… for fans of the late C. P. Snow
* See earlier references here to that phrase.
Thursday, March 12, 2015
Overarching Symmetry*
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Thursday, December 11, 2014
Stark and Bleak
C. P. Snow on G. H. Hardy in the foreword to
A Mathematician's Apology :
"… he had another favourite entertainment.
'Mark that man we met last night,'
he said, and someone had to be marked
out of 100 in each of the categories
Hardy had long since invented and defined.
STARK, BLEAK ('a stark man is not necessarily
bleak: but all bleak men without exception
want to be considered stark')…."
Related material :
Tommy Lee Jones in The New York Times on Nov. 6th, 2014,
and Pierce Brosnan in the 2014 film "The November Man" :
“Geometry was very important to us in this movie.”
— The Missing ART (Log24, November 7th, 2014)
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Thursday, November 29, 2012
The Place of the Lion
For C. S. Lewis, who was born on this date in 1898,
and Natalie Wood, who died on this date in 1981
"He was accustomed to receiving manuscripts from strangers…."
— C. P. Snow on mathematician G. H. Hardy
"Whoever you are— I have always depended on
the kindness of strangers." — A Streetcar Named Desire
From this journal on September 24, 2012—
|
"A single self-transcendence" — Aldous Huxley From an anonymous author at the website Kill Devil Hill— "This little story… has that climactic moment of Kill Devil Hills also appears in a 1983 film—
"Suppose it were possible to transfer — Trailer for "Brainstorm" (1983), |
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Lines of Symbols
C. P. Snow on G. H. Hardy, in Snow's foreword to A Mathematician's Apology—
"One morning early in 1913, he found, among the letters on his breakfast table, a large untidy envelope decorated with Indian stamps. When he opened it, he found sheets of paper by no means fresh, on which, in a non-English holograph, were line after line of symbols. Hardy glanced at them without enthusiasm. He was by this time, at the age of thirty-six, a world famous mathematician: and world famous mathematicians, he had already discovered, are unusually exposed to cranks. He was accustomed to receiving manuscripts from strangers, proving the prophetic wisdom of the Great Pyramid, the revelations of the Elders of Zion, or the cryptograms that Bacon has inserted in the plays of the so-called Shakespeare."
Some related material (click to enlarge)—
The author links to, but does not name, the source of the above
"line after line of symbols." It is "Visualizing GL(2,p)." See that webpage
for some less esoteric background.
See also the two Wikipedia articles Finite geometry and Hesse configuration
and an image they share—
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Saturday, June 2, 2012
High Society
In memory of Sir Andrew Huxley, OM, who died on May 30, 2012
C. P. Snow on G. H. Hardy at Trinity College, Cambridge—
He played his games and indulged his eccentricities.
He was living in some of the best intellectual company
in the world— G. E. Moore, Whitehead, Bertrand Russell,
Trevelyan, the high Trinity society which was shortly to
find its artistic complement in Bloomsbury. (Hardy himself
had links with Bloomsbury, both of personal friendship
and of sympathy.)
See also "Max Black" + Trinity in this journal.
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Thursday, April 21, 2011
Spaghetti Junction
Literary remarks for Maundy Thursday—
— C. P. Snow, foreword to G. H. Hardy's A Mathematician's Apology
Related material—
Emory University press release of January 20th, 2011:
"In 1937, Hans Rademacher found an exact formula for calculating partition values. While the method was a big improvement over Euler's exact formula, it required adding together infinitely many numbers that have infinitely many decimal places. 'These numbers are gruesome,' Ono says….
… The final eureka moment occurred near another Georgia landmark: Spaghetti Junction. Ono and Jan Bruinier were stuck in traffic near the notorious Atlanta interchange. While chatting in the car, they hit upon a way to overcome the infinite complexity of Rademacher's method. They went on to prove a formula that requires only finitely many simple numbers.
'We found a function, that we call P, that is like a magical oracle,' Ono says. 'I can take any number, plug it into P, and instantly calculate the partitions of that number….'"
See also this journal on April 15 and a Google Groups [sage-devel] thread, Ono-Bruinier partition formula. That thread started on April 15 and was last updated this morning.
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Monday, December 1, 2008
Monday December 1, 2008
A Version of
Heaven's Gate
Heaven's Gate
in memory of
G. H. Hardy,
who died on
this date in 1947
C. P. Snow on Hardy:
"He was living in some of the best intellectual company in the world– G.E. Moore, Whitehead, Bertrand Russell, Trevelyan, the high Trinity society which was shortly to find its artistic complement in Bloomsbury."
For a rather different artistic complement, see the previous entry.
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Sunday, July 13, 2008
Sunday July 13, 2008
The Drunkard’s Walk
is the title of a recent
book by Leonard Mlodinow:
Cover of British edition
Review in The Washington Post on June 29 (St. Peter’s Day):
“Leonard Mlodinow has had, to speak informally, a pretty random career….
A far more sober instance of randomness, however, underpins his new book, The Drunkard’s Walk. And it’s not hard to see it as a sort of Rosebud, explaining why the author finds unpredictability so compelling.”
Another sort of Rosebud–
C. P. Snow on G. H. Hardy:
“… A Mathematician’s Apology is, if read with the textual attention it deserves, a book of haunting sadness. Yes, it is witty and sharp with intellectual high spirits: yes, the crystalline clarity and candour are still there: yes, it is the testament of a creative artist. But it is also, in an understated stoical fashion, a passionate lament for creative powers that used to be and that will never come again.”
Perhaps in the afterlife Hardy, an expert on the theory of numbers, does again enjoy such powers. If so, his comments on the following would be of interest:
New York Lottery today:
Mid-day 006
(the first perfect number)
Evening 568
(an apparently random number)
Mid-day 006
(the first perfect number)
Evening 568
(an apparently random number)
Hardy, when taken to church as a child, passed the time by factorizing hymn numbers. This suggests we note that 568 equals 8 times 71. A check of Wikipedia on the prime number 71 reveals that it is related to 568 in another way: 568 is is the sum of the primes less than 71–
2 + 3 + 5 + 7 + 11 +
13 + 17 + 19 + 23 +
29 + 31 + 37 + 41 +
43 + 47 + 53 + 59 +
61 + 67 = 568
Clearly it is false that the sum of the primes less than a prime p is, in general, a multiple of p, since (2 + 3 + 5) is not a multiple of 7. The sum of primes less than an integer x is, however, of some interest.
See The On-Line Encyclopedia
of Integer Sequences,
A046731, Sum of primes < 10^n, as well as
A006880, Number of primes < 10^n.
According to an amateur* mathematician named Cino Hilliard, “a very important relationship exists” between the sum of primes less than x and the prime counting function Pi(x) which is the number of primes less than x—
(Sum of primes less than x) ~ Pi(x^2).
Whether this apparent relationship is, in fact, “very important,” or merely a straightforward consequence of other number-theoretical facts, is not obvious (to those of us not expert in number theory) from Google searches. Perhaps Hardy can clear this question up for those who will, by luck or grace, meet him in the next world.
* For some background, see a profile and user group messages here and here and here.
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Sunday July 13, 2008
Indefinable?
C. P. Snow on G. H. Hardy:
“This was 1931, and the phrase was not yet in English use, but in later days they would have said that in some indefinable way he had star quality.”
From the Feast of the
Transfiguration, 2007:
Symmetry axes
of the square:
See Damnation Morning.
See also today’s
previous three entries.
Happy birthday,
Harrison Ford.
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Sunday July 13, 2008
Christ's High Table
C. P. Snow in A Mathematician's Apology :
FOREWORD
"It was a perfectly ordinary night at Christ's high table, except that Hardy was dining as a guest. He had just returned to Cambridge as Sadleirian professor, and I had heard something of him from young Cambridge mathematicians. They were delighted to have him back: he was a real mathematician, they said, not like those Diracs and Bohrs the physicists were always talking about: he was the purest of the pure. He was also unorthodox, eccentric, radical, ready to talk about anything. This was 1931, and the phrase was not yet in English use, but in later days they would have said that in some indefinable way he had star quality."
Perhaps now also at Christ's high table– Scarlett O'Hara's Younger Sister , Evelyn Keyes, who died on July 4, 2008:
"… the memory of Evelyn Keyes looking at herself on the screen, exclaiming: 'There's star quality! Look at those tits!'"
Evelyn Keyes in 99 River Street
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Thursday, October 26, 2006
Thursday October 26, 2006
Hardy & Wright
“When he was taken to church
he amused himself by factorizing
the numbers of the hymns.”
— C. P. Snow, foreword to
A Mathematician’s Apology,
by G. H. Hardy
An application of
lottery hermeneutics:
420 –> 4/20 –>
Hall of Shame,
Easter Sunday,
April 20, 2003;
145 –> 5*29 –> 5/29 –>
The Rev. Wright may also
be interested in the following
Related material:
“Shem was a sham….”
(FW I.7, 170 and Log24 Oct. 13),
and The Hebrew Word Shem:
“When I teach introductory Hebrew, the first word I typically teach is the common noun SHEM . It’s pronounced exactly like our English word ‘shame,’ means almost exactly the opposite, and seems to me to be a key….” — Glen Penton
This word occurs, notably, in Psalm (or “hymn”) 145.
See http://scripturetext.com/psalms/145-1.htm:
thy name
shem (shame)
an appellation, as a mark or memorial of individuality; by implication honor, authority, character — + base, (in-)fame(-ous), named(-d), renown, report.
Update of 12:25 PM 10/26
from the online Crimson:
from the online Crimson:
Related material:
The Crimson Passion
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Monday, September 18, 2006
Monday September 18, 2006
Apology
| Excerpts from Log 24, January 18, 2004: A Living Church "Plato has told you a truth; but Plato is dead. Shakespeare has startled you with an image; but Shakespeare will not startle you with any more. But imagine what it would be to live with such men still living. To know that Plato might break out with an original lecture to-morrow, or that at any moment Shakespeare might shatter everything with a single song. The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before." — G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy C. P. Snow on G. H. Hardy in the foreword to A Mathematician's Apology: "… he had another favourite entertainment…." … If, as Chesterton might surmise, he… met Plato and Shakespeare in Heaven, the former might discuss with him the eternal Platonic form of the number 17*, while the latter might offer…. * Footnote of 9/18/06: For the Platonic form of 17, see Feast of the Triumph of the Cross (9/14/06) and Medal (9/15/06). |
A Living Church,
continued…
Apology:
An Exercise in Rhetoric
An Exercise in Rhetoric
Related material:
|
ON 6-6-6 —
"Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick stars in a scene from the R-rated movie 'The Omen.' An official of the Australian bishops conference took on the superstition surrounding the movie's release date of June 6, 2006, noting that 'I take evil far too seriously to think "The Omen" is telling me anything realistic or important.'" (CNS/20th Century Fox) |
and
 |
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Friday, October 15, 2004
Friday October 15, 2004
Snow Jobs
In memory of C. P. Snow,
whose birthday is today
“Without the narrative prop of
High Table dinner conversation
at Cambridge, Snow would be lost.”
— Roger Kimball*
High Table dinner conversation
at Cambridge, Snow would be lost.”
— Roger Kimball*
“It was a perfectly ordinary night
at Christ’s high table, except that
Hardy was dining as a guest.”
— C. P. Snow**
“666=2.3.3.37, and there is
no other decomposition.”
— G. H. Hardy***
** Foreword to
A Mathematician’s Apology
Oct. 15, 2004, 7:11:37 PM
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Sunday, January 18, 2004
Sunday January 18, 2004
A Living Church
"Plato has told you a truth; but Plato is dead. Shakespeare has startled you with an image; but Shakespeare will not startle you with any more. But imagine what it would be to live with such men still living. To know that Plato might break out with an original lecture to-morrow, or that at any moment Shakespeare might shatter everything with a single song. The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast. He is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before."
— G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
C. P. Snow on G. H. Hardy in the foreword to A Mathematician's Apology:
"… he had another favourite entertainment. 'Mark that man we met last night,' he said, and someone had to be marked out of 100 in each of the categories Hardy had long since invented and defined. STARK, BLEAK ('a stark man is not necessarily bleak: but all bleak men without exception want to be considered stark')…."
S. H. Cullinane on religion and Hollywood:
"If the incomparable Max Bialystock were to remake 'Up Close and Personal,' he might retitle it 'Distant and Impersonal.' A Google search on this phrase suggests
a plot outline for Mel Brooks & Co."
In memory of
producer Ray Stark,
an excerpt from that plot outline:
The Oxford University Press summary of
God:
Myths of the Male Divine,
by David Leeming and Jake Page
"They [Leeming and Page] describe the rise of a male sky God as 'the equal to, the true mate, of Goddess, who was still associated with Earth.' In the Iron Age, the sky God became more aggressive, separating from the Goddess and taking his place as the King God, as Zeus, Odin, and Horus. Ultimately he emerged as the creator, a more distant and impersonal force. Here Leeming and Page also illuminate an important trend–a sense that the divine is beyond gender, that it permeates all things (as seen in the Chinese Tao and En Sof of the Kabbalah). They see a movement in the biography of God toward a reunion with the Goddess."
As for the Goddess, see
(December 17, 2002).
Stark, a saint among Hollywood producers, died yesterday, January 17. If, as Chesterton might surmise, he then met Plato and Shakespeare in Heaven, the former might discuss with him the eternal Platonic form of the number 17, while the latter might offer the following links on Stark's new heavenly laptop:
This concludes the tribute to Stark. For a tribute to Bleak, click here.
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Wednesday, October 15, 2003
Wednesday October 15, 2003
The One Culture
Today’s birthdays:
Friedrich Nietzsche and C. P. Snow.
Recommended reading–
The Two Cultures Today, by Roger Kimball, which begins with a quotation from Nietzsche:
“It is not a question of annihilating science, but of controlling it.”
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