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Saturday, September 24, 2011

Ariadne and the Exorcist

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:00 pm

The title describes two philosophical events (one major, one minor) from the same day— Thursday, July 5, 2007. Some background from 2001:

"Are the finite simple groups, like the prime numbers, jewels strung on an as-yet invisible thread? And will this thread lead us out of the current labyrinthine proof to a radically new proof of the Classification Theorem?" (p. 345)

— Ronald Solomon,  "A Brief History of the Classification of Finite Simple Groups," Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society , Vol. 38 No. 3 (July 2001), pp. 315-352

The major event— On July 5, 2007, Cambridge University Press published Robert T. Curtis's Symmetric Generation of Groups.*

Curtis's book does not purport to lead us out of Solomon's labyrinth, but its publication date may furnish a Jungian synchronistic clue to help in exiting another  nightmare labyrinth— that of postmodernist nominalism.

The minor event— The posting of Their Name is Legion in this journal on July 5, 2007.

* This is the date given by Amazon.co.uk and by BookDepository.com. Other sources give a later July date, perhaps applicable to the book's publication in the U.S. rather than Britain.

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