J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter Books
Turn 20 Years Old
. . . .
" J.K. Rowling’s first book about Harry and his friends at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry was released on June 26, 1997.
The publisher, Bloomsbury, only released 500 copies to stores in Britain and sent 500 to British libraries.
Now, thanks to 450 million more copies of the first book and six others, Harry Potter and his friends are known around the world.
Adults and children loved the books. But 12 publishers rejected the first one, known in many countries as 'Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.' "
"I’ve got the rather foolhardy idea of trying to explain
to you the kind of mathematics I do, and the kind of
ideas that seem simple to me. For me, the search
for simplicity is almost synonymous with the search
for structure.
I’m a geometer and topologist, which means that
I study the structure of space … . . . .
In each dimension there is a simplest space
called Euclidean space … "
— In Roman Kossak, ed., Simplicity: Ideals of Practice in Mathematics and the Arts
(Kindle Locations 705-710, 735). Kindle Edition.
For some much simpler spaces of various
dimensions, see Galois Space in this journal.
The term "parametrization," as discussed in Wikipedia, seems useful for describing labelings that are not, at least at first glance, of a vector-space nature.
Thus "parametrization" is apparently more general than the word "coodinatization" used by Hermann Weyl —
“This is the relativity problem: to fix objectively a class of equivalent coordinatizations and to ascertain the group of transformations S mediating between them.”
Note, however, that Weyl's definition of "coordinatization" is not limited to vector-space coordinates. He describes it as simply a mapping to a set of reproducible symbols .
(But Weyl does imply that these symbols should, like vector-space coordinates, admit a group of transformations among themselves that can be used to describe transformations of the point-space being coordinatized.)
Ellmann on Joyce and 'the perception of coincidence' —
"Samuel Beckett has remarked that to Joyce reality was a paradigm,
an illustration of a possibly unstatable rule. Yet perhaps the rule
can be surmised. It is not a perception of order or of love; more humble
than either of these, it is the perception of coincidence. According to
this rule, reality, no matter how much we try to manipulate it, can only
assume certain forms; the roulette wheel brings up the same numbers
again and again; everyone and everything shift about in continual
movement, yet movement limited in its possibilities."
— Richard Ellmann, James Joyce , rev. ed.. Oxford, 1982, p. 551
John Calder, an independent British publisher who built a prestigious list
of authors like Samuel Beckett and Heinrich Böll and spiritedly defended
writers like Henry Miller against censorship, died on Aug. 13 in Edinburgh.
He was 91.
Narration by the fictional schoolgirl Pagan Moore in a novel
apparently first published on March 4, 2004 —
"Now, can anyone else tell me or shall I ask Miss Moore again to help us out?”
“Apollo is a symbol for the male, the rational, the young, and the civilized. The Furies represent the female, the violent, the old, and the primal. Aeschylus captures a mythical moment in history, one in which the world was torn between a savage and archaic past and the bold new order of Greek civilization, the young Olympian gods, and rationality. The difficulty of the struggle between these two worlds is dramatized by the cycle of violence in the House of Atreus and the clash between Apollo and the Furies.”
No one giggled after Dank finished.
—Existence (first novel of a trilogy), pp. 80-81.
By Abbi Glines. Kindle Edition.
Update at 1:37 PM ET the same day —
A check for the source of the above speech yields …
"Apollo is a symbol for the male, the rational, the young, and the civilized.
The Furies represent the female, the violent, the old, and the primal."
” . . . the 3 by 3, the six-sided, three-layer configuration of
the original Rubik’s Cube, which bestows an illusion of brilliance
on those who can solve it.”
— John Branch in the online New York Times today,
“Children of the Cube”:
"It is said that the students of medieval Paris came to blows in the streets over the question of universals. The stakes are high, for at issue is our whole conception of our ability to describe the world truly or falsely, and the objectivity of any opinions we frame to ourselves. It is arguable that this is always the deepest, most profound problem of philosophy. It structures Plato's (realist) reaction to the sophists (nominalists). What is often called 'postmodernism' is really just nominalism, colourfully presented as the doctrine that there is nothing except texts. It is the variety of nominalism represented in many modern humanities, paralysing appeals to reason and truth."
— Simon Blackburn, Think,
Oxford University Press, 1999, page 268
A fanciful instance of the 4×2 grid in a scene from the film "The Master" —
A fanciful novel referring to the number 8,
and a not -so-fanciful reference:
Illustrated above are Katherine Neville's novel The Eight and the
"knight" coordinatization of the 4×2 grid from a page on the exceptional
isomorphism between PSL(3,2) (alias GL(3,2)) and PSL(2,7) — groups
of, respectively, degree 7 and degree 8.
Literature related to the above remarks on grids:
Ross Douthat's New York Times column yesterday purported, following a 1946 poem by Auden, to contrast students of the humanities with
technocrats by saying that the former follow Hermes, the latter Apollo.
“All right, Jessshica. It’s time to open the boxsssschhh.”
“Gahh,” she said. She began to walk toward the box, but her heart failed her and she retreated back to the chair. “Fuck. Fuck.” Something mechanical purred. The seam she had found cracked open and the top of the box began to rise. She squeezed shut her eyes and groped her way into a corner, curling up against the concrete and plugging her ears with her fingers. That song she’d heard the busker playing on the train platform with Eliot, “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”; she used to sing that. Back in San Francisco, before she learned card tricks. It was how she’d met Benny: He played guitar. Lucy was the best earner, Benny said, so that was mainly what she sang. She must have sung it five times an hour, day after day. At first she liked it but then it was like an infection, and there was nothing she could do and nowhere she could go without it running across her brain or humming on her lips, and God knew she tried; she was smashing herself with sex and drugs but the song began to find its way even there. One day, Benny played the opening chord and she just couldn’t do it. She could not sing that fucking song. Not again. She broke down, because she was only fifteen, and Benny took her behind the mall and told her it would be okay. But she had to sing. It was the biggest earner. She kind of lost it and then so did Benny and that was the first time he hit her. She ran away for a while. But she came back to him, because she had nothing else, and it seemed okay. It seemed like they had a truce: She would not complain about her bruised face and he would not ask her to sing “Lucy.” She had been all right with this. She had thought that was a pretty good deal.
Now there was something coming out of a box, and she reached for the most virulent meme she knew. “Lucy in the sky!” she sang. “With diamonds!”
This post was suggested by Log24 remarks on May 4, 2014,
the date of Garrett Lisi's Twitter post announcing the opening
of his Pacific Science Institute (see previous post).
" Ms. Appelbaum’s favorite authors, she said in an interview with The Internet Writing Journal in 1998, were too many to count, but they included George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Anne Tyler and Julian Barnes.
'I love to see writers expand our range of understanding, experience, knowledge, even happiness,' she said in that interview. 'Publishing has always struck me as a way to change the world.' "
A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B6 of the New York edition with the headline: Judith Appelbaum, Guru On Publishing, Dies at 78.
See a review of the new Anne Tyler novel Clock Dance
in today's online New York Times .
“… I realized that to me, Gödel and Escher and Bach
were only shadows cast in different directions
by some central solid essence.
I tried to reconstruct the central object . . . ."
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