Big Rock
"I'm going to hit this problem
with a big rock."
– Mathematical saying, quoted here
on St. Peter's Day 2008
"I see a red door and I want it painted black" — The Rolling Stones
Wednesday, October 26, 2022
The Big Rock
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Tuesday, June 25, 2013
Big Rock
From the LA Times online obituaries today:
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Michael Feran Baigent was born in Nelson, New Zealand,
From 1998 he lectured on and led tours of the temples and Elliott Reid Longtime film, TV actor with a comic touch
Elliott "Ted" Reid, 93, a longtime character actor in films |
From a post last Saturday, June 22, and the earlier
post last Friday, June 21, that preceded it:
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The Eliade passage was quoted in a 1971 Ph.D. thesis Some context— Stevens's Rock in this journal. Friday, June 21, 2013
Lexicon
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"… a fundamental language
"… the questions raised by R. Lowell |
See also, in this journal, Big Rock.
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Wednesday, June 5, 2024
“Change Arises”* — Wednesday’s String Theory
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Wednesday, March 20, 2024
Cullinane Diamond Song
|
Shining Mathematics: Pop upbeat V2 March 19, 2024
[Verse]
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Click the image below to hear the song at app.suno.ai —
Miller's Note to Self : "Don't underestimate Wednesday."
For more about the mathematics itself, see other octad posts.
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Tuesday, March 19, 2024
Paint It Black
A New York Times report today of a March 13 death
suggests a review of . . .
Supplementary tune for Sam Levinson . . .
"Whose barn, what barn, my barn" — Song lyric
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Monday, March 6, 2023
Date with a Dark Lady
The name "Vrinda Madan" from the above book cover metadata
yields a webpage that may or may not have the same Madan as
an author — "… Howie Michels' Epic Dreamscapes."
The date of that webpage — Sept. 15, 2022 — seems of particular
interest. See as well this journal on that date for some other posts
that are also now tagged The Cavalier Date.
Wednesday may or may not want to play "Paint it Black" to honor
the cover of the above newly published book.
(Michels is reportedly married to Francine Prose,
author of Bigfoot Dreams and Mister Monkey .)
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Wednesday, January 25, 2023
In Memory of an Author* Who Died on Wednesday, Jan. 18
"He played with history and narrative techniques." — Obituary headline
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* See his New York Times obituary, online today —
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Saturday, December 17, 2022
Sunday, December 4, 2022
Saturday, December 3, 2022
Friday, July 16, 2010
Meditation
From a religious meditation on St. Peter's Day, 2008, "Big Rock"—
An academic quotes Wallace Stevens:
"Professor Eucalyptus in 'Ordinary Evening' XIV, for example, 'seeks/ God in the object itself'…."
My reaction:
"I have more confidence that God is to be found in the Ping Pong balls of the New York Lottery."
From today's New York Lottery— Midday 215, Evening 000.
The latter number seems to speak with a certain authority.
The former may or may not mean something. See a search for "2/15" in this journal.
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Sunday, June 29, 2008
Sunday June 29, 2008
Big Rock
"I'm going to hit this problem
with a big rock."
|
A professor discusses a poem by Wallace Stevens:
"Professor Eucalyptus in 'Ordinary Evening' XIV, for example, 'seeks/ God in the object itself,' but this quest culminates in his own choosing of 'the commodious adjective/ For what he sees… the description that makes it divinity, still speech… not grim/ Reality but reality grimly seen/ And spoken in paradisal parlance new'…."
– Douglas Mao, Solid Objects:Modernism and the Test of Production, Princeton University Press, 1998, p. 242
"God in the object" seems
unlikely to be found in the artifact pictured on the cover of Mao's book: 
I have more confidence
These objects may be |
June 28, 2008:
These numbers can, of course,
be interpreted as symbols of
the dates 6/29 and 5/30.
The last Log24 entry of
6/29 (St. Peter's Day):
"The rock cannot be broken.
It is the truth."
– Wallace Stevens,
"Credences of Summer"
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Saturday, July 29, 2006
Saturday July 29, 2006
Big Rock
Thanks to Ars Mathematica, a link to everything2.com:
“In mathematics, a big rock is a result which is vastly more powerful than is needed to solve the problem being considered. Often it has a difficult, technical proof whose methods are not related to those of the field in which it is applied. You say ‘I’m going to hit this problem with a big rock.’ Sard’s theorem is a good example of a big rock.”
Another example:
Properties of the Monster Group of R. L. Griess, Jr., may be investigated with the aid of the Miracle Octad Generator, or MOG, of R. T. Curtis. See the MOG on the cover of a book by Griess about some of the 20 sporadic groups involved in the Monster:
The MOG, in turn, illustrates (via Abstract 79T-A37, Notices of the American Mathematical Society, February 1979) the fact that the group of automorphisms of the affine space of four dimensions over the two-element field is also the natural group of automorphisms of an arbitrary 4×4 array.
This affine group, of order 322,560, is also the natural group of automorphisms of a family of graphic designs similar to those on traditional American quilts. (See the diamond theorem.)
This top-down approach to the diamond theorem may serve as an illustration of the “big rock” in mathematics.
For a somewhat simpler, bottom-up, approach to the theorem, see Theme and Variations.
For related literary material, see Mathematics and Narrative and The Diamond as Big as the Monster.
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