2003
The previous post mentions an Amos Oz
novel, A Tale of Love and Darkness
(Sipour Al Ahava Vehoshekh, סיפור על אהבה וחושך),
apparently first published in Hebrew in 2002.
“By groping toward the light we are made to realize
how deep the darkness is around us.”
— Arthur Koestler, The Call Girls: A Tragi-Comedy ,
Random House, 1973, page 118
Harvard Class Day Speaker
This year's Class Day speaker at Harvard
will be Natalie Portman.
Related material:
See also the link to Preoccupied from Sunday—
"The Cardinal seemed a little preoccupied today."
Thursday, April 23, 2015
The Good
"… they didn't really know
what was good
and was not good…."
— The late Bernard Stollman,
who reportedly died at 85
on Monday, April 20, 2015
"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
Colorful Tale
(A sequel to yesterday's ART WARS and this
morning's De Colores )
“Perhaps the philosophically most relevant feature
of modern science is the emergence of abstract
symbolic structures as the hard core of objectivity
behind– as Eddington puts it– the colorful tale
of the subjective storyteller mind.” — Hermann Weyl
(Philosophy of Mathematics and Natural Science ,
Princeton, 1949, p. 237)
See also Deathly Hallows.
De Colores
See orange, black, green at The Daily Princetonian
and in this journal.
Wednesday, April 22, 2015
ART WARS continued
The previous post mentioned a new mobile, "Triangle Constellation,"
commissioned for the Harvard Art Museums.
Related material (click to enlarge) —
The above review is of an exhibition by the "Constellation" artist,
Carlos Amorales, that opened on Sept. 26, 2008 — "just in time for
Halloween and the Day of the Dead."
See also this journal on that date.
Purely Aesthetic
G. H. Hardy in A Mathematician's Apology —
What ‘purely aesthetic’ qualities can we distinguish in such theorems as Euclid’s or Pythagoras’s? I will not risk more than a few disjointed remarks. In both theorems (and in the theorems, of course, I include the proofs) there is a very high degree of unexpectedness, combined with inevitability and economy. The arguments take so odd and surprising a form; the weapons used seem so childishly simple when compared with the far-reaching results; but there is no escape from the conclusions. There are no complications of detail—one line of attack is enough in each case; and this is true too of the proofs of many much more difficult theorems, the full appreciation of which demands quite a high degree of technical proficiency. We do not want many ‘variations’ in the proof of a mathematical theorem: ‘enumeration of cases’, indeed, is one of the duller forms of mathematical argument. A mathematical proof should resemble a simple and clear-cut constellation, not a scattered cluster in the Milky Way. |
Related material:
-
A post at noon on Sunday, April 19, 2015, with a link,
"Ageometretos medeis eisito," to an image search
for "large Desargues configuration" that includes …
-
A review, dated April 20, 2015, of "After Hours at the
Harvard Art Museums" in The Harvard Crimson -
An article, also dated April 20, 2015, in Harvard Magazine
titled "Harvard Installs 'Triangle Constellation'"
Tales of Money and Power:
A companion-piece to Sunday's Sermon for the Cruelest Month —
Click the above paragraph for further details.
Tuesday, April 21, 2015
Jamaica Beach
Update of 11:45 PM ET the same day —
See also remarks by Freeman Dyson on the novel
A High Wind in Jamaica quoted here Sunday morning.
From an introduction to the novel by Francine Prose:
"In the end, everything in this luminous, extraordinary novel
is so much the reverse of what we think it should be, or what
we would expect, that we are left entirely disoriented—
unsure of what anything is, or should be. The effect is
disturbing and yet beautiful, fantastic but also frighteningly
true to life."
Minimum Lovable Ishtar
See also Little Mermaid in this journal.
The Full Force of Roman Law
This year, Easter Sunday fell on April 5. NBC on that date:
"It was necessary to call upon the full force of Roman law…"
From a Washington Post obituary yesterday evening —
"The Nazarene's crucifixion sends a message…."
See Wikipedia on the Rabbi's son.
Related material: Log24 on April 5, 2015.
Monday, April 20, 2015
Immaculate Inception
Continued from a post of April 10, 2015 —
Maya Angelou stamp with
misattributed quote and
Oprah on April 7, 2015
Trailer for "Welcome to Me" published on Feb. 23, 2015 —
Related material: Manifest O (April 1, 2015).
Ways to Get a Date
From The Harvard Crimson , April 19, 2015 —
1. Serenade them with an Acapella Group
Nothing is more romantic than a group of students
showing up at your door and singing to you
for three minutes. The gesture is simple enough
to pull off. Ask one of your friends in an acapella
group for a quick favor. With so many acapella
groups on campus, you’re bound to find someone
to help you woo your potential date with the hot fire
of four part harmonies.
This suggests …
A Song for Kristen
Click image for the song.
Sunday, April 19, 2015
Preoccupied
"The Cardinal seemed a little preoccupied today."
See also a post found via a search in
this journal for "April 19 ".
Sermon for the Cruelest Month
Some Harvard thoughts suggested by the recent
Jonathan Crombie project "Waiting for Ishtar" and
by a search in this journal for "Megan Follows" —
Remarks by Freeman Dyson in today's New York Times
Sunday Book Review (page BR8)…
"Who is your favorite fictional hero or heroine?
The child Emily in 'A High Wind in Jamaica,'
by Richard Hughes. She murders a friendly
sea captain and lays the blame on members
of the crew, who are hanged for the crime.
To have survived for millions of years in the
lawless world of human evolution, parents
must love children even when children do evil,
and children must be ruthless and lovable.
Emily is ruthless and lovable."
A remark by young Emily in the film of "High Wind"—
"Church of England."
For another version of "lovable," see The Eve of St. Agnes, 2003.
For another version of "ruthless," see the depiction, by Zachary Scott,
of a Harvard student in the 1948 film titled "Ruthless."
Saturday, April 18, 2015
By Express
'Green Gables' star Jonathan Crombie dies at 48
Update of 8:19 PM ET —
Trailer for a recent Crombie documentary, "Waiting for Ishtar,"
that has not yet been released:
See also Lucero + Ishtar and Lucero + Muerte .
Midrash:
The Southwest Furthers
See Southwest + Furthers in this journal.
Expanding the Spielraum
See also today's previous post and the new film "Beyond the Reach,"
filmed in northwest New Mexico —
The Acme Corporation Presents…
Kyle Smith on April 15 in the New York Post —
"The ludicrous action thriller 'Beyond the Reach'
fails to achieve the Southwestern noir potency
of 'No Country for Old Men,' but there’s no denying
it brings to mind another Southwestern classic
about malicious pursuit: the Road Runner cartoons."
Related material:
-
Legespiel Meets Würfelspiel in…
Gift of the Third Kind
(April 7, 2007), featuring Ellen Yi-Luen Do — -
the current home page of Ellen Yi-Luen Do,
now at Georgia Tech, and… - a page about her ACME Lab —
Welcome to ACME lab!
Yes, the name is both confusing and has
We call it ACME Creativity Machine Environment – We like recursive ideas. |
Friday, April 17, 2015
For Story Time
A book first published by Doubleday in 1979:
From Fritz Leiber's 1959 sci-fi classic "Damnation Morning" —
She drew from her handbag a pale grey
gleaming implement that looked by quick turns
to me like a knife, a gun, a slim sceptre, and a
delicate branding iron— especially when its tip
sprouted an eight-limbed star of silver wire.
“The test?” I faltered, staring at the thing.
“Yes, to determine whether you can live in the
fourth dimension or only die in it.”
See also Philanthropic Numerology (St. Luke's Day, 2012).
Thursday, April 16, 2015
Library of Paradise
Freeman Dyson in a New York Times interview online today:
"Who is your favorite novelist of all time?
Octavia Butler, a tall black lady who died in 2006.
She wrote 'Parable of the Sower' and 'Parable of
the Talents,' two books that are normally classified
as science fiction but are more concerned with
theology than with science. The main character in
both stories is a black woman who survives
apocalyptic disasters and becomes the founder of
a new religion in California."
See also Octavia Butler in this journal.
National Library Week
"Celebrate National Library Week 2015 (April 12-18, 2015)
with the theme "Unlimited possibilities @ your library®."
See also Library of Hell.
A page from Princeton University Press on March 18, 2012:
… "mathematics and narrative…." (top of page xvii).
I prefer the interplay of Euclidean and Galois mathematics.
Forms of Luminosity
"Visibilities are not forms of objects, nor even forms
that would show up under light, but rather forms of
luminosity which are created by the light itself and
allow a thing or object to exist only as a flash, sparkle
or shimmer."
— Deleuze, Foucault
Clap if you believe in Plotnitsky .
From his "Teaching" page —
Capitalism and Paranoia, Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Foucault, Deleuze, and Modernist Novel. The course offers a comprehensive examination of the works of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, and of the relationships between their ideas and the culture of modernity and, then, postmodernity, as the culture of capitalism. The course also considers, through the optics of Foucault's and Deleuze's work, how this culture is reflected in modernist and postmodernist novels of the twentieth century, and in the genre of the novel itself, which has been the dominant and indeed defining literary genre of this culture, from early to late capitalism. While Foucault's and Deleuze's work may be seen as a radical philosophical critique of modernity and capitalism by the philosophical means, the novel enacts an analogous and often equally radical literary critique. The works to be discussed include selections from Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud; Foucault's The Order of Things, Discipline and Punish, History of Sexuality, vol.1, and selected essays; and substantive selections from such works by Deleuze (and Deleuze and Guattari) as Anti-Oedipus, A Thousand Plateaus, and Foucault, as well as several shorter essays. Among the works of fiction to be considered are Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; Kafka's The Trial; Woolf's Orlando; and Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. |
Wednesday, April 15, 2015
Birthdays
Today is the birthday of artist Leonardo da Vinci (b. 1452)
and of mathematician Leonhard Euler (b. 1707).
For both, a link.
A Trip to Six Years Ago
See a newsletter of the Mathematical Association of America
(MAA) on April 15, 2009. Excerpts, with updated links:
"Michael Starbird's Distinguished Lecture, simply titled
Read More —
"'Rick's Tricky Six Puzzle: S5 Sits Specially in S6'
http://www.maa.org/sites/default/files/pdf/pubs/mmapr09.pdf |
See as well a related Log24 post of Nov. 5, 2012.
Tuesday, April 14, 2015
Sacramental Geometry:
The Dreaming Jewels continued
"… the icosahedron and dodecahedron have the same properties
of symmetry. For the centres of the twenty faces of an icosahedron
may be joined to form a regular dodecahedron, and conversely, the
twelve vertices of an icosahedron can be placed at the centres
of the faces of a suitable dodecahedron. Thus the icosahedral and
dodecahedral groups are identical , and either solid may be used to
examine the nature of the group elements."
— Walter Ledermann, Introduction to the Theory
of Finite Groups (Oliver and Boyd, 1949, p. 93)
Salvador Dali, The Sacrament of the Last Supper
Omar Sharif and Gregory Peck in Behold a Pale Horse
Above: soccer-ball geometry.
See also …
See as well
"In Sunlight and in Shadow."
Monday, April 13, 2015
Is That a Fish in Your Ear?*
Hermeneutics for Academics
Würfel-Märchen continued …
"Again, you are free to interpret these symbols
as you like."
See also …
Through the Looking Glass: A Sort of Eternity —
and The Library of Hell.
Deutsche Schule
Unorthodox Easter
(A sequel to yesterday's Orthodox Easter posts)
This morning's Google News —
The New York Times on the late Günter Grass —
"Many of Mr. Grass’s books are phantasmagorical
mixtures of fact and fantasy, some of them inviting
comparison with the Latin American style known as
magical realism. His own name for this style was
'broadened reality.'"
From p. xii of the 2005 second edition of a book discussed
in yesterday's Orthodox Easter posts —
(Click image to enlarge.)
Early editions of The Heart of Mathematics include
Gary Larson's legendary Hell's Library "Far Side" cartoon.
Books in Hell's Library include Big Book of Story Problems ,
More Story Problems , and Even More Story Problems .
— Adapted from a review of the 2000 first edition
See also Mathematics and Narrative in this journal.
Sunday, April 12, 2015
Symbol of Heaven
Today is Easter Sunday in the Orthodox Church.
Two readings:
"Ancient Symbol of Heaven"
From "Misunderstood Masterpiece," an essay
in the Jesuit weekly America on Salvador Dali's
"The Sacrament of the Last Supper" —
"The setting is distinctive: a dodecahedron,
or 12-sided space, that we perceive in the
pentagon-shaped windowpanes behind the
table. The architecture is also transparent.
The dodecahedron is an ancient symbol of
heaven, where this event is taking place.
This is the realm of the Father…."
— Michael Anthony Novak, Nov. 5, 2012
Scholarship, Not Rhetoric
A PDF of the Kotrc paper is available online.
The Greek Fifth Element:
The Dodecahedron .
This Platonic solid appears, for instance, on the cover
of a colorful text titled The Heart of Mathematics
(Wiley, third edition, 2009) —
For serious students, here is a better book, more in
keeping with the above authors' later interpretation
of the fifth element as change :
Saturday, April 11, 2015
Yale Mot
From a New York Post review of "Clouds of Sils Maria,"
a film that opened yesterday —
"Assayas [the writer-director] evidently thinks he’s
being daring and original and avant-garde in leaving
so much open-ended. But you can tell what really
interests him isn’t doing the work of a serious artist
but the comfy trappings of one — the swank dining
rooms, the posh cars with drivers always at the ready.
What’s French for bourgeois? Never mind.
'Clouds' isn’t a film but an idea for a film —
unfinished, unsatisfying, undergraduate."
From this date last year:
"Here was finality indeed, and cleavage!"
Friday, April 10, 2015
Living Theater
Immaculate Inception
See also Midnight Purple
and today's previous post.
Eastern Eggheads
This is Holy Week in the Orthodox Church.
"The Greek Orthodox tradition is for eggs to be dyed red
on Holy Thursday in commemoration of the Last Supper…."
See more at: http://usa.greekreporter.com/2015/04/07/
why-do-greeks-dye-easter-eggs-red-how-to-do-it/
The Borisov CV is from Math Humor for Holy Week.
See as well yesterday's posts Translation and Easter Translation.
Thursday, April 9, 2015
Easter Translation
See also James Joyce on Humpty-Dumpty
and posts in this journal from April 10, 2012.
Translation
From an informative April 7 essay in The Nation —
In his marvelous book Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything , David Bellos demonstrates many of the ways that translation is not only possible but ubiquitous, so thoroughly woven into the fabric of our daily lives—from classrooms to international financial markets, from instruction manuals to poems—that if translation were somehow to become impossible, the world would descend into the zombie apocalypse faster than you can say “je ne sais quoi ." — "Forensic Translation," by Benjamin Paloff |
See also searches in this journal for Core and for Kernel.
See as well Fabric Design and Symplectic.
Core Values
"Yankee Doodle went to London" — Song lyric
“Geometry was very important to us in this movie.”
— The Missing ART (Log24, November 7th, 2014)
ART —
"Faculty Approve Theater Concentration, Affirmation
of Integrity" — Recent Harvard Crimson headline
Wednesday, April 8, 2015
A Beverage for Asimov
See also Asimov + Tequila in this journal.
For Students of the Forked Tongue
See also "Derrida + Serpent" in this journal.
The Crosswicks Curse
The Names
"Russell makes an extremely interesting and
important proposal about proper names."
— "Notes on Russell," by Curtis Brown
"The Names (1982) is the seventh novel of
American novelist Don DeLillo. The work, set
mostly in Greece, is primarily a series of
character studies, interwoven with a plot about
a mysterious 'language cult' that is behind
a number of unexplained murders."
For other fiction about language cults,
see Dan Brown.
Tuesday, April 7, 2015
Logic
Monday, April 6, 2015
History of Religion
The New York Times tonight on the late
cabaret singer Julie Wilson, who reportedly
died at 90 in Manhattan on Easter Sunday —
"In 1988 she was nominated for a Tony Award
for best featured actress in a Broadway musical
for her role as the owner of a speakeasy in
Peter Allen’s 'Legs Diamond.'"
The church connection —
"The reviews were unanimously negative,
with particular disbelief at Peter Allen's
attempts to play so totally against type
as a suave lothario. Frank Rich
commented that the evening's most
compelling drama was watching Allen
figure out 'what to do with his hands.'
The failure of the musical was so total
that it compelled the Nederlander
Organization to finally sell the beloved
but flop-prone Mark Hellinger Theatre to
the Times Square Church, which still
owns it." — Wikipedia
See also Times Square Church in this journal.
Springtime for Princeton*
… Continues.
* And the late Julie Wilson.
For the title, see a Log24 search.
For the Church of the Mad Men
Taylor, Buttrick, Taylor on Buttrick
— Heidegger, “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry,”
translated by Douglas Scott, in Existence and Being ,
Regnery, 1949
Sunday, April 5, 2015
Night at the Museum and…
Documenting the Academy’s Victims*
This post was suggested by today's
Easter message from academic David Lavery —
For a reply, see …
"Horus Manure: Debunking the Jesus/Horus Connection,"
a post from the weblog Jon Sorensen: Blogging on
Catholic Apologetics , dated October 25, 2012.
The phrase "blood libel" also comes to mind.
* "Documenting Victims" was the title of a post in this journal
from the same date as Sorensen's post— Oct. 25, 2012.
Easter Verse
Verse from mathematics enthusiast David Justice
and a more traditional rhyme I prefer.
Saturday, April 4, 2015
Control
For the Easter Vigil:
“This is Control. Do you read me?”*
* Paraphrase based on Contact , Interstellar ,
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy , and The Ghost Writer .
Harrowing of Hell (continued)
Holy Saturday is, according to tradition, the day of
the harrowing of Hell.
Notes:
The above passage on "Die Figuren der vier Modi
im Magischen Quadrat " should be read in the context of
a Log24 post from last year's Devil's Night (the night of
October 30-31). The post, "Structure," indicates that, using
the transformations of the diamond theorem, the notorious
"magic" square of Albrecht Dürer may be transformed
into normal reading order. That order is only one of
322,560 natural reading orders for any 4×4 array of
symbols. The above four "modi" describe another.
Friday, April 3, 2015
NPR Requiem
Multifaceted Music Critic Andrew Porter Dies At 86
APRIL 03, 2015 4:38 PM ET
From the article:
Over the Rainbow
For Smiley’s People
Suggested by the excellent 2010 film "The Ghost Writer"—
See also Lebrecht in this journal, Ralph Willett, and Ave Verum Corpus.
Deposition
For the title, see Wikipedia.
A related quote:
Philip Kennicott in The Washington Post, July 3, 2009—
"The Vogels help allay deep cultural fears
within the art world— fears that art is elitist,
or some kind of confidence game,
or not a serious endeavor (a fear that has
dogged art since at least the time of Plato)."
Math Humor for Holy Week
See also the home page of Cornell mathematician Steven Strogatz:
Strogatz is the author of "Why Pi Matters."
Backstory —
Thursday, April 2, 2015
A Word…
… in memory of Tom Koch, comedy writer for Bob and Ray,
who reportedly died at 89 on March 22 —
Nuanced
Part I: "Nuanced" in the recent post Metamorphosis
(from March 22, the above date):
"We wanted the film to go through a very subtle
and nuanced visual metamorphosis."
— Nenad Cicin-Sain on The Time Being
Part II: Other instances of "nuanced" in this journal.
Wednesday, April 1, 2015
Würfel-Märchen
Continued from yesterday, the date of death for German
billionaire philanthropist Klaus Tschira —
For Tschira in this journal, see Stiftung .
For some Würfel illustrations, see this morning's post
Manifest O. A related webpage —
Manifest O
The title was suggested by
http://benmarcus.com/smallwork/manifesto/.
The "O" of the title stands for the octahedral group.
See the following, from http://finitegeometry.org/sc/map.html —
|
An invariance of symmetry The diamond theorem on a 4x4x4 cube, and a sketch of the proof. |
83-10-01 | Portrait of O A table of the octahedral group O using the 24 patterns from the 2×2 case of the diamond theorem. |
83-10-16 | Study of O A different way of looking at the octahedral group, using cubes that illustrate the 2x2x2 case of the diamond theorem. |
84-09-15 | Diamonds and whirls Block designs of a different sort — graphic figures on cubes. See also the University of Exeter page on the octahedral group O. |
Tuesday, March 31, 2015
Flame Diary
Last Saturday's post Against Dryness quoted "Gone Girl,"
a recent film about an untypical couple.
Other works of interest:
The Flame Alphabet (Ben Marcus, 2012) and
The Folded Clock (Heidi Julavits, 2015).
Marcus and Julavits are husband and wife. As in
"Gone Girl," both are very bright, and the wife
writes a diary. (No other resemblance between
the couples is apparent.)
Update of 6:40 PM ET March 31:
A 1983 review by the parents of Ben Marcus —
Update of 7:09 PM March 31:
Sunday, March 29, 2015
Saturday, March 28, 2015
Against Dryness
"July 5, 2012, begins normally enough —
Ben Affleck’s character goes for a drink
at the bar he co-owns with his hilariously
sarcastic twin sister Margo …."
Margo Dunne: Well, the Irish prince graces us
with his presence. [she flicks water in his face]
Nick Dunne: His majesty prefers not to be moistened.
Margo and Nick go on to discuss what Nick should get
his wife as a fifth ("wood") anniversary present.
One possibility, from the German website EinsteinSpiele.de —
(Suggested by the word Legespiel in yesterday's link Tribute.)
See also the above date — July 5, 2012 — in this journal.
The Esthetic Question
From James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man —
As he came back to the hearth, limping slightly but with a brisk step, Stephen saw the silent soul of a jesuit look out at him from the pale loveless eyes. Like Ignatius he was lame but in his eyes burned no spark of Ignatius’s enthusiasm. Even the legendary craft of the company, a craft subtler and more secret than its fabled books of secret subtle wisdom, had not fired his soul with the energy of apostleship. It seemed as if he used the shifts and lore and cunning of the world, as bidden to do, for the greater glory of God, without joy in their handling or hatred of that in them which was evil but turning them, with a firm gesture of obedience, back upon themselves: and for all this silent service it seemed as if he loved not at all the master and little, if at all, the ends he served. Similiter atque senis The dean returned to the hearth and began to stroke his chin. — When may we expect to have something from you on the esthetic question? — he asked. |
Friday, March 27, 2015
The McEvoy Rite
Nan Tucker McEvoy, last of founding family
to run Chronicle, dies
By Sam Whiting at SFGate.com, Friday, March 27, 2015
From the story —
"After graduating from Dominican Convent Upper School
in San Rafael in 1937, she was discouraged from attending college
by family members who wanted her to be a socialite."
Related material —
Pursuit of Gestalt*
The art above is by the Copenhagen studio
Hvass & Hannibal. For a photo of the artists,
see a webpage on Beijing Design Week 2011.
Hvass and Hannibal were apparently in Beijing
for the "open workshop," Sept. 17-23, 2011.
Gestalt-related material from this journal that week —
- Objectivity
- Anatomy of a Cube
- Relativity Problem Revisited
- Symmetric Generation
- Sicilian Reflections
* Title suggested by that of a book by Quine.
Thursday, March 26, 2015
When Death Tells a Story…
See the title phrase and "working backward" in this journal.
The Möbius Hypercube
The incidences of points and planes in the
Möbius 84 configuration (8 points and 8 planes,
with 4 points on each plane and 4 planes on each point),
were described by Coxeter in a 1950 paper.*
A table from Monday's post summarizes Coxeter's
remarks, which described the incidences in
spatial terms, with the points and planes as the vertices
and face-planes of two mutually inscribed tetrahedra —
Monday's post, "Gallucci's Möbius Configuration,"
may not be completely intelligible unless one notices
that Coxeter has drawn some of the intersections in his
Fig. 24, a schematic representation of the point-plane
incidences, as dotless, and some as hollow dots. The figure,
"Gallucci's version of Möbius's 84," is shown below.
The hollow dots, representing the 8 points (as opposed
to the 8 planes ) of the configuration, are highlighted in blue.
Here a plane (represented by a dotless intersection) contains
the four points that are represented in the square array as lying
in the same row or same column as the plane.
The above Möbius incidences appear also much earlier in
Coxeter's paper, in figures 6 and 5, where they are shown
as describing the structure of a hypercube.
In figures 6 and 5, the dotless intersections representing
planes have been replaced by solid dots. The hollow dots
have again been highlighted in blue.
Figures 6 and 5 demonstrate the fact that adjacency in the set of
16 vertices of a hypercube is isomorphic to adjacency in the set
of 16 subsquares of a square 4×4 array, provided that opposite
sides of the array are identified, as in Fig. 6. The digits in
Coxeter's labels above may be viewed as naming the positions
of the 1's in (0,1) vectors (x4, x3, x2, x1) over the two-element
Galois field.† In that context, the 4×4 array may be called, instead
of a Möbius hypercube , a Galois tesseract .
* "Self-Dual Configurations and Regular Graphs,"
Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society,
Vol. 56 (1950), pp. 413-455
† The subscripts' usual 1-2-3-4 order is reversed as a reminder
that such a vector may be viewed as labeling a binary number
from 0 through 15, or alternately as labeling a polynomial in
the 16-element Galois field GF(24). See the Log24 post
Vector Addition in a Finite Field (Jan. 5, 2013).
Tuesday, March 24, 2015
Hirzebruch
(Continued from July 16, 2014.)
Some background from Wikipedia:
"Friedrich Ernst Peter Hirzebruch ForMemRS[2]
(17 October 1927 – 27 May 2012)
was a German mathematician, working in the fields of topology,
complex manifolds and algebraic geometry, and a leading figure
in his generation. He has been described as 'the most important
mathematician in Germany of the postwar period.'
[3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11]"
A search for citations of the A. E. Brouwer paper in
the previous post yields a quotation from the preface
to the third ("2013") edition of Wolfgang Ebeling's
Lattices and Codes: A Course Partially Based
on Lectures by Friedrich Hirzebruch , a book
reportedly published on September 19, 2012 —
"Sadly, on May 27 this year, Friedrich Hirzebruch, Hannover, July 2012 Wolfgang Ebeling "
(Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Ebeling, Institute of Algebraic Geometry, |
Also sadly …
Brouwer on the Galois Tesseract
Yesterday's post suggests a review of the following —
Andries Brouwer, preprint, 1982:
"The Witt designs, Golay codes and Mathieu groups" Pages 8-9: Substructures of S(5, 8, 24) An octad is a block of S(5, 8, 24). Theorem 5.1
Let B0 be a fixed octad. The 30 octads disjoint from B0
the design of the points and affine hyperplanes in AG(4, 2), Proof…. … (iv) We have AG(4, 2).
(Proof: invoke your favorite characterization of AG(4, 2) An explicit construction of the vector space is also easy….) |
Related material: Posts tagged Priority.
Monday, March 23, 2015
Gallucci’s Möbius Configuration
From H. S. M. Coxeter's 1950 paper
"Self-Dual Configurations and Regular Graphs,"
a 4×4 array and a more perspicuous rearrangement—
(Click image to enlarge.)
The above rearrangement brings Coxeter's remarks into accord
with the webpage The Galois Tesseract.
Update of Thursday, March 26, 2015 —
For an explanation of Coxeter's Fig. 24, see Thursday's later
post titled "The Möbius Hypercube."
Sunday, March 22, 2015
Metamorphosis
In memory of a film enthusiast who reportedly
died on February 23, 2015:
"We wanted the film to go through a very subtle
and nuanced visual metamorphosis."
— Nenad Cicin-Sain on The Time Being
See also February 23, 2015 in this journal.
Friday, March 20, 2015
The Forking
An article in the new April issue of Notices of the American
Mathmatical Society suggests a search for connections
between the Calkin-Wilf tree and the modular group.
The search yields, for instance (in chronological order) …
"Cutting sequences for geodesic flow on the modular surface
and continued fractions," David J. Grahinet, Jeffrey C. Lagaria,
arXiv, 2 April 2001
"Orderings of the rationals and dynamical systems,"
Claudio Bonanno, Stefano Isola, arXiv, 14 May 2008.
"Periods of negative-regular continued fractions. Rational numbers."
Sergey Khrushchev and Michael Tyaglov, slides PDF, 11 Sept. 2012
"The Minkowski ?(x) function, a class of singular measures,
theta-constants, and mean-modular forms," Giedrius Alkauskas,
arXiv, 20 Sept. 2012
"Forests of complex numbers,"
Melvyn B. Nathanson, arXiv, 1 Dec. 2014
Update of March 21, 2015:
For many more related papers, search by combining the
phrase "modular group" with phrases denoting forking structures
other than Calkin-Wilf, such as "cubic tree," "Stern-Brocot tree,"
and "Farey tree" (or "Farey sequence" or "Farey series" or
"Farey graph" ).
Style
Compare and contrast yesterday's quotation from Jeffrey Kipnis
with the following quotation from Robert Bringhurst —
Related material — Jews on Style.
Thursday, March 19, 2015
“Divisive Rhetoric”
— Jeffrey Kipnis, "Twisting the Separatrix"
Assemblage No. 14 (Apr., 1991), pp. 30-61
Published by: The MIT Press
Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3171098
Midnight in the Garden continues…
Wednesday, March 18, 2015
Natural History
Copyrighted images, intended only for scholarly personal use.
See also Witch Ball and City of Bones .
Burning Bright
For Mark Steinberg, sports agent .
From Field Notes (9:29 AM ET Saturday, Nov. 28, 2009) —
From the heraldic crest of Steinberg's fraternity :
"Remember me to Herald Square."
Play Is Not Playing Around
Tuesday, March 17, 2015
Monday, March 16, 2015
Sunday, March 15, 2015
Nicht Spielerei
See Brian Sutton-Smith in today's New York Times
obituaries and Jerome Kagan in this journal.
See also a post from March 7, 2015, the reported
date of Sutton-Smith's death.
Saturday, March 14, 2015
Unicode Diamonds
The following figure, intended to display as
a black diamond, was produced with
HTML and Unicode characters. Depending
on the technology used to view it, the figure
may contain gaps or overlaps.
◢◣
◥◤
Some variations:
◤◥
◣◢
◤◥
◢◣
◤◣
◢◥
◤◣
◥◢
Such combined Unicode characters —
◢
black lower right triangle,
◣
black lower left triangle,
᭘
black upper left triangle,
᭙
black upper right triangle
— might be used for a text-only version of the Diamond 16 Puzzle
that is more easily programmed than the current version.
The tricky part would be coding the letter-spacing and
line-height to avoid gaps or overlaps within the figures in
a variety of browsers. The w3.org visual formatting model
may or may not be helpful here.
Update of 11:20 PM ET March 15, 2015 —
Seekers of simplicity should note that there is
a simple program in the Processing.js language, not using
such Unicode characters, that shows many random affine
permutations of a 4×4 diamond-theorem array when the
display window is clicked.
Eating Club
From Wikipedia's Eating Clubs at Princeton University —
"Princeton's eating clubs are the primary setting in
F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1920 debut novel, This Side of Paradise ,
and more recently, the clubs appeared prominently in the
2004 novel, The Rule of Four . In her most recent novel,
The Accursed , Joyce Carol Oates repeatedly refers to the
Eating Clubs …."
See as well Eating Club in this journal.
Introduction to Yau
This is related somewhat distantly to Mathieu moonshine.
Friday, March 13, 2015
Mathieu Moonshine
(Continued from yesterday's "earlier references" link.)
Yesterday at the Simons Foundation's Quanta Magazine :
See also earlier Log24 references to Mathieu moonshine .
I do not know the origin of this succinct phrase, taken from
an undated web page of Anne Taormina.
Stranger than Dreams
Thursday, March 12, 2015
For Stephen King
Doctor Steam
"Everybody's doin'
a brand new dance now…"
"A corpse will be
transported by express!"
— Under the Volcano
Overarching Symmetry*
Wednesday, March 11, 2015
World Time
1:46 AM March 11, 2015 EDT
(Eastern Daylight Time in USA) is
5:46 AM March 11, 2015 UTC
(Coordinated Universal Time worldwide).
"On March 11, 2011 at 5:46 a.m.
Coordinated Universal Time (UTC),
a magnitude 8.9 earthquake occurred
off the East Coast of Japan…."