The Dodecahedron .
This Platonic solid appears, for instance, on the cover
of a colorful text titled The Heart of Mathematics
(Wiley, third edition, 2009) —
For serious students, here is a better book, more in
keeping with the above authors' later interpretation
of the fifth element as change :
From yesterday's post Hollywood Arrival —
" Yesterday's events at 6407 Sunset Blvd. in Hollywood,
together with the logic of number and time from recent
posts based on a Heinlein short story, suggest that the
character played by Adams is a sort of 'fifth element'
needed to save the world.
In other words, the strange logic of recent posts ties the
California lottery number 6407 to the date April 12, 2015,
and a check of that date in this journal yields posts tagged
Orthodox Easter 2015 that relate to the 'fifth element.' "
A related image from Arrival (at 1:37:18) —
A related passage of scientific prose —
"Paramount discoveries are still being made…."
Or at least distributed.
In the new film Arrival , Amy Adams plays a linguist
who must interpret the language used by aliens whose
spaceships hover at 12 points around the globe.
Yesterday's events at 6407 Sunset Blvd. in Hollywood,
together with the logic of number and time from recent
posts based on a Heinlein short story, suggest that the
character played by Adams is a sort of "fifth element"
needed to save the world.
In other words, the strange logic of recent posts ties the
California lottery number 6407 to the date April 12, 2015,
and a check of that date in this journal yields posts tagged
Orthodox Easter 2015 that relate to the "fifth element."
Midrash by Ted Chiang from the story on which Arrival was based —
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After the breakthrough with Fermat's Principle, discussions of scientific concepts became more fruitful. It wasn't as if all of heptapod physics was suddenly rendered transparent, but progress was suddenly steady. According to Gary, the heptapods' formulation of physics was indeed topsy-turvy relative to ours. Physical attributes that humans defined using integral calculus were seen as fundamental by the heptapods. As an example, Gary described an attribute that, in physics jargon, bore the deceptively simple name “action,” which represented “the difference between kinetic and potential energy, integrated over time,” whatever that meant. Calculus for us; elementary to them. Conversely, to define attributes that humans thought of as fundamental, like velocity, the heptapods employed mathematics that were, Gary assured me, “highly weird.” The physicists were ultimately able to prove the equivalence of heptapod mathematics and human mathematics; even though their approaches were almost the reverse of one another, both were systems of describing the same physical universe. |
The previous three posts —
— suggest a review of a post from April 11, 2015:
Michael Starbird on Mathematics —
In Starbird's philosophical fable, the "fifth element" is change .
See also the recent post White Mischief.
"But what was supposed to be the source of a compound's
authority? Why, the same as that of all new religious movements:
direct access to the godhead, which in this case was Creativity."
— Tom Wolfe, From Bauhaus to Our House
"Creativity is not a matter of magical inspiration."
— Burger and Starbird, The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking (2012)
Video published on Oct 19, 2012
"In this fifth of five videos, mathematics professor
Michael Starbird talks about the fifth element
in his new book, The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking ,
co-authored with Williams College professor
Edward B. Burger."
For more on the Starbird manifesto, see Princeton University Press.
An excerpt —
See also a post for Abel's Birthday, 2011 —
Midnight in Oslo — and a four-elements image from
the Jan. 26, 2010, post Symbology —
Scarlett Johansson stars in a new film, "Lucy," due to be
released on August 8, directed by Luc Besson, auteur of
The Fifth Element (1997). In other pop culture…
"There have long been rumors of a mythical Ninth Element
that grants ultimate power to the Wizard who masters it.
The Order of Magick says there is no such thing. But…."
— Website of Magicka: The Ninth Element Novel
See also, in this journal, Holy Field as well as Power of the Center.
"We tell ourselves stories…." * — Joan Didion
in "The Fifth Element"
Priest Vito Cornelius: I… have… a different theory to offer you, sir.
President Lindberg: You have twenty seconds.
* See also Friday morning's post.
** Today's New York Times—
"A version of this op-ed appeared in print
on July 23, 2011, on page A19 of the New York
edition with the headline: The Great Evil." —
"… the clocks were striking thirteen…"
"Entertainment continued," a Log24 post last year on this date, suggests…
A reading from Richard Kearney's Strangers, Gods and Monsters (Routledge, 2003)—
Neither earth nor air nor fire nor water… perhaps a Fifth Element ?
The weekend's posts in this journal coincided,
more or less, with the finale of the TV series "Lost."
Recalling each story brings to mind
the subtitle of Heinrich Zimmer's classic
The King and the Corpse —
Tales of the Soul's Conquest of Evil.
Here, in the spirit of "The Fifth Element," is a
brief graphic summary of such a conquest—
The Soul
Evil
(from Saturday morning)
This 1495 image is found in
The Janus Faces of Genius:
The Role of Alchemy
in Newton's Thought,
by B. J. T. Dobbs,
Cambridge U. Press,
2002, p. 85
From
Kernel of Eternity:
From
Sacerdotal Jargon
at Harvard:
From "The Fifth Element"
(1997, Milla Jovovich
and Bruce Willis) —
The crossing of the beams:
Happy birthday, Bruce Willis.
Horse Sense
Mathematicians are familiar with the emblem of Springer Verlag, the principal publisher of higher mathematics.
Ferdinand Springer, son of Julius Springer, founder of Springer Verlag, “was a passionate chess player and published a number of books on the subject. In 1881 this personal hobby and the name Springer led the company to adopt the knight in chess (in German, Springer) as its colophon.”
Hermann Hesse on a certain sort of serenity:
“I would like to say something more to you about cheerful serenity, the serenity of the stars and of the mind…. neither frivolity nor complacency; it is supreme insight and love, affirmation of all reality, alertness on the brink of all depths and abysses; it is a virtue of saints and of knights; it is indestructible and only increases with age and nearness to death. It is the secret of beauty and the real substance of all art.”
A saint and a knight, Jeanne d’Arc, was memorably portrayed by Milla Jovovich in The Messenger.
(Jovovich seems fated to play more-than-human characters in religious epics; see The Fifth Element.)
Another Springer, related to horses and to the accusation of witchcraft faced by Jeanne d’Arc, is Nancy Springer, the author of
Springer has written a number of books about horses, as well as other topics.
All of the above…. especially the parts having to do with mathematics and horses… was prompted by my redrawing today of a horse-shape within mathematics. See my entry The Eight of April 4, 2003, and the horse-figure redrawn at right below.
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Believers in the story theory of truth may wish to relate the gifts of Jeanne d’Arc and of the girl in The Hex Witch of Seldom to the legend of Pegasus. See, for instance,
Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star.
For another connection between mathematics and horses, see Sangaku.
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