“Knight move” remark from The Eiger Sanction —
“I like to put people on myself by skipping logical steps
in the conversation until they’re dizzy.”
The following logical step — a check of the date Nov. 18, 2017 —
was omitted in the post Futon Dream on this year’s St. Stephen’s Day.
For further context, see James Propp in this journal.
” There’s a line from the movie ‘The Paper Chase’, in which
the fearsome Professor Kingsfield tells a room of first-year
law-school students ‘You come in here with a skull full of mush …
and you leave thinking like a lawyer.’ “
— James Propp on December 14, 2020, in . . .
Related material — Japanese Bed.
"When I was a kid living in the Long Island suburbs,
I sometimes got called a math genius. I didn’t think
the label was apt, but I didn’t mind it; being put in
the genius box came with some pretty good perks."
— "The Genius Box," March 16, 2018
From posts in this journal tagged "Black Diamond" —
"Particularly if a person thinks of himself as clever,
he will often have a hard time admitting his own ignorance."
— John Ganz in the online New York Times today.
"One model for what I’m trying to accomplish is the writings of
Martin Gardner. Some other models are … well, actually, I’m not
going [to] tell you; I’d much rather imitate these writers in hope that
you’ll notice the resemblance and figure it out. That’s a game
I’ll be playing with you over the next few years."
— James Propp, Mathematical Enchantments, June 17, 2015.
A check of my own ignorance of synchronology . . .
http://m759.net/wordpress/?p=50955,
a post of June 17, 2015.
The "more complicated" material mentioned by James Propp
in the previous post was notably described by A. A. Albert in 1956:
The previous post was suggested by some April 17, 2016, remarks
by James Propp on the eightfold cube.
Propp's remarks included the following:
"Here’s a caveat about my glib earlier remark that
'There are only finitely many numbers ' in a finite field.
It’s a bit of a stretch to call the elements of finite fields
'numbers'. Elements of GF(q ) can be thought of as
the integers mod q when q is prime, and they can be
represented by 0, 1, 2, …, q–1; but when q is a prime
raised to the 2nd power or higher, describing the
elements of GF(q ) is more complicated, and the word
'number' isn’t apt."
Related material —
See also this journal on the date of Propp's remarks — April 17, 2016.
This journal on April 16, 2018 —
Happy birthday to Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI.
Related material from another weblog in a post also dated April 16, 2018 —
"As I write this, it’s April 5, midway through the eight-day
festival of Passover. During this holiday, we Jews air our
grievances against the ancient Pharaoh who enslaved
and oppressed us, and celebrate the feats of strength
with which the Almighty delivered us from bondage —
wait a minute, I think I’m mixing up Passover with Festivus."
. . . .
"Next month: Time and Tesseracts."
From that next post, dated May 16, 2018 —
"The tesseract entered popular culture through
Madeleine L’Engle’s 'A Wrinkle in Time' . . . ."
The post's author, James Propp, notes that
" L’Engle caused some of her readers confusion
when one of the characters … the prodigy
Charles Wallace Murray [sic ] , declared 'Well, the fifth
dimension’s a tesseract.' "
Propp is not unfamiliar with prodigies:
"When I was a kid living in the Long Island suburbs,
I sometimes got called a math genius. I didn’t think
the label was apt, but I didn’t mind it; being put in
the genius box came with some pretty good perks."
— "The Genius Box," a post dated March 16, 2018
To me, Propp seems less like Charles Wallace
and more like the Prime Coordinator —
For further details, see the following synchronicity checks:
James Propp in the current Math Horizons on the eightfold cube —
For another puerile approach to the eightfold cube,
see Cube Space, 1984-2003 (Oct. 24, 2008).
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