"Before time began, there was the Cube." — Optimus Prime in "Transformers"
This journal at 9 PM ET March 17, 2023 —
The use of binary coordinate systems as a conceptual tool
Natural physical transformations of square or cubical arrays
of actual physical cubes (i.e., building blocks) correspond to
natural algebraic transformations of vector spaces over GF(2).
This was apparently not previously known.
See "The Thing and I."
See as well today's post Geometry for Belgium.
Illustrations of object and gestures
from finitegeometry.org/sc/ —
Object
Gestures
An earlier presentation of the above
seven partitions of the eightfold cube:
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Related mathematics:
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The use of binary coordinate systems
Natural physical transformations of square or cubical arrays See "The Thing and I." |
and . . .
Related entertainment:
Or Matt Helm by way of a Jedi cube.
From last night's update to the previous post —
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The use of binary coordinate systems
Natural physical transformations of square or cubical arrays See "The Thing and I." |
From a post of May 1, 2016 —
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Mathematische Appetithäppchen: Autor: Erickson, Martin —
"Weitere Informationen zu diesem Themenkreis finden sich |
Update at 9 PM ET March 17: A related observation by SHC —
The use of binary coordinate systems as a conceptual tool
Natural physical transformations of square or cubical arrays
of actual physical cubes (i.e., building blocks) correspond to
natural algebraic transformations of vector spaces over GF(2).
This was apparently not previously known.
See "The Thing and I."
A search in this journal for the above book leads to . . .
and its link to . . .
https://web.archive.org/web/20020408031913/
http://m759.freeservers.com/coord.html —
That page, "…20020408…," is a webpage, "Binary Coordinate Systems,"
archived on April 8, 2002.
For a sequel of sorts introducing Ternary Coordinate Systems ,
see yesterday's post Educational Series.
For a related philosophical remark, see Slow Art (June 15, 2015).
The “Black” of the title refers to the previous post.
For the “Well,” see Hexagram 48.
Related material —
The Galois Tesseract and, more generally, Binary Coordinate Systems.
Judith Shulevitz in The New York Times
on Sunday, July 18, 2010
(quoted here Aug. 15, 2010) —
“What would an organic Christian Sabbath look like today?”
The 2015 German edition of Beautiful Mathematics ,
a 2011 Mathematical Association of America (MAA) book,
was retitled Mathematische Appetithäppchen —
Mathematical Appetizers . The German edition mentions
the author's source, omitted in the original American edition,
for his section 5.17, "A Group of Operations" (in German,
5.17, "Eine Gruppe von Operationen") —
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Mathematische Appetithäppchen: Autor: Erickson, Martin —
"Weitere Informationen zu diesem Themenkreis finden sich |
That source was a document that has been on the Web
since 2002. The document was submitted to the MAA
in 1984 but was rejected. The German edition omits the
document's title, and describes it as merely a source for
"further information on this subject area."
The title of the document, "Binary Coordinate Systems,"
is highly relevant to figure 11.16c on page 312 of a book
published four years after the document was written: the
1988 first edition of Sphere Packings, Lattices and Groups ,
by J. H. Conway and N. J. A. Sloane —
A passage from the 1984 document —
The Mathematical Association of America has a
submit-a-review form that apparently allows readers
to comment on previously reviewed books.
This morning I submitted the following comment on
Alexander Bogomolny's March 16, 2012, review of
Martin J. Erickson's Beautiful Mathematics :
In section 5.17, pages 106-108, "A Group of Operations,"
Erickson does not acknowledge any source. This section
is based on the Cullinane diamond theorem. See that
theorem (published in an AMS abstract in 1979) at
PlanetMath.org and EncyclopediaOfMath.org, and
elsewhere on the Web. Details of the proof given by
Erickson may be found in "Binary Coordinate Systems,"
a 1984 article on the Web at
http://finitegeometry.org/sc/gen/coord.html.
If and when the comment may be published, I do not know.
Update of about 6:45 PM ET June 7:
The above comment is now online at the MAA review site.
Update of about 7 PM ET July 29:
The MAA review site's web address was changed, and the
above comment was omitted from the page at the new address.
This has now been corrected.
See reference AR in "Binary Coordinate Systems."
See also Prewar Berlin in this journal.
A topic related to A Simple Reflection Group of Order 168—
Transvection groups over GF(2). See, for instance…
“The Cube Space” is a name given to the eightfold cube in a vulgarized mathematics text, Discrete Mathematics: Elementary and Beyond, by Laszlo Lovasz et al., published by Springer in 2003. The identification in a natural way of the eight points of the linear 3-space over the 2-element field GF(2) with the eight vertices of a cube is an elementary and rather obvious construction, doubtless found in a number of discussions of discrete mathematics. But the less-obvious generation of the affine group AGL(3,2) of order 1344 by permutations of parallel edges in such a cube may (or may not) have originated with me. For descriptions of this process I wrote in 1984, see Diamonds and Whirls and Binary Coordinate Systems. For a vulgarized description of this process by Lovasz, without any acknowledgement of his sources, see an excerpt from his book.
or, The Eightfold Cube
Every permutation of the plane's points that preserves collinearity is a symmetry of the plane. The group of symmetries of the Fano plane is of order 168 and is isomorphic to the group PSL(2,7) = PSL(3,2) = GL(3,2). (See Cameron on linear groups (pdf).)
The above model indicates with great clarity six symmetries of the plane– those it shares with the equilateral triangle. It does not, however, indicate where the other 162 symmetries come from.
Shown below is a new model of this same projective plane, using partitions of cubes to represent points:
The second model is useful because it lets us generate naturally all 168 symmetries of the Fano plane by splitting a cube into a set of four parallel 1x1x2 slices in the three ways possible, then arbitrarily permuting the slices in each of the three sets of four. See examples below.
(Note that this procedure, if regarded as acting on the set of eight individual subcubes of each cube in the diagram, actually generates a group of 168*8 = 1,344 permutations. But the group's action on the diagram's seven partitions of the subcubes yields only 168 distinct results. This illustrates the difference between affine and projective spaces over the binary field GF(2). In a related 2x2x2 cubic model of the affine 3-space over GF(2) whose "points" are individual subcubes, the group of eight translations is generated by interchanges of parallel 2x2x1 cube-slices. This is clearly a subgroup of the group generated by permuting 1x1x2 cube-slices. Such translations in the affine 3-space have no effect on the projective plane, since they leave each of the plane model's seven partitions– the "points" of the plane– invariant.)
To view the cubes model in a wider context, see Galois Geometry, Block Designs, and Finite-Geometry Models.
For another application of the points-as-partitions technique, see Latin-Square Geometry: Orthogonal Latin Squares as Skew Lines.
For more on the plane's symmetry group in another guise, see John Baez on Klein's Quartic Curve and the online book The Eightfold Way. For more on the mathematics of cubic models, see Solomon's Cube.
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Initial Xanga entry. Updated Nov. 18, 2006.
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