Log24

Sunday, August 3, 2008

Sunday August 3, 2008

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 3:00 pm
Kindergarten
Geometry

Preview of a Tom Stoppard play presented at Town Hall in Manhattan on March 14, 2008 (Pi Day and Einstein’s birthday):

The play’s title, “Every Good Boy Deserves Favour,” is a mnemonic for the notes of the treble clef EGBDF.

The place, Town Hall, West 43rd Street. The time, 8 p.m., Friday, March 14. One single performance only, to the tinkle– or the clang?– of a triangle. Echoing perhaps the clang-clack of Warsaw Pact tanks muscling into Prague in August 1968.

The “u” in favour is the British way, the Stoppard way, “EGBDF” being “a Play for Actors and Orchestra” by Tom Stoppard (words) and André Previn (music).

And what a play!– as luminescent as always where Stoppard is concerned. The music component of the one-nighter at Town Hall– a showcase for the Boston University College of Fine Arts– is by a 47-piece live orchestra, the significant instrument being, well, a triangle.

When, in 1974, André Previn, then principal conductor of the London Symphony, invited Stoppard “to write something which had the need of a live full-time orchestra onstage,” the 36-year-old playwright jumped at the chance.

One hitch: Stoppard at the time knew “very little about ‘serious’ music… My qualifications for writing about an orchestra,” he says in his introduction to the 1978 Grove Press edition of “EGBDF,” “amounted to a spell as a triangle player in a kindergarten percussion band.”

Jerry Tallmer in The Villager, March 12-18, 2008

Review of the same play as presented at Chautauqua Institution on July 24, 2008:

“Stoppard’s modus operandi– to teasingly introduce numerous clever tidbits designed to challenge the audience.”

Jane Vranish, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Saturday, August 2, 2008

“The leader of the band is tired
And his eyes are growing old
But his blood runs through
My instrument
And his song is in my soul.”

— Dan Fogelberg

“He’s watching us all the time.”

Lucia Joyce

 

Finnegans Wake,
Book II, Episode 2, pp. 296-297:

I’ll make you to see figuratleavely the whome of your eternal geomater. And if you flung her headdress on her from under her highlows you’d wheeze whyse Salmonson set his seel on a hexengown.1 Hissss!, Arrah, go on! Fin for fun!

1 The chape of Doña Speranza of the Nacion.

 

Log 24, Sept. 3, 2003:
Reciprocity
From my entry of Sept. 1, 2003:

“…the principle of taking and giving, of learning and teaching, of listening and storytelling, in a word: of reciprocity….

… E. M. Forster famously advised his readers, ‘Only connect.’ ‘Reciprocity’ would be Michael Kruger’s succinct philosophy, with all that the word implies.”

— William Boyd, review of Himmelfarb, a novel by Michael Kruger, in The New York Times Book Review, October 30, 1994

Last year’s entry on this date:

 

Today’s birthday:
James Joseph Sylvester

Mathematics is the music of reason.”
— J. J. Sylvester

Sylvester, a nineteenth-century mathematician, coined the phrase “synthematic totals” to describe some structures based on 6-element sets that R. T. Curtis has called “rather unwieldy objects.” See Curtis’s abstract, Symmetric Generation of Finite Groups, John Baez’s essay, Some Thoughts on the Number 6, and my website, Diamond Theory.

 

The picture above is of the complete graph K6 …  Six points with an edge connecting every pair of points… Fifteen edges in all.

Diamond theory describes how the 15 two-element subsets of a six-element set (represented by edges in the picture above) may be arranged as 15 of the 16 parts of a 4×4 array, and how such an array relates to group-theoretic concepts, including Sylvester’s synthematic totals as they relate to constructions of the Mathieu group M24.

If diamond theory illustrates any general philosophical principle, it is probably the interplay of opposites….  “Reciprocity” in the sense of Lao Tzu.  See

Reciprocity and Reversal in Lao Tzu.

For a sense of “reciprocity” more closely related to Michael Kruger’s alleged philosophy, see the Confucian concept of Shu (Analects 15:23 or 24) described in

Shu: Reciprocity.

Kruger’s novel is in part about a Jew: the quintessential Jewish symbol, the star of David, embedded in the K6 graph above, expresses the reciprocity of male and female, as my May 2003 archives illustrate.  The star of David also appears as part of a graphic design for cubes that illustrate the concepts of diamond theory:

Click on the design for details.

Those who prefer a Jewish approach to physics can find the star of David, in the form of K6, applied to the sixteen 4×4 Dirac matrices, in

A Graphical Representation
of the Dirac Algebra
.

The star of David also appears, if only as a heuristic arrangement, in a note that shows generating partitions of the affine group on 64 points arranged in two opposing triplets.

Having thus, as the New York Times advises, paid tribute to a Jewish symbol, we may note, in closing, a much more sophisticated and subtle concept of reciprocity due to Euler, Legendre, and Gauss.  See

The Jewel of Arithmetic and


FinnegansWiki:

Salmonson set his seel:

“Finn MacCool ate the Salmon of Knowledge.”

Wikipedia:

George Salmon spent his boyhood in Cork City, Ireland. His father was a linen merchant. He graduated from Trinity College Dublin at the age of 19 with exceptionally high honours in mathematics. In 1841 at age 21 he was appointed to a position in the mathematics department at Trinity College Dublin. In 1845 he was appointed concurrently to a position in the theology department at Trinity College Dublin, having been confirmed in that year as an Anglican priest.”

Related material:

Kindergarten Theology,

Kindergarten Relativity,

Arrangements for
56 Triangles
.

For more on the
arrangement of
triangles discussed
in Finnegans Wake,
see Log24 on Pi Day,
March 14, 2008.

Happy birthday,
Martin Sheen.

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