(Continued from yesterday afternoon)
This journal on December 12th, 2009—
Cover illustration— Arithmetic and Music,
Borgia Apartments, The Vatican
Compare and contrast with Frenkel at the Fields Institute—
(Continued from yesterday afternoon)
From yesterday's online New York Times (5:59 PM ET)—
ART REVIEW What exactly are we looking at? Is it the real thing, or is it the promotion of a famous brand gussied up in spectacular, pseudo-sacramental style? Gold or fool’s gold? This sort of confusion pervades today’s art world, where, so often, the sales pitch comes in the form of quasi-religious rhetoric. It’s a big reason the tribal arts of Africa and other lands — as well as the putatively purely authentic creations of folk artists and so-called outsiders — are held in such high esteem.
— Ken Johnson, review of two exhibitions, |
"Tenser, said the tensor…"
"… Galois was a mathematical outsider…."
— Tony Mann, "head of the department of mathematical sciences,
University of Greenwich, and president, British Society for the
History of Mathematics," in a May 6, 2010, review of Duel at Dawn
in Times Higher Education.
Related art:
(Click for a larger image.)
For a less outside version of the central image
above, see Kunstkritikk on Oct. 15, 2013.
The late Colin Wilson appears at the head
of this afternoon's New York Times obituaries —
Margalit Fox's description this afternoon of
Wilson's first book, from 1956—
"The Outsider had an aim no less ambitious
than its scope: to delineate the meaning of
human existence."
This suggests a review of Log24 posts on "The Zero Theorem"
that yields—
See also Log24 on the date of Wilson's death.
Related material: Devil's Night, 2011.
See the Telegraph obituary of Jim Hall
and a post on Charlie Christian (and others).
The inclusion of D. H. Lawrence in that post
suggests a review of posts tagged Howl.
"The werewolves are here to save us."
— Simon in "The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones."
For the late Jim Hall—
Backstory: Icon, 1:44 PM ET today.
Update of 11 PM ET Dec. 10, 2013 —
For all the notes, see Da Capo (11 AM today)
and the Cullinane frequency matrix (12×12).
Matrix used to illustrate the well-tempered
scale. The integer frequency-ratio values
are only approximate in such a scale.
See also last night's "Pink Champagne on Ice" post.
The "ice" in that post's title refers to the white lines
forming a tesseract in the book cover's background—
"icy white and crystalline," as Johnny Mercer put it.
(A Tune for Josefine, Nov. 25.)
See also the tag Diamond Theory tesseract in this journal.
"Let’s love, and kill like 17 now."
— AFI song, soundtrack of "City of Bones"
See also Comic Strip Dead and
Llewyn Davis in this journal.
Related material —
* The title is a musical term…
The title refers to a post of April 26, 2009.
For Blancanieves, Elizabeth Taylor, and Lily Collins.
See also this journal on the above upload date— June 21, 2012.
Or: The Naked Blackboard Jungle
"…it would be quite a long walk
Swiftly Mrs. Who brought her hands… together.
"Now, you see," Mrs. Whatsit said,
– A Wrinkle in Time , |
Related material: Machete Math and…
Starring the late Eleanor Parker as Swiftly Mrs. Who.
An I Ching study quoted in Waiting for Ogdoad (St. Andrew's Day, 2013)—
(Click for clearer image.)
The author of the above I Ching study calls his lattice "Arising Heaven."
The following lattice might, therefore, be called "Heaven Descending."
Click for the source, mentioned in Anatomy of a Cube (Sept. 18, 2011).
Tonight was Honors Night at the Kennedy Center.
"For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross." — Pynchon
From "Colin Wilson: The Persistence of Meaning" "At a literary conference at SUNY New Paltz three years ago, among people who I thought would be positively disposed to Wilson, my mentioning of his name resulted in any number of arched eyebrows and suavely disparaging remarks. Now this might itself be, not an affirmation of justified oblivion, as one could easily assume, but rather a kind of indirect evidence for intrinsic merit. I stress the academic character of the event and the self-assured oiliness of the dismissal. In context, the reference seemed to carry a distinctly un-PC valence so that the reaction to it, as I picture it in retrospect, resembled that of a patrician vampire to garlic."
— Thomas F. Bertonneau on Thursday, |
* The title refers to the film illustrated above, and also
(with a different meaning) to this morning's 11 AM post,
as well as to topics that may interest fans of the authors
in this afternoon's previous post.
Update of 2:02 PM ET:
From this journal on the day of Wilson's death—
"Danvers is a town in Essex County, Massachusetts, |
These two quotations, intended for Stephen King fans,
may also appeal to Colin Wilson fans.
… and Little Colva—
Two links on a Jewish approach to such matters:
Bee Season and, more generally, Kabbalah.
"So it's the laughter we will remember…." —Streisand
Speak for yourself, Barbra.
Wachs reportedly died on Monday, December 2, 2013.
"What's too painful to remember…" — Streisand
"So set 'em up, Joe…" — Sinatra
I've got a little story you oughta know .
A recent addition to Barry Mazur's home page—
"December 1, 2013: Here are rough notes for
a short talk entitled The Faces of Evidence
(in Mathematics) ([PDF]) to be given at the
Cambridge Scientific Club, Dec. 5 2013."
The PDF link does not work, but some earlier remarks by
Mazur on this topic have been published elsewhere:
Related material:
The Proof and the Lie (St. Andrew's Day, 2003), and
a recent repetition of the lie in Wikipedia:
"Around 1955, Japanese mathematicians Goro Shimura
and Yutaka Taniyama observed a possible link between
two apparently completely distinct, branches of mathematics,
elliptic curves and modular forms."
This statement, from the article on Algebraic number theory,
was added on Oct. 22, 2013 by one "Brirush," apparently a
Temple University postdoctoral researcher, in what he rightly
called a "terrible history summary."
Happy Feast of Saint Nicholas.
See the previous post, the remarks of Roger Kimball
on Frank Stella's lecture at Harvard on Oct. 12, 1983,
and "Study of O" in this journal, with my own images
of space from October 1983.
* The title refers to a 1996 film.
Happy birthday to Jeff Bridges.
Related remarks: yesterday's post at this hour.
Excerpt from a poem by Johanna Skibsrud
(Toronto Quarterly , April 2, 2011)—
No, I could not love a human being if they
Even if I was a bear
Even if you were a bear
But I am not a bear. And will not eat you. And you are not a bear. And will not eat me. And that is why I could not love you. |
Related material: Into the Bereshit.
See also the remarks on space in Skibsrud's
January 2012 doctoral thesis at the University
of Montreal—
" 'The nothing that is': An Ethics of Absence
Within the Poetry of Wallace Stevens."
— as well as Bull Run I and Bull Run II.
A new website illustrates its URL.
See DiamondSpace.net.
See my Google Sites page if you would like to
download a zipped copy (31 MB) of my
Finite-Geometry Notes site
(not zipped, at finitegeometry.org/sc/map.html).
Or you can of course use a website downloader.
(Suggested by a recent NY Times piece on
a company, Citia, that splits books into pieces
for easier electronic access. The large zipped
file referred to above is sort of a reverse of this
process.)
First edition, 1973, cover art by Gene Szafran
"It's going to be accomplished in steps,
this establishment of the Talented
in the scheme of things."
— To Ride Pegasus ,
by Anne McCaffrey (Radcliffe '47)
Click for clearer image.
From Willard Van Orman Quine Guest Book Volume 1—
"May 7, 1997 'McX and Wyman' — In his essay 'On What There Is', Willard Quine introduces two fictional philosophers who put forward certain ontological doctrines: McX and Wyman. It would be interesting to know whether Quine was thereby alluding to some real philosophers. My guess for McX would be Hugh MacColl, but I have no idea who Wyman might stand for. Thanks for considering the question! from Dr. Kai F. Wehmeier — Email: Kai.Wehmeier (at) math.uni-muenster.de Web Page: http://wwwmath.uni-muenster.de/math/users/wehmeier/"
"I spoke with Prof Quine last night regarding your question which he found interesting. He says his intention was to create some fictional philosophers ('X' and 'Y') to illustrate some of his concerns. There may also have been a 'Z' man. These fictional philosophers were not designed to represent any particular philosophers although their viewpoints may happen [to] reflect those of actual philosophers. – Doug” [Douglas Boynton Quine]
Related material:
The X-Men Tree (Nov. 12),
X-Men Tree continued (Nov. 17),
Waiting for Ogdoad (Oct. 30),
Interpenetrative Ogdoad (Oct. 31),
Waiting for Ogdoad continued (Nov. 30),
For Sean Connery on St. Andrew's Day (Nov. 30).
On St. Andrew's Day.
A Connery adventure in Kuala Lumpur—
For another Kuala Lumpur adventure, see today's update
to "In Defense of Plato's Realism"—
The July 5, 2007, post linked to
"Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star."
For related drama from Kuala Lumpur, see
"Occam's Razor, Plato's Beard."
Continued from October 30 (Devil’s Night), 2013.
“In a sense, we would see that change
arises from the structure of the object.”
— Theoretical physicist quoted in a
Simons Foundation article of Sept. 17, 2013
This suggests a review of mathematics and the
“Classic of Change ,” the I Ching .
The physicist quoted above was discussing a rather
complicated object. His words apply to a much simpler
object, an embodiment of the eight trigrams underlying
the I Ching as the corners of a cube.
See also…
(Click for clearer image.)
The Cullinane image above illustrates the seven points of
the Fano plane as seven of the eight I Ching trigrams and as
seven natural ways of slicing the cube.
For a different approach to the mathematics of cube slices,
related to Gauss’s composition law for binary quadratic forms,
see the Bhargava cube in a post of April 9, 2012.
"These are odd facts…." — G. H. Hardy,
quoted in the previous post, "Centered"
Other odd facts:
If n is odd, then the object at the center
of the n×n square is a square.
Similarly for the n×n×n cube.
Related meditation:
“In a sense, we would see that change
arises from the structure of the object,” he said.
“But it’s not from the object changing.
The object is basically timeless.”
— Theoretical physicist quoted in a
Simons Foundation article of Sept. 17, 2013,
"A Jewel at the Heart of Quantum Physics"
See also "My God, it's full of… everything."
"I have now come to the most difficult part of my story."
"265" — Page number and centered square number
"153" — Triangular number (as noted by St. Augustine)
"265/153" — Object Lesson
An accurate description of such number lore:
"These are odd facts, very suitable for puzzle columns
and likely to amuse amateurs, but there is nothing
in them which appeals much to a mathematician.
The proofs are neither difficult nor interesting—
merely a little tiresome. The theorems are not serious;
and it is plain that one reason (though perhaps not the
most important) is the extreme speciality of both the
enunciations and the proofs, which are not capable of
any significant generalization." — G. H. Hardy
See also some remarks on figurate numbers in this journal.
Nothing went wrong at the back of the north wind. "What a queer place it must be!" "It's a very good place." "Do you want to go back again?" "No; I don't think I have left it; I feel it here, somewhere." "Did the people there look pleased?" "Yes— quite pleased, only a little sad." "Then they didn't look glad?" "They looked as if they were waiting to be gladder some day." |
For the birth date of C. S. Lewis and Madeleine L'Engle.
THE GOLD KEY The speaker in this case |
"Now he believed that where there was a key, there must also be a lock…."
"We must find the country from which the shadows come," said Mossy. "We must, dear Mossy," responded Tangle. "What if your golden key should be the key to it?" "Ah! that would be grand," returned Mossy. |
From the cover of Anne Sexton's Transformations—
"Her metaphoric strength has never been greater —
really funny, among other things, a dark, dark laughter."
— C. K. Williams
Another dark lady:
See also Karr in this journal on the date of the above article—
May 24, 2012, the feast of the dark lady.
From "Why Was New Haven Divided into Nine Squares?"
"Of note on the Wadsworth Map of 1748 are…
the Grammar School, the 'Goal' or jail…."
Related material: Puritan in this journal.
Non-Puritans may prefer the following image—
Source: Yale English Department banner
Continued from Deo Gratias , a post at noon last Saturday
that featured blues singer R. L. Burnside.
"It is a fresh spiritual that he defines"
— "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven"
A Yale death between Saturday night and Sunday morning—
See is not believed to have committed suicide, according to
Judicial Department spokeswoman Rhonda Hebert
Mr. Samuel See was delivered to the |
Also known as Virgil the Geometer.
" Art, in other words, can speak to social conflicts,
and not always how you might think. Yvonne Scott,
a professor here at Trinity College, remarked
before the wake that in 1972 the invention of
Patrick Ireland was 'hard for people to grasp
because for a long while conceptual art wasn’t
understood here.' She added, 'Times have changed.' "
— Michael Kimmelman in The New York Times ,
May 22, 2008
Related art:
The "Square Round" link at the end of the previous post.
A story dated December 16, 2008, from the parish of Shannon.
A post dated December 16, 2008, from this journal.
Continued from Pensée (Feb. 10, 2012).*
Nick Paumgarten in The New Yorker of Dec. 2, 2013—
" When one speaks of Zwirner the gallerist, one is speaking
as much of a handful of women in their forties who have been
with the gallery fifteen or more years. Zwirner has made them
partners, meaning, he says, that they 'will participate in profits
as the gallery does well.' They are Angela Choon, who runs the
London gallery; Hanna Schouwink, from Holland; Bellatrix Hubert,
from France; and Kristine Bell, from outside Buffalo. Seeing them
all together, at an opening or a dinner, brings to mind David
Carradine’s gang of glamorous assassins in 'Kill Bill.' "
See also the previous post, on An Object of Beauty.
* For some related art, see Square Round.
In memory of a composer who reportedly died
on Thursday, November 21, 2013:
Related material, for mature audiences only, "based on the
confessional poetry of Anne Sexton," from Nov. 8, 2012:
See also Confessional : this journal on that date.
Peter Keepnews on the late jazz musician Chico Hamilton:
"He was a charter member of the baritone saxophonist
Gerry Mulligan’s quartet, which helped lay the groundwork
for the cool movement. His own quintet, which he formed
shortly after leaving the Mulligan group, came to be
regarded as the quintessence of cool."
Example: a recording uploaded on October 27, 2013,
and this journal on that date.
Related material: Working Backward.
Suggested by a theater review titled "Filling the Existential Void."
Companion piece: A Poem for Pinter.
"Waiting for Ogdoad" continues…
"You want Frye's with that?" — A recent humanities graduate.
Frye's backstory: Ogdoad.
Other material suggested by the previous post and by the time of this post…
No Man's Land, Gods and Monsters, and Forty and Eight.
From a slide show of Pinter's "No Man's Land"—
* Footnotes on the title—
For Hirst: Wikipedia.
For Spooner: Into the Woods.
For the groundlings: Urban Dictionary.
From the New York Times obituary of philanthropist
Fred Kavli, who died on Thursday, November 21—
” In 2005, when Mr. Kavli announced that
he planned to start the prizes, he recalled
skiing in the Norwegian mountains as a boy.
‘At times,’ he told a gathering in New York,
‘the whole sky was aflame with the Northern Lights
shifting and dancing across the sky down to the
white-clad mountaintops. In the stillness and
loneliness of the white mountains, I pondered the
universe, the planet, nature and the wonders of
man. I’m still pondering.’ “
“And we may see the meadow in December, icy white
and crystalline….” — Johnny Mercer, lyrics to Lionel
Hampton and Sonny Burke’s “Midnight Sun”
* Lyche
Ben Brantley reviewing a show by the X-Men patriarchs
that opened on Sunday:
"This isn’t just a matter of theatergoers chuckling
to show that they’re smart and cultured and had
damn well better be having a good time after
forking out all that money…."
I prefer reality (which includes the life of Fred Kavli) :
See also Saturday's posts Chess and Frame Tale.
Whether the patriarch Kavli, pictured above, is now having
a good time, I do not know. I hope so.
The title refers to a post from July 2012:
The above post, a new description of a class of figurate
numbers that has been studied at least since Pythagoras,
shows that the "triangular numbers" of tradition are not
the only triangular numbers.
"Thus the theory of description matters most.
It is the theory of the word for those
For whom the word is the making of the world…."
— Wallace Stevens, "Description Without Place"
See also Finite Relativity (St. Cecilia's Day, 2012).
“We’ll give the week-end to wisdom, to Weisheit, the rabbi….”
— Wallace Stevens in “Things of August” (see Storyville yesterday)
My choice for a rabbi would be George Steiner.
INTERVIEWER You once referred to the “patience of apprehension” and “open-endedness of asking” which fiction can enact, and yet you have described your fictions as “allegories of argument, stagings of ideas.” Do you still consider them to be “stagings of ideas”? GEORGE STEINER Very much so. My writing of fiction comes under a very general heading of those teachers, critics, scholars who like to try their own hand once or twice in their lives. |
For one such staging, see today’s earlier posts Chess and Frame Tale.
See The X-Men Tree, another tree, and Trinity MOG.
Norwegian, 22, Takes World Chess Title
Quoted here on Thursday, the date of Kavli‘s death:
Herbert Mitgang’s New York Times
obituary of Cleanth Brooks—
“The New Critics advocated close reading of literary texts
and detailed analysis, concentrating on semantics, meter,
imagery, metaphor and symbol as well as references to
history, biography and cultural background.”
See also Steiner, Chess, and Death.
From a poem in today's previous post:
"Thou art not August unless I make thee so."
This, along with two obituaries in this evening's
online New York Times , suggests the following
passage:
See also Surfaces of a Diamond and Storyville.
From David Lavery's weblog today—
It is? Then a check of the rest of the poem seems in order.
In the poem, Stevens speaks of…
The impossible possible philosophers' man,
The man who has had the time to think enough,
The central man, the human globe, responsive
As a mirror with a voice, the man of glass,
Who in a million diamonds sums us up.
Compare and contrast with a rather silly recent music video—
Perhaps Stevens's "human globe" could be portrayed by the
versatile Philip Seymour Hoffman, who stars in a new film directed
by Anton Corbijn, the perpetrator of the above Arcade Fire video.
See also Log24 posts on and just before the video's upload date.
The Mitgang Menu
Related material: This morning's 6 AM post and Wiener News.
Update of 3:29 PM:
From Herbert Mitgang's New York Times
obituary of Cleanth Brooks—
"The New Critics advocated close reading of literary texts
and detailed analysis, concentrating on semantics, meter,
imagery, metaphor and symbol as well as references to
history, biography and cultural background."
"The shaving razor's cold and it stings."
The above image is from Ulysses “Seen,” adapted
by Robert Berry from the novel by James Joyce.
Continued from 24 hours ago.
"AA had no rules but many traditions (that were, in fact, rules).
One of the most ironclad was that you never made a Twelfth Step
call on an active alcoholic by yourself, unless the alkie in question
was safely incarcerated in a hospital, detox, or the local bughouse.
If you did, you were apt to end up matching him drink for drink and
line for line."
— King, Stephen (2013-09-24). Doctor Sleep: A Novel
(p. 272). Scribner. Kindle Edition.
" Aus 'It' wurde 'Es', und King sprach es so aus,
dass man sich alleine vom Klang des Titels
gruselte: 'Essssss!' "
— Last night's online
Hamburger Abendblatt
To commemorate a death on November 12th—
See also November 12th in this journal
as well as The Columbia Record Club.
This morning's previous post concluded with
a 1938 tune for entertainer Edward Frenkel.
A more up-to-date musical offering:
"Bobbies on bicycles two by two…" — Roger Miller, 1965
A mathematics weblog in Australia today—
Clearly, the full symmetric group contains elements
with no regular cycles, but what about other groups?
Siemons and Zalesskii showed that for any group G
between PSL(n,q) and PGL(n,q) other than for
(n,q)=(2,2) or (2,3), then in any action of G, every
element of G has a regular cycle, except G=PSL(4,2)
acting on 8 points. The exceptions are due to
isomorphisms with the symmetric or alternating groups.
In memory of William Weaver,
translator of Foucault's Pendulum ,
and of Nobel winner Doris Lessing,
author of The Four-Gated City ,
a song. (Note the upload date.)
* Continued from August 8th, 2013
In memory of the translator of Foucault's Pendulum ,
who reportedly died on Tuesday, November 12th—
A detail from an image search (2 MB) linked to here
on that date:
See also Milano in this journal.
"…the source of all great mathematics is the special case,
the concrete example. It is frequent in mathematics that
every instance of a concept of seemingly great generality
is in essence the same as a small and concrete special case."
— Paul Halmos in his autobiography
I Want to Be a Mathematician (1985).
For example:
Yes. See …
The 48 actions of GL(2,3) on a 3×3 coordinate-array A,
when matrices of that group right-multiply the elements of A,
with A =
(1,1) (1,0) (1,2) (0,1) (0,0) (0,2) (2,1) (2,0) (2,2) |
Actions of GL(2,p) on a pxp coordinate-array have the
same sorts of symmetries, where p is any odd prime.
Note that A, regarded in the Sallows manner as a magic square,
has the constant sum (0,0) in rows, columns, both diagonals, and
all four broken diagonals (with arithmetic modulo 3).
For a more sophisticated approach to the structure of the
ninefold square, see Coxeter + Aleph.
From a weblog post today—
"one of our great achievements as a species
is the rhetorical question. indeed, this is what
separates us from the higher animals. it is
how we make sense of our lives. our lives
are rhetorical questions, aren't they?"
And our deaths?
Backstory:
This journal on Oct. 25, 2013— St. Crispin's Day—
and a eulogy last night in The New York Times by an
art-department professor, Crispin Sartwell, who is also
the author of the above remarks on rhetorical questions.
Sartwell's Times eulogy was for an older
professor and art theorist, Arthur Danto.
Danto died on Crispin's Day.
Update:
"Michael Smith… is currently working on a novel
and a three-part history of MI6 entitled:
SIX: A History of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service ."
And then there is…
From a reader review—
"Apparently a classic of the sci-fi cannon…."
From the obituary of a Bletchley Park
codebreaker who reportedly died on
Armistice Day (Monday, Nov. 11)—
"The main flaw of the Enigma machine,
seen by the inventors as a security-enhancing
measure, was that it would never encipher
a letter as itself…."
Update of 9 PM ET Nov. 13—
"The rogue’s yarn that will run through much of
the material is the algebraic symmetry to which
the name of Galois is attached…."
— Robert P. Langlands,
Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton
"All the turmoil, all the emotions of the scenes
have been digested by the mind into
a grave intellectual whole. It is as though
Bach had written the 1812 Overture."
— Aldous Huxley, "The Best Picture," 1925
New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley
last night at 10 PM ET on the opening of a
play by Samuel Beckett —
"The cause of this incontinent mirth?
The dirtiest joke of all time. I mean life itself.
No playwright of the 20th century, and quite
possibly ever, has told this joke with the
clarity, simplicity and richness of Beckett."
Related material — This journal yesterday.
See also Lead Balloon.
Related material:
The comments on a Log24 post of Nov. 6, 2013,
remarks by Michael Worton on the tree in
"Waiting for Godot," images from the film
"The Tree of Life," and, in memory of Robert
de Marrais, an image search from this evening:
"Spelling the Tree" + "de Marrais," 2 MB.
For and by composer Sir John Tavener, 69,
who reportedly died today.
Update of 8:28 PM ET Nov. 12—
The obituary link above is to The Telegraph.
Here is a link to the version in The New York Times—
“DEVIL – MUSIC
20 pages of incidental music written at school
for G. K. Chesterton’s play MAGIC
by D. Coxeter.”
See also…
Related material — Chesterton + Magic in this journal.
Or: The Nutshell
What about Pascal?
For some background on Pascal's mathematics,
not his wager, see…
Richmond, H. W.,
"On the Figure of Six Points in Space of Four Dimensions,"
Quarterly Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics ,
Volume 31 (1900), pp. 125-160,
dated by Richmond March 30,1899
Richmond, H. W.,
"The Figure Formed from Six Points in Space of Four Dimensions,"
Mathematische Annalen ,
Volume 53 (1900), Issue 1-2, pp 161-176,
dated by Richmond February 1, 1899
See also Nocciolo in this journal.
Recall as well that six points in space may,
if constrained to lie on a circle, be given
a religious interpretation. Richmond's
six points are secular and more general.
The first two pages of a 1989 book by George Steiner—
See also yesterday's posts The Field of the Possible
and Abstraction.
Compare and contrast with Socrates in the Meno
quoting Pindar then discussing with a slave boy
the duplication of the square.
Was Socrates a great philosopher or, as the above
figure seems to indicate and as some say of Steiner,
too clever by half ?
(Continued from Dec. 6, 2012)
Context:
Chinese Field and Modal Diamond .
(See also today’s previous post.)
This post was suggested by the recent Log24
posts Film Politics, The Wind Rises, and
Figure and Ground, as well as the related
Wikipedia article The Wind Has Risen.
Cover design by Helen Yentus.
Μή, φίλα ψυχά, βίον ἀθάνατον σπεῦδε,
τὰν δ' ἔμπρακτον ἄντλει μαχανάν.
— Pindar, Pythian III , epigraph to
Le Cimetière Marin by Paul Valéry (1920)
O mon âme, n’aspire à la vie immortelle,
mais épuise le champ du possible.
— Pindar, 3e Pythique , epigraph to
The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus (1942)
O my soul, do not aspire to immortal life,
but exhaust the limits of the possible.
— Pindar, Pythian iii , as translated
from the French (or Greek) by Justin O'Brien
in the Knopf Myth of Sisyphus , 1955
… Or: The Japanese Aesthetics of Zero
Related aesthetic remarks by an author mentioned here
Thursday morning —
"#Haiyan has reached perfection…
8.0 on the Dvorak intensity scale."
(Where Entertainment Is God, continued)
Related material: A Log24 post from the release date,
September 10, 2013, for the DVD of "Delete"—
This post was suggested by…
1. Movie reviews links on the NY Times online front page—
2. "When Death tells a story…" in this journal
3. A search for "Recognition" in this journal
(suggested by Terence Cave's Recognitions ,
mentioned in a post of October 31.)
4. The play "Magic," by G. K. Chesterton
5. The following posts —
The post itself consists simply of the title,
together with the above items that suggested
the title.
Yesterday afternoon's post linked to efforts by
the late Robert de Marrais to defend a mathematical
approach to structuralism and kaleidoscopic patterns.
Two examples of non-mathematical discourse on
such patterns:
1. A Royal Society paper from 2012—
Click the above image for related material in this journal.
2. A book by Junichi Toyota from 2009—
Kaleidoscopic Grammar: Investigation into the Nature of Binarism
I find such non-mathematical approaches much less interesting
than those based on the mathematics of reflection groups .
De Marrais described the approaches of Vladimir Arnold and,
earlier, of H. S. M. Coxeter, to such groups. These approaches
dealt only with groups of reflections in Euclidean spaces.
My own interest is in groups of reflections in Galois spaces.
See, for instance, A Simple Reflection Group of Order 168.
Galois spaces over fields of characteristic 2 are particularly
relevant to what Toyota calls binarism .
The essay excerpted in last night's post on structuralism
is of value as part of a sustained attack by the late
Robert de Marrais on the damned nonsense of the late
French literary theorist Jacques Derrida—
Catastrophes, Kaleidoscopes, String Quartets:
Deploying the Glass Bead Game
Part I: Ministrations Concerning Silliness, or:
Is “Interdisciplinary Thought” an Oxymoron?
Part II: Canonical Collage-oscopes, or:
Claude in Jacques’ Trap? Not What It Sounds Like!
Part III: Grooving on the Sly with Klein Groups
Part IV: Claude’s Kaleidoscope . . . and Carl’s
Part V: Spelling the Tree, from Aleph to Tav
(While Not Forgetting to Shin)
The response of de Marrais to Derrida's oeuvre nicely
exemplifies the maxim of Norman Mailer that
"At times, bullshit can only be countered
with superior bullshit."
Bead-Game Structuralism:
Excerpts from Comments by Robert de Marrais
on Interpenetration and The Raw and the Cooked
Click the image below for the webpage:
The Flickr source of the above hashtags photo,
titled "Lots of Hash" —
See also this journal on the date the photo was taken.
From a book by Harvard mathematician Barry Mazur —
"Part of the self leaves the body when we sleep…"
See also the Saturday evening post "Fingo."
"And behold, a white horse." — Johnny Cash
See also references to such a horse here.
The title, that of a novel by Arthur Koestler,
has appeared before in this journal.
The title was quoted in a Log24 note of
May 29, 2002 (G.K. Chesterton's birthday).
The link in Saturday evening's post to a Chesterton
essay suggested a further search that yielded
the following quotation—
Then silence sank. And slowly
Arose the sea-land lord
Like some vast beast for mystery,
He filled the room and porch and sky,
And from a cobwebbed nail on high
Unhooked his heavy sword.
— G. K. Chesterton,
The Ballad of the White Horse
This, together with some Log24 remarks
from 2004, suggests two images—
Above: A 1955 cover design by Robert Flynn.
The arrow theme also appears in a figure from
John Sealander's Road to Nowhere in the 2004
remarks:
The remarks quoting the Sealander image, from
March 5, 2004, were on mathematics and narrative.
Related material from a year later:
See an announcement, saved from March 16, 2005,
of a conference on mathematics and narrative that
was held in July 2005. Some context: Koestler's novel.
The title, derived from a saying of Newton,
might apply to an essay by David Justice
that contains the following passage—
Our proposals are in the spirit of [Link added to Justice’s original.] |
Some context:
Sparks Middle School and the film "Insidious"—
In memory of Anca Petrescu,
"the Albert Speer of Communism."
Source: www.thezerotheorem-movie.com.
The Gilliam quotes are from insidemovies.ew.com.
In "Notes on Finite Group Theory"
by Peter J. Cameron (October 2013),
http://www.maths.qmul.ac.uk/~pjc/notes/gt.pdf,
some parts are particularly related to the mathematics of
the 4×4 square (viewable in various ways as four quartets)—
Cameron is the author of Parallelisms of Complete Designs ,
a book notable in part for its chapter epigraphs from T.S. Eliot's
Four Quartets . These epigraphs, if not the text proper, seem
appropriate for All Saints' Day.
But note also Log24 posts tagged Not Theology.
See the title phrase in this journal.
See also posts from last August tagged Storyville.
See Josh Lederman's AP story on this year's
colorful White House Halloween decorations.
Orange and black are also the Princeton colors.
See as well The Crosswicks Curse.
The title is from an essay by James C. Nohrnberg—
"Just another shake of the kaleidoscope" —
Related material:
Kaleidoscope Puzzle,
Design Cube 2x2x2, and
Through the Looking Glass: A Sort of Eternity.
The title is from p. xxxix of Michael Dolzani's
introduction to
The "Third Book" Notebooks of Northrop Frye,
1964-1972: The Critical Comedy
(University of Toronto Press, 2002).
Those whose interests are more mathematical
than literary may consult the similar word "octad"
in this journal.
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