Friday, July 8, 2011
After 759
Friday, February 6, 2015
The Annotated Spielraum
Comments on two sub-images from yesterday's
The Big Spielraum (image, 1 MB) that may or
may not interest Emma Watson —
The Potter Sub-Image
This is from a link in a July 8, 2011, post:
The above "Childhood's End" link leads to
a midrash on the Harry Potter series:
"After pg. 759 in Harry Potter and the
Deathly Hallows , my childhood ended."
The Carmichael Sub-Image
The number of the last page in the last Harry Potter
book is 759. This number may, for those with
cabalistic tendencies, be interpreted as the
number 3*23*11 from a 1931 mathematics paper:
Saturday, December 31, 2011
The Uploading
"Design is how it works." — Steve Jobs
From a commercial test-prep firm in New York City—
From the date of the above uploading—
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From a New Year's Day, 2012, weblog post in New Zealand—
From Arthur C. Clarke, an early version of his 2001 monolith—
"So they left a sentinel, one of millions they have scattered
throughout the Universe, watching over all worlds with the
promise of life. It was a beacon that down the ages has been
patiently signaling the fact that no one had discovered it.
Perhaps you understand now why that crystal pyramid was set…."
The numerical (not crystal) pyramid above is related to a sort of
mathematical block design known as a Steiner system.
For its relationship to the graphic block design shown above,
see the webpages Block Designs and The Diamond Theorem
as well as The Galois Tesseract and R. T. Curtis's classic paper
"A New Combinatorial Approach to M24," which contains the following
version of the above numerical pyramid—
For graphic block designs, I prefer the blocks (and the parents)
of Grand Rapids to those of New York City.
For the barbed tail of Clarke's "Angel" story, see the New Zealand post
of New Year's Day mentioned above.