Illustration by Nicholas Konrad / The New Yorker April 28, 2022
Some related material from Harvard —
Friday, April 29, 2022
Metamorphosis: Seed to Flower in New Yorker Propaganda
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Code Bleu
From The New York Times on May 5, 2011 —
"… What Paris says to me is love story, awash with painters,
shots of the Seine, Champagne. Thank God I have a
can’t-miss notion to sell you. I call it ‘Midnight in Paris.’ ”
“Romantic title,” I had to admit. “Is there a script?”
“Actually, there’s nothing on paper yet, but I can spitball
the main points,” he said, slipping on his tap shoes.
“Maybe some other time,” I said, mindful of Cubbage’s
unbroken string of theatrical Hiroshimas.
— Woody Allen
The above passage is in memory of a French film director
who, like the reporter in yesterday's post Primary Colors,
reportedly died on April 21, 2022.
See also Aitchison at Hiroshima and Easter for Aitchison.
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Thursday, April 28, 2022
The Usual Narratives … Dog Bites Man, Shit Hits Fan.
"It was a bright cold day in April . . ."
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The Tummelplatz
"Leslie Jamison has written an honest and important book….
All in all, vivid writing and required reading." ―Stephen King
Meanwhile, also on April 5, 2018… See posts tagged D8.
More recently, in a conspicuously un-dated new literary magazine …
See as well Freud on the Tummelplatz .
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Wednesday, April 27, 2022
Dealing with Cubism …
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Ennead (Pace Moon Knight)
Putting the graphic in lexicographic —
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Tuesday, April 26, 2022
The Nocciolo
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Monday, April 25, 2022
Annals of Mathematical History
Some related remarks —
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Vienna Fantasies
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Sunday, April 24, 2022
The Well and the Stone
From a post of October 25, 2002 —
"A work of art has an author and yet,
when it is perfect, it has something
which is essentially anonymous about it."
— Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
This flashback was suggested by a quotation
in today's previous post —
"Go back to the darkest roots of civilisation
and you will find them knotted round
some sacred stone or encircling
some sacred well."
— G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy , Ch. 5 —
"The Flag of the World."
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Roots
"Go back to the darkest roots of civilisation
and you will find them knotted round
some sacred stone or encircling
some sacred well."
— G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy , Ch. 5 —
"The Flag of the World."
See also . . .
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Structuralism: Three Betweens
|
Tuesday, November 3, 2009 Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Glasperlenspiel, Solomon Marcus — m759 @ 10:10 PM Book review by Jadran Mimica in Oceania, Vol. 74, 2003: "In his classic essay of 1955 'The Structural Study of Myth' Levi-Strauss came up with a universal formula of mythopoeic dynamics [fx(a) : fy(b) :: fx(b) : fa-1(y)] that he called canonical 'for it can represent any mythic transformation'. This formulation received its consummation in the four massive Mythologiques volumes, the last of which crystallises the fundamental dialectics of mythopoeic thought: that there is 'one myth only' and the primal ground of this 'one' is 'nothing'. The elucidation of the generative matrix of the myth-work is thus completed as is the self-totalisation of both the thinker and his object." So there. At least one mathematician has claimed that the Levi-Strauss formula makes sense. (Jack Morava, arXiv pdf, 2003.) I prefer the earlier (1943) remarks of Hermann Hesse on transformations of myth: "…in the spirit of the Glass Bead Game, everything actually was all-meaningful, that every symbol and combination of symbols led not hither and yon, not to single examples, experiments, and proofs, but into the center, the mystery and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge. Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with a truly meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created." |
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Saturday, April 23, 2022
Kaleidoscopic Structuralism
The previous post suggests two quotes by Elizabeth Janeway
from her review of the second volume of The Human Predicament ,
an unfinished trilogy by Richard Hughes.
"The Human Predicament poses a universal question, and Hughes
is grappling with it really as a structuralist philosopher."
"Hughes's style is kaleidoscopic , the shaking of vivid moments together
until a pattern emerges."
— The New York Times Book Review , Sunday, August 19, 1973, page 2
For a less literary example of kaleidoscopic structuralism, see
a Log24 post from the first anniversary of Janeway's reported death.
Related vocabulary —
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Plato, Shakespeare, Et Cetera
See as well "Plato and Shakespeare" in this journal.
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Friday, April 22, 2022
“The History of the Concept of Structure”
|
Derrida was the final speaker on the final day. He remained a silent observer for much of the symposium. He looked on as Lacan rose to his feet with obscure questions at the end of each lecture, and as Barthes gently asked for clarification on various moot points. Eventually, however, Derrida, unused to speaking to large audiences, took to the stage, quietly shuffled his notes, and began, ‘Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be called an “event”…’ He spoke for less than half an hour. But by the time he was finished the entire structuralist project was in doubt, if not dead. An event had occurred: the birth of deconstruction.
Salmon, Peter. An Event, Perhaps (pp. 2-3). |
Salmon today at Arts & Letters Daily —
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Pleasantly Discursive Day* in the East
* Vide "pleasantly discursive" in this journal.
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Dies Natalis
October 2, 2016, was, in the Catholic sense, the dies natalis
of a philosopher of science, Mary Hesse.
October 2 was also the day of birth, in the non-Catholic sense,
of philosopher-poet Wallace Stevens.
Cf. remarks in this journal on October 2, 2016.
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Thursday, April 21, 2022
Change Arises Continues
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Mad Men and Broadway
See as well Morse in Log24 posts on the Go chip.
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Wednesday, April 20, 2022
Physics for Poets
Excerpt from a long poem by Eliza Griswold —
The square array above does not contain Arfken's variant
labels for ρ1, ρ2, and ρ3, although those variant labels were
included in Arfken's 1985 square array and in Arfken's 1985
list of six anticommuting sets, copied at MathWorld as above.
The omission of variant labels prevents a revised list of the
six anticommuting sets from containing more distinct symbols
than there are matrices.
Revised list of anticommuting sets:
α1 α2 α3 ρ2 ρ3
γ1 γ2 γ3 ρ1 ρ3
δ1 δ2 δ3 ρ1 ρ2
α1 γ1 δ1 σ2 σ3
α2 γ2 δ2 σ1 σ3
α3 γ3 δ3 σ1 σ2 .
Context for the poem: Quark Rock.
Context for the physics: Dirac Matrices.
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Tuesday, April 19, 2022
Hat Tip to Andrew Cusack
For a weblog post today on an auction item from
the collection of the late Pierre Le-Tan.
A search for information on Le-Tan reveals that his
dies natalis (in the Catholic sense) was Sept. 17, 2019.
See a poem quoted here on that date in posts tagged Quark Rock.
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Monday, April 18, 2022
Under the April Snow
"Spirits rise . . . ." — Streisand
Related material —
A 1920 play by J. M. Barrie, recreated on stage and now in film.
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For the Church of Perfect Coordinates*
https://blacklistdeclassified.net/2022/04/15/
%f0%9f%94%b4-script-916-helen-maghi/ —
Red: If I may offer some counsel –
“Do not go where the path may lead.
Go instead where there is no path
and leave a trail.”
In the spirit of that, I bring an unusual case….
This post is in honor of Thandiwe Newton,
who left a Westworld trail —
Vide Bulk Apperception.
* Cf. a post from Day 3 of 2022.
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A Space Between
From yesterday's post "Annals of Iconic Simplicity" —
On the founding of Princeton Architectural Press:
"'There was a space between the academic,
theory-heavy M.I.T. Press and the coffeetableism
of Rizzoli,' Mr. Lamster wrote, adding that
Princeton Architectural Press would fill the gap
with 'the voice of the young practitioner.'"
Some context —
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Iconic Simplicity
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Sunday, April 17, 2022
Annals of Iconic Simplicity
The New York Times today has an obituary for
Kevin Lippert, the founder and publisher of
Princeton Architectural Press, who reportedly
died at 63 on March 29, 2022.
“'There was a space between the academic,
theory-heavy M.I.T. Press and the coffeetableism
of Rizzoli,' Mr. Lamster wrote, adding that
Princeton Architectural Press would fill the gap
with 'the voice of the young practitioner.'
Mr. Lippert championed emerging architects.
He published Steven Holl’s seminal architectural
manifesto, 'Anchoring,' in 1989, and wrote the
introduction to the book of the same name.
Mr. Holl, in a tribute to Mr. Lippert on his website,
called him 'a committed intellectual and impresario
for the culture of architecture.'”
— Katharine Q. Seelye, April 17, 2022, 2:21 p.m. ET
From the cited tribute to Lippert on Holl's website —
"An excerpt from his publisher’s foreword to Anchoring :
In its iconic simplicity, his work seems to be about
the language of architecture, not in the allusive sense
used by postmodernists nor in the paradigmatic sense
used by so-called 'deconstructivists' but at the level of
essences of tropes and morphs… He is the only
American architect of his generation to be directly
influenced by the main lines in modern philosophy and
music, that is to say, by the line leading from Husserl
through to Heidegger and by separate achievements
of Bartok and Schonberg ."
Actually, although the above "iconic simplicity" passage,
up to the ellipsis after "morphs," is from the foreword
by Lippert, the references that follow the ellipsis — to
Husserl, Heidegger, Bartok, and Schonberg — are not
from Lippert's foreword, but from the introduction by
one Kenneth Frampton —
From Google Books:
Bibliographic data —
Another architectural memorial, from the reported date of Lippert's death —
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Easter for Aitchison*
* See other posts tagged Aitchison in this journal.
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Saturday, April 16, 2022
The Quantum Tummelplatz
For the De las Cuevas above, see …
https://www.gemmadelascuevas.com/ —
"I am an Assistant Professor at the Institute for Theoretical Physics
at the University of Innsbruck (Austria) . . . ."
— and a tweet from Thursday, April 14, 2022, that indicates
an interest in philosophy as well as physics —
Related vocabulary —
Related drama —
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Friday, April 15, 2022
The Big Interview
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Location, Location, Location
Draft of a letter to FDR written by Leo Szilard
and signed by Albert Einstein —
For the letter as sent , see a webpage on the Manhattan Project.
This post was suggested by a New York Times obituary today that
contained the following misleading description —
"a 1939 letter from Albert Einstein to President Franklin D. Roosevelt
encouraging the American effort to build the atomic bomb."
There was apparently no such effort until after the letter was received.
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Thursday, April 14, 2022
Ouellette vs. the Cube
From the 2019 post Spring Loaded —
A more recent image, from Carroll's wife Jennifer Ouellette —
For a more sophisticated approach to the 4x4x4 cube,
see a page at finitegeometry.org.
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The Heisenberg Potion
From the previous post —
Many will prefer snazzier potions —
These were available as NFTs recently . . .
See some.place. And then there is nine.place.
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Wednesday, April 13, 2022
Dealing with Cubism continues . . .
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Tuesday, April 12, 2022
Dealing with Cubism
"It’s important, as art historian Reinhard Spieler has noted,
that after a brief, unproductive stay in Paris, circa 1907,
Kandinsky chose to paint in Munich. That’s where he formed
the Expressionist art group Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) —
and where he avoided having to deal with cubism."
— David Carrier,
Images from an earlier Christmas Day, in 2005 —
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Monday, April 11, 2022
Holy Week: A Midrash for Levy
"Jesus Christ, Adam. I need you to play it cool."
See as well this journal on February 10, 2010 —
A Midrash for Levy —
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Sunday, April 10, 2022
Turning Nine continues.
That was then, this is now —
Be careful what you wish for.
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“Program or be programmed” — Douglas Rushkoff
For the Unicorn School —
<time class="_1o9PC"
datetime="2022-04-10T06:41:25.000Z"
title="Apr 10, 2022">4 hours ago
</time>
From posts tagged Unicorn Language —
Some will prefer the Dragon School . . .
of Tom Hiddleston, Emma Watson, and Humphrey Carpenter.
"National Unicorn Day" was yesterday . Today's mythical creature —
the villainous spymaster of The Eiger Sanction , Yurasis Dragon.
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Munro Doctrines
The previous post was in memory of one Eleanor Munro.
A different literary Munro —
And then there is Hector Hugh Munro, pen name Saki . . .
See lumber room in this journal (Nov. 30 – Dec. 3, 2016), and
later Ghost Ship tales in a post of December 22, 2016.
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Saturday, April 9, 2022
“Readings for Remembrance“
The author of the above title is featured in
a New York Times obituary today. Another
book by the same author, On Glory Roads,
appears in some related readings here .
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Academic Rhetoric
Also on the above publication date —
Conrad K. Die beginnende Schizophrenie.
Stuttgart, Germany: Thieme Verlag; 1958.
Conrad K. Gestaltanalyse und Daseinsanalytik.
Nervenarzt. 1959; 30: 405–410.
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Friday, April 8, 2022
A Comment for Ibsen
"Reviewing Ms. Allen’s staging of Ibsen’s
'When We Dead Awaken'
at Stage West in 1977, Mr. Barnes wrote that
it had 'speed, conviction and perception.'"
— Richard Sandomir today reviewing the life of Rae Allen.
From the conclusion of that Ibsen play —
"Pax vobiscum."
See as well the YouTube comments below, on Allen
in the film version (1958) of "Damn Yankees" —
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The Ugly Lesson: Time Is Money
The above out-of-context quotation illustrates the following lesson,
from the Amazon.com page quoted in this moning's Souls at Stanford —
See as well 1949 in the April 7 post
The Usual Suspects.
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Triangle Song
"Accepting the award, Mr. Logan said, 'I have a hunch
that this is as near to immortality as I'll ever get.'"
— Mel Gussow in The New York Times, March 10, 1975
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Thursday, April 7, 2022
The Usual Suspects
In memory of a musical that opened on this date —
April 7 — in 1949 . . .
See the same date in The Source , by James Michener (1965):
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Hillbilly Politics: News of the World, Second Wave
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Wednesday, April 6, 2022
Dia Space
The date of the above post
was also the date of . . .
Analytic Continuation —
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Programmes: Architectural Theory and the Separatrix
Architectural theorist Jeffrey Kipnis in 1991, recalled here in 2015 —
For the source of the illustration, see Hexagram 14.
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Programmes: Warburgian vs. Hessian
For the former, see Warburg in this journal.
For the latter, see beadgame.space on the Web.
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Tuesday, April 5, 2022
“Analysis.” — Dr. Robert Ford in “Westworld”
"Godard, in the final analysis, expands the Warburgian programme
of iconology into that of a cinematographic iconology of the interstice."
— The author of the essay quoted in the previous post.
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For a Maker of Strings Who Died on March 30
Related material: Blue Guitar.
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Monday, April 4, 2022
Pythagoras via Tao, Polya, and Euclid
From a post of April 1 —
A related post by Terry Tao on September 14, 2007 —
The comments on Tao's post contain a reference to Polya's classic
Induction and Analogy in Mathematics . (See pp. 15-17.) Polya notes
on page 15 —
"Generalization, Specialization, and Analogy often concur
in solving mathematical problems. Let us take as an example
the proof of the best known theorem of elementary geometry,
the theorem of Pythagoras. The proof that we shall discuss is
not new; it is due to Euclid himself (Euclid VI, 31)."
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History of Mathematics . . . As It Is Writ
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Sunday, April 3, 2022
Non-Dreams
Compare and contrast with the Glass-Bead essay in the previous post —
The Caramello essay is backed up by some impressive technical work:
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Dreams
Some may prefer a different sort of dream . . .
Background for the Stimmung dream, from May 2019 —
For a different type of lifeworld, see May 2019 in this journal.
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Saturday, April 2, 2022
Friday, April 1, 2022
An Obit for the Movie-Teller*…
… From the online New York Times this evening.
* Vide that phrase in this journal.
See also the previous post and . . .
On Sept. 12, 2001, The Washington Post published
an opinion essay by General Boyd in which he wrote,
“While we may feel at the moment as though we are
in a trance, we are, in fact, awakening.”
— Katharine Q. Seelye in the general's obituary.
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Beauty Bare … ?
Update of 11:30 AM ET April 1, 2022 — A simpler version:
The above picture may be used to to introduce the concept of a "shape constant"
in similar figures — like the shape constant pi in a circle or the square root of 2
in a square. In each of the three similar figures at right above, the ratio of the
triangular area to the area of the attached square is a shape constant …
the same, because of their similarity, for each of the three shapes. Since the
areas of the top two triangles at right sum to that of the enclosed triangle at left,
their attached square areas sum to the area of the bottom square, Q.E.D.
The source of the proof —
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Thursday, March 31, 2022
Architectural Review: Before and After
There were no Log24 posts on March 17 or March 19.
From a March 18 post, a flashback to February —
"In The Girl Before, the house is almost a shapeshifter as it fits
the needs of the story. Sometimes it feels like an art gallery,
with its inhabitants on display. It's a smart home (of course it is),
and its automated locks and lights and creepily intuitive A.I.
give it the feel of a high-tech prison. Sometimes it's a mausoleum
for Jane, who's dealing with the recent pain of a miscarriage.
Sometimes it's a fortress for Emma, who's dealing with the recent
trauma of a home invasion." — Joe Reid at Primetimer.com.
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Wednesday, March 30, 2022
Games
Click to enlarge.
Related reading — George Steiner's Fields of Force , on chess in Iceland, and . . .
The New Yorker , article by Sam Knight dated March 28, 2022 —
They went to Björk’s house. She cooked salmon.
She had seen “The Witch” and introduced Eggers
to Sjón, who had written a novel about seventeenth-
century witchcraft in Iceland. When he got home,
Eggers read Sjón’s books. “I was, like, this guy’s
a fucking magician,” Eggers said. “He sees all time,
in time, out of time.”
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“Design is how it works.” — Steve Jobs
See box-space.design.
Related cinematic remarks —
|
From Third Text , 2013, Vol. 27, No. 6, pp. 774–785 — "Genealogy of the Image in Histoire(s) du Cinéma : Godard, Warburg and the Iconology of the Interstice" * * * * P. 777 — Godard conceives of the image only in the plural, in the intermediate space between two images, be it a prolonged one (in Histoire(s) there are frequent instances of black screens) or a non-existent one (superimposition, co-presence of two images on screen). He comments: ‘[For me] it’s always two, begin by showing two images rather than one, that’s what I call image, the one made up of two’ [18] and elsewhere, ‘I perceived . . . cinema is that which is between things, not things [themselves] but between one and another.’ [19] 18. Jean-Luc Godard and Youssef Ishaghpour, "Archéologie du cinéma et mémoire du siècle," Farrago ,Tours, 2000, p. 27. The title of this work is reflective of the Godardian agenda that permeates Histoire(s) . 19. Jean-Luc Godard, "Introduction à une véritable histoire du cinéma," Albatros , Paris,1980, p. 145 |
See as well Warburg in this journal.
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Tuesday, March 29, 2022
In Memoriam Christopher Alexander
The New York Times reports that the architectural theorist
died at 85 on March 17. In his memory . . .
Christopher Alexander in this journal.
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Monday, March 28, 2022
The Omega Oracle
"Design is how it works ." — Steve Jobs. See interality.org.
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Sunday, March 27, 2022
Saturday, March 26, 2022
Box Geometry: Space, Group, Art (Work in Progress)
| Name Tag | .Space | .Group | .Art |
|---|---|---|---|
| Box4 |
2×2 square representing the four-point finite affine geometry AG(2,2). (Box4.space) |
S4 = AGL(2,2) (Box4.group) |
(Box4.art) |
| Box6 |
3×2 (3-row, 2-column) rectangular array representing the elements of an arbitrary 6-set. |
S6 | |
| Box8 | 2x2x2 cube or 4×2 (4-row, 2-column) array. | S8 or A8 or AGL(3,2) of order 1344, or GL(3,2) of order 168 | |
| Box9 | The 3×3 square. | AGL(2,3) or GL(2,3) | |
| Box12 | The 12 edges of a cube, or a 4×3 array for picturing the actions of the Mathieu group M12. | Symmetries of the cube or elements of the group M12 | |
| Box13 | The 13 symmetry axes of the cube. | Symmetries of the cube. | |
| Box15 |
The 15 points of PG(3,2), the projective geometry of 3 dimensions over the 2-element Galois field. |
Collineations of PG(3,2) | |
| Box16 |
The 16 points of AG(4,2), the affine geometry of 4 dimensions over the 2-element Galois field. |
AGL(4,2), the affine group of |
|
| Box20 | The configuration representing Desargues's theorem. | ||
| Box21 | The 21 points and 21 lines of PG(2,4). | ||
| Box24 | The 24 points of the Steiner system S(5, 8, 24). | ||
| Box25 | A 5×5 array representing PG(2,5). | ||
| Box27 |
The 3-dimensional Galois affine space over the 3-element Galois field GF(3). |
||
| Box28 | The 28 bitangents of a plane quartic curve. | ||
| Box32 |
Pair of 4×4 arrays representing orthogonal Latin squares. |
Used to represent elements of AGL(4,2) |
|
| Box35 |
A 5-row-by-7-column array representing the 35 lines in the finite projective space PG(3,2) |
PGL(3,2), order 20,160 | |
| Box36 | Eurler's 36-officer problem. | ||
| Box45 | The 45 Pascal points of the Pascal configuration. | ||
| Box48 | The 48 elements of the group AGL(2,3). | AGL(2,3). | |
| Box56 |
The 56 three-sets within an 8-set or |
||
| Box60 | The Klein configuration. | ||
| Box64 | Solomon's cube. |
— Steven H. Cullinane, March 26-27, 2022
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Friday, March 25, 2022
The Diamantova Logo
From the "Mathematics and Narrative" link in the previous post —
An image reposted here on March 12, 2022, the reported date of death
for Vera Diamantova —
Helen Mirren with plastic Gankyil .
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Thursday, March 24, 2022
Mathematics and Narrative: Solomon vs. the Wicked Queen
"Solomon Golomb’s classic book Shift Register Sequences,
published in 1967—based on his work in the 1950s—
went out of print long ago. But its content lives on. . . ."
For part of that content, see Stencils .
A :Log24 post from the date of Golomb's death —
See as well other posts on Mathematics and Narrative.
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Westview via Spelman
Images reposted here on March 9 . . .
the reported date of death for film director John Korty —
The quotation is from a professor of mathematics at Spelman College.
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Tech Note
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Wednesday, March 23, 2022
Watchmen Squid Game: Pronoun Trouble
|
"… Wade’s entire life is built around the squid attack. In the episode’s opening, we see that 34 years ago, young Wade was at a carnival in Hoboken, New Jersey, proselytizing as a Jehovah’s Witness when the squid emitted a psychic blast that killed three million people in the New York area. Just before the attack, a girl led him into a house of mirrors, feigning interest in hooking up with him in order to steal his clothes, leaving him naked and humiliated in the fairground attraction. But the cruel prank also saved his life, as mirrors can apparently repel the squid's psychic blast." |
Related literary remarks —
|
"It may have been by chance, and it may have had the side effect of being easy to read, but this way of putting a novel together offered a bridge between the miniaturist in Doerr and the seeker of world-spanning connections. He could focus on the details of every piece in the narrative, but there was pleasure, too, in placing them against each other. Sometimes he would lay out all these micro chapters on the floor so he could see them and discover the resonances between characters across space and time. 'That’s the real joy,' Doerr said, 'the visceral pleasure that comes from taking these stories, these lives, and intersecting them, braiding them.'" — "A version of this article appears in print on Sept. 20, 2021, Section C, Page 4 of the New York edition with the headline: Bringing His Readers To Higher Ground." |
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Tuesday, March 22, 2022
For the Friends of Nemo*
Nautilus , March 10, 2022 —
Earlier . . . From "Deep Learning for Jews," July 17, 2018 —
* See Watchmen in this journal.
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Esprit for Pascal and Galois: Finesse vs. Geometrie
Finesse —
|
Sunday December 10, 2006 m759 @ 9:00 PM
“Function defined form, expressed in a pure geometry
– J. G. Ballard on Modernism
“The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance –
— Daniel J. Boorstin, |
Geometrie —
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Algebraic/Geometric
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Monday, March 21, 2022
Quest Tale —
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Compare and Contrast.
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Candidate for the Waymark Prize
The previous post suggests a review of
a Log24 post from August 22, 2020 —
From a web page —
From YouTube, for the Church of Synchronology —
For some context, see Holocron in this journal.
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Sunday, March 20, 2022
Mathieu Cube Exercise, Continued
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Friday, March 18, 2022
♫ “Another day older and . . .”
"Weight limit 10 tons… Except local deliveries" —
Conclusion: the book is a mine of information, but
you sure have to dig for it. — Paul R. Halmos,
review of Topological Dynamics , November 1955
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Found† in Space*
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Architectural Review
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"Poincaré said that science is no more a collection of facts than a house is a collection of bricks. The facts have to be ordered or structured, they have to fit a theory, a construct (often mathematical) in the human mind. … Mathematics may be art, but to the general public it is a black art, more akin to magic and mystery. This presents a constant challenge to the mathematical community: to explain how art fits into our subject and what we mean by beauty. In attempting to bridge this divide I have always found that architecture is the best of the arts to compare with mathematics. The analogy between the two subjects is not hard to describe and enables abstract ideas to be exemplified by bricks and mortar, in the spirit of the Poincaré quotation I used earlier."
— Sir Michael Atiyah, "The Art of Mathematics" |
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Gottschalk Review —
W. H. Gottschalk and G. A. Hedlund, Topological Dynamics, The ending of the review — The most striking virtue of the book is its organization. The authors' effort to arrange the exposition in an efficient order, and to group the results together around a few central topics, was completely successful; they deserve to be congratulated on a spectacular piece of workmanship. The results are stated at the level of greatest available generality, and the proofs are short and neat; there is no unnecessary verbiage. The authors have, also, a real flair for the "right" generalization; their definitions of periodicity and almost periodicity, for instance, are very elegant and even shed some light on the classical concepts of the same name. The same is true of their definition of a syndetic set, which specializes, in case the group is the real line, to Bohr's concept of a relatively dense set. The chief fault of the book is its style. The presentation is in the brutal Landau manner, definition, theorem, proof, and remark following each other in relentless succession. The omission of unnecessary verbiage is carried to the extent that no motivation is given for the concepts and the theorems, and there is a paucity of illuminating examples. The striving for generality (which, for instance, has caused the authors to treat uniform spaces instead of metric spaces whenever possible) does not make for easy reading. The same is true of the striving for brevity; the shortest proof of a theorem is not always the most perspicuous one. There are too many definitions, especially in the first third of the book; the reader must at all times keep at his finger tips a disconcerting array of technical terminology. The learning of this terminology is made harder by the authors' frequent use of multiple statements, such as: "The term {asymptotic } {doubly asymptotic } means negatively {or} {and} positively asymptotic." Conclusion: the book is a mine of information, but you sure have to dig for it. — PAUL R. HALMOS |
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Annals of Literary Analysis
On Doctor Strange in Spider-Man: No Way Home —
"This all-powerful wizard really used 'Scooby-Doo' as a verb
meaning 'successfully pull off a series of physical challenges
against monsters who are real.' What in the dad-trying-to-
relate-to-his-distant-son hell? That's like pumping someone up
to kick a game-winning field goal by saying 'Charlie Brown this crap.'"
— Vinnie Mancuso at Collider , November 17, 2021
But seriously . . .
From posts tagged Frankfurter —
"Scooby-Doo this ."
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The Dog Far Hence, or Ekphrasis for Anubis
The above image suggests a review of Sigaud in this journal and of . . .
Related material from the Web —
"Anubis, easily recognizable as an anthropomorphized jackal or dog,
was the Egyptian god of the afterlife and mummification. He helped
judge souls after their death and guided lost souls into the afterlife.
So, was he evil? No, and in fact just the opposite. In ancient Egyptian
mythology the ultimate evil was chaos. Nearly all of Egyptian mythology
was focused around maintaining the cycles of cosmic order that kept
chaos at bay. Few things were as significant in this goal as the rituals
maintaining the cycle of life, death, and afterlife. Therefore, Anubis was
not evil but rather one of the most important gods who kept evil out of Egypt."
— Christopher Muscato at Study.com
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Wednesday, March 16, 2022
For Harlan Kane: The Gottschalk Gestalt
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Midnight Memorial
"On a crisp Fall morning…." — The late Maureen Howard, writer of fiction.
Non-fiction: Feb. 19, 2022,
https://news.yahoo.com/frances-haugen-
on-meta-headquarters-122958675.html —
FRANCES HAUGEN: To give you a sense of how absurd the space is,
so Facebook is obsessed with 15 and 30-minute meetings. It's like they're
very efficient, everyone's– they're obsessed with the word crisp, like are
your documents crisp, is your explanation crisp? The space is so large that
I would regularly walk 15 minutes, 10, 15 minutes to go to a 30-minute meeting.
And again, fiction . . .
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Tuesday, March 15, 2022
The Rosenhain Symmetry
See other posts now so tagged.
Hudson's Rosenhain tetrads, as 20 of the 35 projective lines in PG(3,2),
illustrate Desargues's theorem as a symmetry within 10 pairs of squares
under rotation about their main diagonals:
See also "The Square Model of Fano's 1892 Finite 3-Space."
The remaining 15 lines of PG(3,2), Hudson's Göpel tetrads, have their
own symmetries . . . as the Cremona-Richmond configuration.
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Midnight Wrinkle
See as well the life of a real astrophysicist.
Update of 12:26 PM ET March 15:
Vide other posts now tagged The Rosenhain Symmetry.
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Monday, March 14, 2022
A Fiction Which
"I’ve lived five years on the edge of the continent,
and over those years I’ve shed one skin and grown into another."
— Steinhauer, Olen. All the Old Knives (p. 222).
St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
(Hardcover first edition: Minotaur Books, March 10, 2015.)
So to speak.
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Sunday, March 13, 2022
Black Art
"… Mathematics may be art, but to the general public it is
a black art, more akin to magic and mystery."
— Sir Michael Atiyah, quoted here on April 4, 2016.
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Saturday, March 12, 2022
Obi-Wan* Enters Narnia: Wardrobe Malfunction**
* Recent role of Ewan McGregor, the camerlengo of Dan Brown.
** Mashup of the C. S. Lewis wardrobe and the previous post.
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Logos and Branding
The "branding" part of this post's title and tag —
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The scene went from bad to worse. The camerlengo’s torn cassock, having been only laid over his chest by Chartrand, began to slip lower. For a moment, Langdon thought the garment might hold, but that moment passed. The cassock let go, sliding off his shoulders down around his waist. The gasp that went up from the crowd seemed to travel around the globe and back in an instant. Cameras rolled, flashbulbs exploded. On media screens everywhere, the image of the camerlengo’s branded chest was projected, towering and in grisly detail. Some screens were even freezing the image and rotating it 180 degrees. The ultimate Illuminati victory. Langdon stared at the brand on the screens. Although it was the imprint of the square brand he had held earlier, the symbol now made sense. Perfect sense. The marking’s awesome power hit Langdon like a train. Orientation. Langdon had forgotten the first rule of symbology. When is a square not a square? He had also forgotten that iron brands, just like rubber stamps, never looked like their imprints. They were in reverse. Langdon had been looking at the brand’s negative ! As the chaos grew, an old Illuminati quote echoed with new meaning: ‘A flawless diamond, born of the ancient elements with such perfection that all those who saw it could only stare in wonder.’ Langdon knew now the myth was true. Earth, Air, Fire, Water. The Illuminati Diamond. — Dan Brown, Angels & Demons |
I prefer Modal Nietzsche.
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