Happy Birthday, Hassler Whitney
In honor of the late Hassler Whitney, mathematician and mountaineer, here is a link to the five Log24 entries ending with White, Geometric, and Eternal (Dec. 20, 2003).
Related material: the five Log24 entries ending with The Meadow (Dec. 18, 2005) and the five Log24 entries ending with Strange Attractor (Jan. 7, 2006).
The cross and the epiphany star in this last group of entries may interest the symbol-mongers among us.
Those more interested in substance than in symbols may prefer the following (click to enlarge):
This is apparently the original source for
the figure I cited on Dec. 20, 2003, as
from antiquark.com.
The connection with Whitney is
through the theory of matroids,
which Whitney founded in 1935.
See Hassler Whitney,
"On the abstract properties
of linear dependence,"
American Journal of Mathematics,
vol. 57 (1935), 509-533,
Collected Papers, vol. I, 147-171.