Log24

Tuesday, January 20, 2015

Purely Coincidental

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:00 pm

"The character and events depicted in this
motion picture are fictitious. Any similarity
to actual persons, living or dead, is purely
coincidental."

— Ending credits of the 2012 film
      "Travelling Salesman"

From that film's introduction to the
main character:

"He is presently the Rouse Ball Professor
of Mathematics in the Department of
Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics
at Cambridge University and a fellow at
Trinity College. In 2008 he was awarded
the greatest honor in our profession
when he was presented with the Fields Medal
….
Ladies and gentlemen, it is with great honor
that I now present to you Dr. Timothy Horton."

See also

A line for a fellow of Trinity:

"What am I, the farmer's daughter?"

Monday, March 2, 2009

Monday March 2, 2009

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 7:00 pm

Straight

From this journal’s Sunday sermon:

“Flowers’s thoughts stray to Brown,
with affectionate pity, as he
drinks port and eats walnuts
for the first time in
Senior Combination Room.”

— G. H. Hardy recounting the plot
of A Fellow of Trinity

A Glossary of Cambridge:

Combination Room
Attached to the High Table end of the largely unheated medieval college halls, this was a warm place for Fellows to gather before and after meals. Now known as the Senior Combination Room to distinguish it from the Junior and Middle combination rooms.

 

From Stanley Fish’s weblog
in The New York Times
(Sunday, March 1, 2009, 10 PM):

 

George Herbert’s “Redemption” —

“‘I resolved to be bold,/And make a suit unto him, to afford/A new small-rented lease and cancel th’old.’

But first he has to find him…. Either he’s just left or he hasn’t been seen, but then, unexpectedly and in the most unlikely circumstances, he turns up:

‘At length I heard a ragged noise and mirth/Of thieves and murderers: there I him espied.’

Before he or his reader can ask ‘what on earth are you doing here?,’ the final line provides an answer with a compact swiftness that is literally breathtaking:

 ‘Who straight, “Your suit is granted,” said, and died.'”

For Senior Combination Room as
a den of thieves and murderers,
see That Hideous Strength.

Related material:

The Painted Word

G. H. Hardy died at 70
on December 1, 1947.
That date is now observed as
“Day Without Art.”

Day Without Art logo: X'd-out frame

Click on image
for further details.

Sunday, March 1, 2009

Sunday March 1, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 11:00 am

Solomon's Cube
continued

"There is a book… called A Fellow of Trinity, one of series dealing with what is supposed to be Cambridge college life…. There are two heroes, a primary hero called Flowers, who is almost wholly good, and a secondary hero, a much weaker vessel, called Brown. Flowers and Brown find many dangers in university life, but the worst is a gambling saloon in Chesterton run by the Misses Bellenden, two fascinating but extremely wicked young ladies. Flowers survives all these troubles, is Second Wrangler and Senior Classic, and succeeds automatically to a Fellowship (as I suppose he would have done then). Brown succumbs, ruins his parents, takes to drink, is saved from delirium tremens during a thunderstorm only by the prayers of the Junior Dean, has much difficulty in obtaining even an Ordinary Degree, and ultimately becomes a missionary. The friendship is not shattered by these unhappy events, and Flowers's thoughts stray to Brown, with affectionate pity, as he drinks port and eats walnuts for the first time in Senior Combination Room."

— G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology

"The Solomon Key is the working title of an unreleased novel in progress by American author Dan Brown. The Solomon Key will be the third book involving the character of the Harvard professor Robert Langdon, of which the first two were Angels & Demons (2000) and The Da Vinci Code (2003)." — Wikipedia

"One has O+(6) ≅ S8, the symmetric group of order 8! …."

 — "Siegel Modular Forms and Finite Symplectic Groups," by Francesco Dalla Piazza and Bert van Geemen, May 5, 2008, preprint.

"The complete projective group of collineations and dualities of the [projective] 3-space is shown to be of order [in modern notation] 8! …. To every transformation of the 3-space there corresponds a transformation of the [projective] 5-space. In the 5-space, there are determined 8 sets of 7 points each, 'heptads' …."

— George M. Conwell, "The 3-space PG(3, 2) and Its Group," The Annals of Mathematics, Second Series, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Jan., 1910), pp. 60-76

"It must be remarked that these 8 heptads are the key to an elegant proof…."

— Philippe Cara, "RWPRI Geometries for the Alternating Group A8," in Finite Geometries: Proceedings of the Fourth Isle of Thorns Conference (July 16-21, 2000), Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001, ed. Aart Blokhuis, James W. P. Hirschfeld, Dieter Jungnickel, and Joseph A. Thas, pp. 61-97
 

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