Dance of the Numbers, continued:
Partitions
Freeman Dyson on the role of the “crank” in the theory of partitions:
“‘Each step in the story is a work of art,’ Dyson says, ‘and the story as a whole is a sequence of episodes of rare beauty, a drama built out of nothing but numbers and imagination.'”
— Erica Klarreich in
Science News Online, week of
June 18, 2005, quoted in
“In Honor of Freeman Dyson’s Birthday:
Dance of the Numbers“
(Log24, Dec. 15, 2005)
Paraphrase of Freeman Dyson’s remarks in The New York Review of Books, issue dated May 28, 1998:
“Theology is about words; science is about things.“
“What is 256 about?”
— Reply to Freeman Dyson,
(May 15, 1998)
A partial answer to that rhetorical question: 256 is the cardinality of the power set of an 8-set.
For the role played by 8-sets and by 23 (today’s date) in partitions of a different sort, see Geometry of the 4×4 Square.