The title is that of a play mentioned last night in
a New York Times obituary .
Related recent film lines —
Related material from this journal on Jan. 20, 2018 —
Excerpts from a post of May 25, 2005 —
Above is an example I like of mathematics….
Here is an example I like of narrative:
Kate felt quite dizzy. She didn't know exactly what it was
that had just happened, but she felt pretty damn certain that
it was the sort of experience that her mother would not have
approved of on a first date.
"Is this all part of what we have to do to go to Asgard?"
she said. "Or are you just fooling around?"
"We will go to Asgard...now," he said.
At that moment he raised his hand as if to pluck an apple,
but instead of plucking he made a tiny, sharp turning movement.
The effect was as if he had twisted the entire world through a
billionth part of a billionth part of a degree. Everything
shifted, was for a moment minutely out of focus, and then
snapped back again as a suddenly different world.
— Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
Image from a different different world —
Hat-tip to a related Feb. 26 weblog post
at the American Mathematical Society.
For the former, see the previous post.
For the latter, see yesterday's The Unfolding.
Related material —
(Screenshot at 9:08 PM ET)
Heimel on Dating —
|
She adapted “Sex Tips” and “But Enough About You,” a 1986 collection, into a play, “A Girl’s Guide to Chaos,” which opened later that year off Broadway at the American Place Theater. The play is largely a conversation among four friends, one of whom, Cynthia (played by Debra Jo Rupp in the original production) realizes to her horror that she will have to start dating again. “Please, God, no, don’t make me do it!” she says. “I’ll be good from now on, I promise! I’ll stop feeding the dog hashish! I’ll be kind, thoughtful, sober, industrious, anything. But please, God, not the ultimate torture of dating!”
— Richard Sandomir tonight in The New York Times |
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"Risin' up to the challenge of our rival" — Eye of the Tiger
On the recent film "Justice League" —
From DC Extended Universe Wiki, "Mother Box" —
"However, during World War I, the British rediscovered
mankind's lost Mother Box. They conducted numerous studies
but were unable to date it due to its age. The Box was then
shelved in an archive, up until the night Superman died,
where it was then sent to Doctor Silas Stone, who
recognized it as a perpetual energy matrix. . . ." [Link added.]
The cube shape of the lost Mother Box, also known as the
Change Engine, is shared by the Stone in a novel by Charles Williams,
Many Dimensions . See the Solomon's Cube webpage.
See too the matrix of Claude Lévi-Strauss in posts tagged
Verwandlungslehre .
Some literary background:
Who speaks in primordial images speaks to us
as with a thousand trumpets, he grips and overpowers,
and at the same time he elevates that which he treats
out of the individual and transitory into the sphere of
the eternal. — C. G. JUNG
"In the conscious use of primordial images—
the archetypes of thought—
one modern novelist stands out as adept and
grand master: Charles Williams.
In The Place of the Lion he incarnates Plato’s
celestial archetypes with hair-raising plausibility.
In Many Dimensions he brings a flock of ordinary
mortals face to face with the stone bearing
the Tetragrammaton, the Divine Name, the sign of Four.
Whether we understand every line of a Williams novel
or not, we feel something deep inside us quicken
as Williams tells the tale.
Here, in The Greater Trumps , he has turned to
one of the prime mysteries of earth . . . ."
— William Lindsay Gresham, Preface (1950) to
Charles Williams's The Greater Trumps (1932)
For fans of what the recent series Westworld called "bulk apperception" —
From the website of Richard P. Gabriel —
" As part of my studies, I came up with a 'theory of poetry'
based loosely on Christopher Alexander’s 'Nature of Order.' "
[The Alexander link is mine, not Gabriel’s.]
A phrase from this journal a year ago today — "poetic order" —
links to the theory of Gabriel —
From Gabriel's "The Nature of Poetic Order" —
Positive Space
• Positive space is the characteristic of a center
that moves outward from itself, seemingly oozing life
rather than collapsing on itself
• An image that resonates is showing positive space
• A word that has many connotations that fit with the
other centers in the poem is showing positive space
• It is an expansion outward rather than a contraction
inward, and it shows that the poem is unfolding
in front of us and not dying
Related material —
From a post of April 26, 2017 —
A sequel to Friday's "The Dark, Seductive Art of Phillips Exeter."
From Twitter today —
Groton School @GrotonSchool Feb 1
Groton School Theater Department Presents: CABARET
Friday, February 23rd at 7:30 pm
Saturday, February 24th at 7:30 pm
Sunday, February 25th at 3 pm
All performances are free to the public. Please make ticket
reservations in advance online: http://bit.ly/CABARET2018.
"What of the night
That lights and dims the stars?
Do you know, Hans Christian,
Now that you see the night?"
— The concluding lines of
"Sonatina to Hans Christian,"
by Wallace Stevens
(in Harmonium (second edition, 1931))
From "Mathmagic Land" (May 22, 2015)
Donald in Mathmagic Land
From "The Trials of Device" (April 24, 2017)
From two pedagogues in Montana —
Related material from author Dan Brown's father,
a pedagogue who taught at Phillips Exeter Academy :
Click the above image for some background.
Related material from Log24 —
Compare and contrast with the above
Transformational Geometry cover:
Related material from Vienna — The previous post and
Wittgenstein on Bewitchment.
See as well . . .
Click to enlarge.
"He made the Gallup Organization’s list of Ten Most Admired Men
in the World 54 times, a record, and his fame and influence as a
spiritual leader rivaled the pope’s." — Mark Feeney, Globe staff
Judith Wilt on the fictional Casaubon of Middlemarch —
Related material from Wikipedia:
The non -fictional Casaubon and Ultramontanism.
From the former:
"Neither side could understand that Casaubon's reading of
the church fathers led him to adopt an intermediate position
between Genevan Calvinism and Ultramontanism."
See as well Wilt on "Storytelling and Catholicism"
(Boston College syllabus, Spring 2016), and Enda's Game
(Log24, April 5, 2016).
Instagram, August 4, 2017 —
See posts on Suppes and Child Buyers.
Bottom line — See also a post from August 4, 2017.
"It's the system that matters.
How the data arrange themselves inside it."
— Gravity's Rainbow
"Examples are the stained-glass windows of knowledge."
— Vladimir Nabokov
"Butt rock is sincere as hell, the place where irony came to die."
— Deborah Kennedy of Portland, Oregon, in an essay,
"How Butt Rock Helped Me Find Love," dated July 25, 2014.
See also July 25, 2014, in Log24 posts tagged April Awareness 2014.
Side ad with an SFGate story this morning —
"Heuristic evaluation is a well established method for quickly evaluating
the efficacy of new media solutions to interface issues."
— Neil Gordon et al. , University of Hull
Related material:
Michael Atiyah on the late Ron Shaw —
Phrases by Atiyah related to the importance in mathematics
of the two-element Galois field GF(2) —
These phrases are from the year-end review of Trinity College,
Cambridge, Trinity Annual Record 2017 .
I prefer other, purely geometric, reasons for the importance of GF(2) —
See Finite Geometry of the Square and Cube.
See also today’s earlier post God’s Dice and Atiyah on the theology of
(Boolean) algebra vs. (Galois) geometry:
On a Trinity classmate of Ian Macdonald (see previous post)—
Atiyah's eulogy of Shaw in Trinity Annual Record 2017
is on pages 137 through 146. The conclusion —
The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) at Princeton in its Fall 2015 Letter
revived "Beautiful Mathematics" as a title:
This ugly phrase was earlier used by Truman State University
professor Martin Erickson as a book title. See below.
In the same IAS Fall 2015 Letter appear the following remarks
by Freeman Dyson —
". . . a special case of a much deeper connection that Ian Macdonald
discovered between two kinds of symmetry which we call modular and affine.
The two kinds of symmetry were originally found in separate parts of science,
modular in pure mathematics and affine in physics. Modular symmetry is
displayed for everyone to see in the drawings of flying angels and devils
by the artist Maurits Escher. Escher understood the mathematics and got the
details right. Affine symmetry is displayed in the peculiar groupings of particles
created by physicists with high-energy accelerators. The mathematician
Robert Langlands was the first to conjecture a connection between these and
other kinds of symmetry. . . ." (Wikipedia link added.)
The adjective "modular" might aptly be applied to . . .
The adjective "affine" might aptly be applied to . . .
The geometry of the 4×4 square combines modular symmetry
(i.e., related to theta functions) with the affine symmetry above.
Hudson's 1905 discussion of modular symmetry (that of Rosenhain
tetrads and Göpel tetrads) in the 4×4 square used a parametrization
of that square by the digit 0 and the fifteen 2-subsets of a 6-set, but
did not discuss the 4×4 square as an affine space.
For the connection of the 15 Kummer modular 2-subsets with the 16-
element affine space over the two-element Galois field GF(2), see my note
of May 26, 1986, "The 2-subsets of a 6-set are the points of a PG(3,2)" —
— and the affine structure in the 1979 AMS abstract
"Symmetry invariance in a diamond ring" —
For some historical background on the symmetry investigations by
Dyson and Macdonald, see Dyson's 1972 article "MIssed Opportunities."
For Macdonald's own use of the words "modular" and "affine," see
Macdonald, I. G., "Affine Lie algebras and modular forms,"
Séminaire N. Bourbaki , Vol. 23 (1980-1981), Talk no. 577, pp. 258-276.
"What of the night
That lights and dims the stars?
Do you know, Hans Christian,
Now that you see the night?"
— The concluding lines of
"Sonatina to Hans Christian,"
by Wallace Stevens
(in Harmonium (second edition, 1931))
". . . in the end the space itself is the star. . . ."
Related material — The death Tuesday night
of Prince Consort Henrik of Denmark, and the
New Year's Eve speech on Dec. 31, 2015, of
Queen Margrethe II of Denmark.
Distantly related material — Yesterday morning's
post The Search for Child's Play.
Yesterday morning's post "Child's Play" suggests . . .
— "Love is an Open Door," from Disney's "Frozen"
Symbology for Tom Hanks and for a Latin teacher
who reportedly died on Saturday, Feb. 10, 2018 —
Click the image below to search Log24 for "green fields."
See also Space Cross.
For the late Anne M. Treisman, who reportedly died Friday, Feb. 9:
From "A Feature-Integration Theory of Attention" —
"The controversy between analytic and synthetic theories
of perception goes back many years: the Associationists
asserted that the experience of complex wholes is built
by combining more elementary sensations, while the
Gestalt psychologists claimed that the whole precedes
its parts, that we initially register unitary objects and
relationships, and only later, if necessary, analyze these
objects into their component parts or properties. This view
is still active now . . . ."
— Anne M. Treisman, University of British Columbia,
and Garry Gelade, Oxford University, in
Cognitive Psychology 12, 97-136 (1980)
"Before time began, there was the Cube." — Optimus Prime
|
On the late Cambridge astronomer Donald Lynden-Bell — "As an academic at a time when students listened and lecturers lectured, he had the disconcerting habit of instead picking on a random undergraduate and testing them on the topic. One former student, now a professor, remembered how he would 'ask on-the-spot questions while announcing that his daughter would solve these problems at the breakfast table'. He got away with it because he was genuinely interested in the work of his colleagues and students, and came to be viewed with great affection by them. He also got away with it because he was well established as a titan of the field." — The London Times on Feb. 8, 2018, at 5 PM (British time) |
Related material —
Two Log24 posts from yesteday, Art Wars and The Void.
See as well the field GF(9) …
… and the 3×3 grid as a symbol of Apollo
(an Olympian rather than a Titan) —
.
In memory of Professor Donald Lynden-Bell,
Emeritus Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Cambridge
Lynden-Bell with colleagues at Meteor Crater, Arizona, reportedly in 1960 —
Lynden-Bell was one of the subjects of the 2015 film "Star Men."
Related material —
"After peering into the void from a perch
outside the visitor center, young Henry, 9,
said he liked the rugged landscape.
'It’s a good place to film a space movie,' he said.
Funny he should mention that —
the crater was the setting for the climactic scenes
of the 1984 sci-fi film 'Starman,' with Jeff Bridges
and Karen Allen arriving for a rendezvous with
an alien mother ship."
— Henry Fountain in The New York Times , Jan. 22, 2009
Lynden-Bell reportedly died at 82 on Feb. 5, 2018 (British time).
See as well this journal on that date.
In memory of a Manhattan art figure
who reportedly died on
Wednesday, February Seventh, 2018 —
ABOUT 'ASCENSION VARIATIONS'
“Ascension Variations is a magical adventure
woven from grand and pedestrian touches, and
in the end the space itself is the star —
or Ms. Monk's transformation of it.
For an hour, we've lived in a spiral,
where up is down and down is up.
It's a sacred place.”
— Gia Kourlas, The New York Times , March 6, 2009
See also the previous post — yesterday's Into the Upside Down —
and two posts of February Seventh:
Conceptual Art and Conceptual Minimalism.
For some related artistic remarks, see this journal on March 6-7, 2009.
(Title suggested by the TV series Stranger Things )
" 'Untitled' (2016) is the most recent painting in the show
and includes one of Mr. Johns’s recurring images of a ruler."
— Image caption in an article by Deborah Solomon
in The New York Times online, Feb. 7, 2018
From a Log24 search for "Ruler" —
Related art —
See also, in this journal, Magic Mountain and Davos.
Einstein and Thomas Mann, Princeton, 1938
|
"At the point of convergence by Octavio Paz, translated by Helen Lane
|
See also AS IS.
Related conceptual art —
Tom Wolfe in The Painted Word :
Click the automat image above to enlarge.
See as well a new retrospective at Facebook.
The metaphor for metamorphosis no keys unlock.
— Steven H. Cullinane, "Endgame"
* See Times Square Church in this journal and
the posts of July 2010. Related material:
A Monday night death —
Click on the image for a
relevant Wallace Stevens poem.
A new Facebook page will describe
some background for the above image.
"The walls in the back of the room show geometric shapes
that remind us of the logos on a space shuttle. "
— Web page on an Oslo art installation by Josefine Lyche.
See also Subway Art posts.
The translation above was obtained via Google.
The Norwegian original —
"På veggene bakerst i rommer vises geometriske former
som kan minne om logoene på en romferge."
Related logos — Modal Diamond Box in this journal:
Logos for Philosophers
(Suggested by Modal Logic) —
"Plato's allegory of the cave describes prisoners,
inhabiting the cave since childhood, immobile,
facing an interior wall. A large fire burns behind
the prisoners, and as people pass this fire their
shadows are cast upon the cave's wall, and
these shadows of the activity being played out
behind the prisoner become the only version of
reality that the prisoner knows."
— From the Occupy Space gallery in Ireland
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