The title is taken from Isak Dinesen— See the previous post,
which posed the question, "Stylist or fraud?"
Stylist and fraud—
The stylist: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Society of Jesus
The fraud (i.e., the fiction):
Click on the cover art for further details.
The cover artist, by the way, died on the date*
mentioned prominently in the previous post.
* September 7, 2009.
See also that date in this journal, with its post
"Magic Boxes." Happy birthday, J. K. Rowling.
Maya Alexandri on September 7, 2009—
|
… Blixen herself may have cut closer to the truth In it, a character explains,
What exactly [the imposter to the Prince] has told
Later, the imposter utters the following enigma: "Life and Death Stylist or fraud, that's the question. |
For mathematician Julia Robinson, who died on this date
in 1985, and her sister Constance Reid, who died on
October 14, 2010—
A search suggested by the "cosmic dippiness" of
a 1998 science fiction novel and by the non-dippiness of
a much better novel with closely related themes from 1977—
(The use of "recursive" here is of course rather poetic, not to be
construed as meaningful in the strictly mathematical sense.
See also the term's etymology, and Working Backwards.)
Today is the dies natalis of group theorist Walter Feit.
"The Steiner systems S (5,6,12) and S (5,8,24) are remarkable combinatorial
configurations unlike any others. Their automorphism groups are the Mathieu
groups M12 and M24. These are the only 5-transitive permutation groups other
than symmetric and alternating groups: (a fact long conjectured but only
proved as a consequence of the classification). The Leech lattice is a blown up
version of S (5,8,24). It is the unique even unimodular lattice in 24 dimensions
with no vectors of weight 2. This uniqueness is an essential reason why it is a
geometric object of fundamental importance. The automorphism group Co.O
of the Leech lattice involves about half of the sporadic groups and generally it
is felt that these are well understood."
— Walter Feit, book review, Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society ,
Vol. 8 (1983), 120-124, page 123
For a memorable eccentric who reportedly died
on Wednesday, July 24, 2013—
(Simplicity continued)
"Understanding a metaphor is like understanding a geometrical
truth. Features of various geometrical figures or of various contexts
are pulled into revealing alignment with one another by the
demonstration or the metaphor.
What is 'revealed' is not that the alignment is possible; rather,
that the alignment is possible reveals the presence of already-
existing shapes or correspondences that lay unnoticed. To 'see' a
proof or 'get' a metaphor is to experience the significance of the
correspondence for what the thing, concept, or figure is ."
— Jan Zwicky, Wisdom & Metaphor , page 36 (left)
Zwicky illustrates this with Plato's diamond figure
from the Meno on the facing page— her page 36 (right).
A more sophisticated geometrical figure—
Galois-geometry key to
Desargues' theorem:
| D | E | F | |
| S' | P | Q | R |
| S | P' | Q' | R' |
| O | P1 | Q1 | R1 |
For an explanation, see
Classical Geometry in Light of Galois Geometry.
(Continued from July 16)
From the schedule of an April 2013 philosophical conference:
Why should anyone care what Zwicky thinks?
1. Her writings. In particular, Plato as Artist .
2. Her husband. See Robert Bringhurst in this journal.
3. A reading by Zwicky and Bringhurst on March 20, 2013.
Related material: Weiner news
Update of 3:30 AM:
A meditation on the above
headline phrase "widely published."
"Und was für ein Bild des Christentums
ist dabei herausgekommen?"
Arts and Letters Daily today links to a July 17
Washington Post review of two books on the
occult and the enlightenment. The review, by
Michael Dirda, ends on a cheerful note:
"Happy synchronicity."
In related news, a Walpurgisnacht obituary also
ends cheerfully:
"He was still trying to get out a joke
with his final breath."
That obituary describes a life that reportedly ended
on April 21, 2013. Synchronicity involving that date—
The posts of April 21, 2013 (and related material in
this morning's previous post).
This post was suggested by a search for the
Derridean phrase "necessary possibility"* that
led to web pages on a conference at Harvard
on Friday and Saturday, March 26**-27, 2010,
on Derrida and Religion .
The conference featured a talk titled
"The Poetics of the Broken Tablet."
I prefer the poetics of projective geometry.
An illustration— The restoration of the full
15-point "large" Desargues configuration in
place of the diminished 10-point Desargues
configuration that is usually discussed.
Click on the image for further details.
* See a discussion of this phrase in
the context of Brazilian religion.
** See also my own philosophical reflections
on Friday, March 26, 2010:
"You Can't Make This Stuff Up."
A related scene, in memory of a jingle singer who died Sunday at 97:
Click for the Heavenly Coffee song.
"The Germans, the document reads,
were looking for 'guidance and advice.'
Their wish was fulfilled."
by René Pfister, Laura Poitras, Marcel Rosenbach,
Jörg Schindler and Holger Stark
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
This is the weekend for Comic-Con International in San Diego.
The convention includes an art show. (Click above image to enlarge.)
Related material from Norway…
Suggested nominations for a Kavli Prize:
1. Josefine Lyche's highly imaginative catalog page for
the current Norwegian art exhibition I de lange nætter,
which mentions her interest in sacred geometry
2. Sacred Geometry: Drawing a Metatron Cube
… and from San Diego—
The Kavli Institutes logo:
For a modeling visionary— "All the Time."
Related material: Coco Rocha and Gatsby .
Update of 12:31 AM July 21— See also "For Doin' Evil."
A Brainstorm for Jo Lyxe :
Swastika logo of the Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind
at the University of California, San Diego.
Soundtrack: Under the Iron Sky .
For a former defender of the Fulda Gap
who reportedly died on July 1, 2013—
and two quotations:
For Brad Leithauser, some of whose remarks
on "Reading Poems Backward" were quoted
here on July 13—
A brief review of the life of artist Marc Simont,
who died on that day.
(Click for a larger and clearer image.)
Marc Simont, Classic Children’s Book Illustrator, Dies at 97
Simont reportedly died on Saturday, July 13, 2013.
See this journal on that date and Simont's cover illustration
for The Wonderful O .
The title refers to a classic 1960 novel by John Hersey.
“How do you get young people excited about space?”
— Megan Garber in The Atlantic , Aug. 16, 2012
(Italics added.) (See previous four posts.)
Allyn Jackson on “Simplicity, in Mathematics and in Art,”
in the new August 2013 issue of Notices of the American
Mathematical Society—
“As conventions evolve, so do notions of simplicity.
Franks mentioned Gauss’s 1831 paper that
established the respectability of complex numbers.”
This suggests a related image by Gauss, with a
remark on simplicity—
Here Gauss’s diagram is not, as may appear at first glance,
a 3×3 array of squares, but is rather a 4×4 array of discrete
points (part of an infinite plane array).
Related material that does feature the somewhat simpler 3×3 array
of squares, not seen as part of an infinite array—
Marketing the Holy Field
Click image for the original post.
For a purely mathematical view of the holy field, see Visualizing GL(2,p).
"How do you get young people excited
about space? How do you get them interested
not just in watching movies about space,
or in playing video games set in space …
but in space itself?"
— Megan Garber in The Atlantic , Aug. 16, 2012
One approach:
"There is such a thing as a tesseract" and
Diamond Theory in 1937.
See, too, Baez in this journal.
(Continued from yesterday evening)
Madeleine L'Engle in The Irrational Season
(1977), Chapter 9:
"After A Wrinkle in Time was finally published,
it was pointed out to me that the villain, a naked
disembodied brain, was called 'It' because It
stands for Intellectual truth as opposed to a truth
which involves the whole of us, heart as well as
mind. That acronym had never occurred to me.
I chose the name It intuitively, because an IT
does not have a heart or soul. And I did not
understand consciously at the time of writing
that the intellect, when it is not informed by
the heart, is evil."
Related material: Mathematics as a Post-Communist Activity.
From Iris Murdoch's novel The Bell —
" 'With an engineer to help me,' said Dora,
'I can do anything.' And indeed as she
stood there in the moonlight, looking at
the quiet water, she felt as if by the sheer
force of her will she could make the great
bell rise. After all, and after her own fashion,
she would fight. In this holy community
she would play the witch."
Some recent posts have been added to the Root Circle saga.
Update of 12:13 AM July 16, 2013:
Click the above image for further details. This "every other term"
strategy may be illustrated as in the July 12, 2013, post "Ein Bild "—
This image was originally posted on June 5, 2006 at 12:06 AM ET.
"Warming to the question of what it means to read a poem backward…."
— Essayist in a New Yorker weblog on July 11, 2013
“Death itself would start working backwards.”
— Aslan in The Chronicles of Narnia , 1950
|
"I twisted my mind like a bright ribbon, folded it,
"All manner of thing shall be well |
See also some context for these quotations.
Last night's 9:29 PM (ET) post featured the phrase
"This way to the egress."
Last night's 10 PM post featured two deaths:
The author of The Best Christmas Pageant Ever
reportedly died at 85 on Tuesday, July 9.
A former director of the Museum of Modern Art
who was famously shown the exit door there
in his younger years reportedly died at 80 on
Saturday, July 6.
For a sort of pageant combining Christmas,
the Museum of Modern Art, and an egress,
see St. Stephen's Day, 2008.
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