"Solomon Golomb’s classic book Shift Register Sequences,
published in 1967—based on his work in the 1950s—
went out of print long ago. But its content lives on. . . ."

For part of that content, see Stencils .

A :Log24 post from the date of Golomb's death —

See as well other posts on Mathematics and Narrative.

"There is  such a thing as a desktop."

— Saying adapted from a 1962 young-adult novel.

For those who prefer drama to mathematics:

See also Magic + Flute in this journal.

"Why history?
Well, the essence of history  is story ,
and a good story is an end in itself."

— Barry Mazur, "History of Mathematics  as a tool,"
    February 17, 2013

See also today's previous post.

See also this journal on October 10, 2010.

From 6/22, 2010 —

    I would argue that at least sometimes, lottery numbers may be regarded,
    according to Bernstein's definition, as story statements.

From 7/02, 2010 —

Narrative Sequence

In today's New York Times, Michiko Kakutani reviews a summer thriller by Kevin Guilfoile.  The Thousand  is in the manner of Dan Brown's 2003 The Da Vinci Code  or of Katherine Neville's 1988 The Eight .

From the review—

What connects these disparate events, it turns out, is a sinister organization called the Thousand, made up of followers of the ancient Greek mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras (yes, the same Pythagoras associated with the triangle theorem that we learned in school).

As Mr. Guilfoile describes it, this organization is part Skull and Bones, part Masonic lodge, part something much more twisted and nefarious….

The plot involves, in part,

… an eccentric artist’s mysterious masterwork, made up of thousands of individually painted tiles that may cohere into an important message….

Not unlike the tiles in the Diamond Theory cover (see yesterday's post) or, more aptly, the entries in this journal.

"List, list, O, list!"
— Hamlet's father's ghost

"Ordering and patterning are not wholly narrative activities."
— James E. Giles, 1986

"See also… the true  story 0, 1, 2, 3…" 
— Log24, January 9, 2009

  For some non-narrative patterning of this list, see (for instance)
         Apostol's Modular Functions and Dirichlet Series in Number Theory.

     Friday, January 9, 2009…

Saturday's post quoted a mathematical narrative with the following opening sentence–

"Let G  be a finite, primitive subgroup of GL(V) = GL(n,D),
where V  is an n-dimensional vector space over the division ring D."

If that narrative were a novel, its opening might win a Bulwer-Lytton prize.

As might the opening of another nonfiction narrative—

"What are we are doing?"

A partial answer to this profound metaphysical question
for fans of the classic film "Dark City"
(which was written in part by one "Lem Dobbs")–

Part I — Fiction —

Part II — Nonfiction —

http://www.shellbeachinn.com/

Part III — Fiction —

"The bench on which Dobbs was sitting
was not so good."

— B. Traven, opening sentence
of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

The Magic Lyre

(Click image for context.)

See also Saturday's post—

as well as Solemn Dance
   and Mazur at Delphi.

(This last is apparently based on
a talk given by Barry Mazur at Delphi
in 2007 and may or may not appear in
a book, Mathematics and Narrative,
to be published in 2010.)

Suggested tune for the lyre–

"Send me the pillow
  that you dream on,"

in memory of Hank Locklin,
who died on this date last year.
 

"The present article elaborates on a talk presented at the first
'Mathematics and Narrative' conference (Mykonos, July 12-15, 2005)."

— Leo Corry on his "Calculating the Limits of Poetic License"

"In this article I seek to clarify the role played by poetic license
in the triangular relationship involving mathematics, the history
of mathematics and mathematics in fiction."

— Leo Corry, https://www.tau.ac.il/~corry/publications/articles.html . . .

See also tonight's previous post.

Madeleine L'Engle meets Captain America —

This is from a Jan. 27, 2012, post on mathematics and narrative.

Related literary criticism by the late Florence King —

"Given all the historical personages the author whistles in,
one more won't hurt. Nicolas Boileau, the 17th-century
French literary critic, gave writers a piece of advice that
Ms. Neville could use: 'Make not your tale of accidents
too full / too much variety will make it dull / Achilles' rage
alone, when wrought with skill /Abundantly does a whole
"Iliad" fill.' "

— NY Times  review of The Eight , a novel by Katherine Neville

(An episode of Mathematics and Narrative .)

Mathematician Peter J. Cameron this morning 
on a Paris anthropological exhibition subtitled 
Révélation d’un temps sans fin —

"I was reminded of Herbert Read’s
novel The Green Child ."

Related recent posts from this  journal:

Seal for the Seventh, Forthright, and Fourth Right.

A passage from The Green Child : 

"He watched over her until he too began to feel
overpowered by a desire to sleep. He therefore
got out on to the ledge of the trough and pulled
the Green Child after him. The rock there was
warm, smooth as jade to the flesh. They lay there
and sank into a profound slumber."

Sweet dreams, Mr. Taylor.

Green Child on the Rocks —

Recommended reading for Josefine Lyche:

See also Ayn Sof (Jan. 7, 2011).

Or: Mathematics and Narrative, Continued

In memory of a Stanford Arabist who reportedly died yesterday:

Another dream palace, from science fiction:

From Catherine Asaro’s  The Spacetime Pool :

Related material: From Sunday, the day of the Stanford Arabist’s death,
a quotation from a 2013 book on “the rise of complex function theory.”

The title, that of a novel by Arthur Koestler,
has appeared before in this journal.

The title was quoted in a Log24 note of
May 29, 2002 (G.K. Chesterton's birthday).

The link in Saturday evening's post to a Chesterton
essay suggested a further search that yielded
the following quotation—

Then silence sank. And slowly
      Arose the sea-land lord
Like some vast beast for mystery,
He filled the room and porch and sky,
And from a cobwebbed nail on high
      Unhooked his heavy sword.

— G. K. Chesterton,
   The Ballad of the White Horse

This, together with some Log24 remarks 
from 2004, suggests two images—

Above: A 1955 cover design by Robert Flynn.

The arrow theme also appears in a figure from
John Sealander's Road to Nowhere in the 2004
remarks:

The remarks quoting the Sealander image, from 
March 5, 2004, were on mathematics and narrative.

Related material from a year later:

See an announcement, saved from March 16, 2005,
of a conference on mathematics and narrative that
was held in July 2005. Some context: Koestler's novel.

(Mathematics and Narrative, continued from May 9, 2013)

See also Scriba's The Concept of Number and,
from the date of his death, The Zero Theorem.

(Mathematics and Narrative, continued)

Fact—

Sabol died yesterday.

Truth—

An art gallery in Oslo is exhibiting a tesseract.

Story—

The Jewel of Odin's Treasure Room

(Click to enlarge.)

* I.e., Wednesday. For some apt Nordic spirit,
   see Odin's Day 2012 Trailer.

From The Telegraph  today—

Professor Peter Goldie,
born November 5 1946, died October 22 2011.

With co-author Elisabeth Schellekens, Goldie wrote
Who's Afraid of Conceptual Art?

In memoriam—

Two posts from the day, Nov. 14, 2009,
that that book was published in paperback—
For St. Lawrence O'Toole's Day and
Mathematics and Narrative, continued—
and a post from the day of Goldie's death… Araby.

See also an excerpt from Who's Afraid? .

Roberta Smith in today's New York Times —

"… the argument that painting may ultimately be about
little more than the communication of some quality of
light and space, however abstract or indirect."

— Review of "Rooms With a View" at the Met

Lowry —

Malcolm Lowry, author of Under the Volcano

Hollywood —

Related material —

Friday, October 8, 2010 m759 @ 12:00 PM   Starting Out in the Evening … and Finishing Up at Noon This post was suggested by last evening's post on mathematics and narrative and by Michiko Kakutani on Vargas Llosa in this morning's New York Times . Above: Frank Langella in "Starting Out in the Evening" Right: Johnny Depp in "The Ninth Gate" "One must proceed cautiously, for this road— of truth and falsehood in the realm of fiction— is riddled with traps and any enticing oasis is usually a mirage." – "Is Fiction the Art of Lying?"* by Mario Vargas Llosa,     New York Times  essay of October 7, 1984 * The Web version's title has a misprint—    "living" instead of "lying."

"You've got to pick up every stitch…"

(A sequel to last night's "For Taylor")

On Joan Tewkesbury, who wrote the script for the 1975 film "Nashville"—

She urges writers to continue to generate new ideas
and new material. "Keep writing. The hardest thing
is to sell one script and not have another to follow it with."

One script— Yesterday's link titled "An Ordinary Evening in Tennessee"

Another— "A Point of Central Arrival"

Related material from last October—

Friday, October 8, 2010 m759 @ 12:00 PM   Starting Out in the Evening … and Finishing Up at Noon This post was suggested by last evening's post on mathematics and narrative and by Michiko Kakutani on Vargas Llosa in this morning's New York Times . Above: Frank Langella in "Starting Out in the Evening" Right: Johnny Depp in "The Ninth Gate" "One must proceed cautiously, for this road— of truth and falsehood in the realm of fiction— is riddled with traps and any enticing oasis is usually a mirage." – "Is Fiction the Art of Lying?"* by Mario Vargas Llosa,     New York Times  essay of October 7, 1984 * The Web version's title has a misprint—    "living" instead of "lying."

"You've got to pick up every stitch…"

* A former governor of Tennessee who died at 80 yesterday in Nashville

From the December 2010 American Mathematical Society Notices—

Related material from this  journal—

Mathematics and Narrative and

Consolation Prize (August 19, 2010)

"I know no writing— except perhaps Henry James's introductory essays— which conveys so clearly and with such an absence of fuss the excitement of the creative artist."

— Graham Greene on A Mathematician's Apology , review in The Spectator , 20 December 1940

"The mere quality and play of an ironic consciousness in the designer left wholly alone, amid a chattering unperceiving world, with the thing he has most wanted to do, with the design more or less realised— some effectual glimpse of that might, by itself, for instance, reward one's experiment."

— Henry James, "Prefaces to the New York Edition," in The Figure in the Carpet and Other Stories, Penguin Books, 1986, with introduction and notes by Frank Kermode

"What? You've found a pattern?"

— Greg Egan, "Wang's Carpets"

See also Notes on Mathematics and Narrative, with its discussion of the tiles of the creative artist Patrick Blackburn in the recent (August 2010) Pythagorean novel The Thousand  and the discussion of Wang tiles in Modal Logic,  a  book from November 2002 whose author also happens to be named Patrick Blackburn.

(Credit for the Greene bibliographic information is due to Janelle Robyn Humphreys, whose doctoral thesis, Shadows of Another Dimension, was published in 2009 by the University of Wollongong.)

The history of mathematics continues…

PRESS RELEASE The Academician Professor Nicolaos Artemiadis will give a speech entitled "The Exploration of the Universe through the Mathematical Science" during a public session of the Academy of Athens (the speech will be in Greek). The public session will be held on Tuesday, January 26th, 2010, at 19:00 at the Academy of Athens.

For some background on Professor Artemiadis, see two notes of July 2005 (the month an international conference on "Mathematics and Narrative" was held in Greece).

A post related by synchronicity to Artemiadis's Jan. 26 speech— Symbology.

Other philosophical remarks— "The Pediment of Appearance."

Special Topics

From a review by Liesl Schillinger in the Aug. 13 New York Times of a new novel by Marisha Pessl:

“… Special Topics in Calamity Physics tells the story of a wise newcomer who joins a circle of students who orbit a charismatic teacher with a tragic secret. The newcomer, a motherless waif named Blue van Meer, spent most of her life driving between college towns with her genius poli-sci professor father, Gareth….  Gareth is fond of making oracular statements, which his daughter laps up as if they were Churchill’s: ‘Everyone is responsible for the page-turning tempo of his or her Life Story,’ he tells her. And, he cautions, ‘never try to change the narrative structure of someone else’s story.’

…. Heeding Gareth van Meer’s dictum that the most page-turning read known to man is the collegiate curriculum, with its ‘celestial, sweet set of instructions, culminating in the scary wonder of the Final Exam,’ Pessl structures Blue’s mystery like a kind of Great Books class…. A professor is all-powerful, Gareth liked to tell his daughter, he puts ‘a veritable frame around life,’ and ‘organizes the unorganizable. Nimbly partitions it into modern and postmodern, renaissance, baroque, primitivism, imperialism and so on. Splice that up with Research Papers, Vacation, Midterms. All that order– simply divine.’ Blue’s syllabus also includes a murder or two. Her book’s last pages are a final exam. You will be relieved to learn it is mostly multiple choice, and there is no time limit.”

Multiple choice:
The examination below, taken from a page by a scholar at a Jesuit university, is on the Borges story “The Garden of Forking Paths”– a classic of multiple choice.

No time limit:
See the first question.

Examination on
“The Garden of Forking Paths“

“What is the meaning of the idea expressed by Yu Tsun that ‘everything happens to a man precisely, precisely now. Centuries of centuries and only in the present do things happen’? What is the significance of the emphasis on the present moment, the here and now? Is this related to the carpe diem (‘seize the day’) idea? How? How is the present effectively connected to the past and the future? How is the present associated simultaneously to choices, actions, and consequences? How is the present moment relevant to the idea of the ‘forking paths’? What is the symbolic meaning of forking paths when understood as a crossroads? What is a person confronted with when standing at a crossroads? What are the implications of a choice of road? May this be connected to the myth of Oedipus and its concerns with human choices and supposed predestination? What is suggested by the idea that ‘in all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the fiction of Ts’ui Pen, he chooses– simultaneously– all of them. He creates, in this way, diverse futures, diverse times which themselves also proliferate and fork’? What does it mean to make all choices at once? What view of life do such beliefs embody?”

Discourse Analysis

Edward Rothstein in today’s New York Times, reviewing Evil Incarnate (Princeton University Press):

“… the most decisive aspect of the myth is that it is, literally, a myth. Every single example of evil he gives turns out to be evil imagined: there is, he says, no evidence for any of it. Evil, he argues, is not something real, it is a ‘discourse,’ a ‘way of representing things and shaping our experience, not some force in itself.'”

Related material:

A review (pdf) by Steven G. Krantz of Charles Wells’s A Handbook of Mathematical Discourse (Notices of the American Mathematical Society, September 2004):

“Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary is a remarkable and compelling piece of writing because of its searing wit and sardonic take on life. Bierce does not define any new words. He instead gives deadly interpretations of very familiar words. Wells’s book does not fit into the same category of literary effort.”

For literary efforts perhaps more closely related to Bierce’s, see Mathematics and Narrative and the five Log24 entries ending on this date last year.

For Hemingway’s birthday:

Mathematics and Narrative, continued

“We know many little things about the relation between mathematics and narrative, but lack one big comprehensive insight.”

— John Allen Paulos (pdf)

“On Wednesday, Sept. 11, 2002– 9/11/02– the New York State lottery numbers were 911, an eerie coincidence that set many people to thinking or, perhaps more accurately, to not thinking.”

—  John Allen Paulos

“Time and chance happeneth to them all.”

— Ecclesiastes 9:11

Mathematics and Narrative
continued…

“Now, at the urging of the UC Berkeley cognitive linguist George Lakoff, liberal America’s guru of the moment, progressive Democrats are practicing to get their own reluctant mouths around some magical new vocabulary, in the hope of surviving and eventually overcoming the age of Bush.”

“… the right’s language is now the default language for everyone.
     On the way to proposing a counterstrategy (it never really arrives), Nunberg pauses to engage in a polite disagreement with his fellow linguist George Lakoff, who has provided a rival account of the conservative ascendancy. Lakoff argues that Republicans have articulated– first for themselves and then for others– a conceptual framework that allows them to unite apparently disparate issues in a single coherent worldview …  woven together not in a philosophically consistent framework but in a narrative ‘that creates an illusion of coherence.’
     Once again, the Republicans have such a narrative– ‘declining patriotism and moral standards, the out-of-touch media and the self-righteous liberal elite … minorities demanding special privileges … disrespect for religious faith, a swollen government’– but ‘Democrats and liberals have not offered compelling narratives that could compete’ with it. Eighty pages later he is still saying the same thing. ‘The Democrats need a compelling narrative of their own.'”

Lakoff is the co-author of a book on the philosophy of mathematics, Where Mathematics Comes From: How the Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics into Being.  From Wikipedia’s article on Lakoff:

“According to Lakoff, even mathematics itself is subjective to the human species and its cultures: thus ‘any question of math’s being inherent in physical reality is moot, since there is no way to know whether or not it is.’ Lakoff and Rafael E. Nunez (2000) argue at length that mathematical and philosophical ideas are best understood in light of the embodied mind. The philosophy of mathematics ought therefore to look to the current scientific understanding of the human body as a foundation ontology, and abandon self-referential attempts to ground the operational components of mathematics in anything other than ‘meat.'”

For a long list of related leftist philosophy, see The Thinking Meat Project.

Democrats seeking narratives may also consult The Carlin Code and The Prime Cut Gospel.
 

Snippets:
A Reply to John Updike

See Updike on digitized snippets.

The following four snippets were pirated from the end of MathPages Quotations, compiled by Kevin Brown.

They are of synchronistic interest in view of the previous two Log24 entries, which referred (implicitly) to a Poe story and (explicitly) to Pascal.

"That is another of your odd notions,"
said the Prefect, who had the fashion
of calling everything 'odd' that was
beyond his comprehension, and thus
lived amid an absolute legion of 'oddities.'
                             Edgar Allan Poe

I knew when seven justices could not
take up a quarrel, but when the parties
were met themselves, one of them
thought but of an If,  as, 'If you said so,
then I said so'; and they shook hands
and swore brothers. Your If is the only
peacemaker; much virtue in If.
                             Shakespeare

I have made this letter longer than usual
because I lack the  time to make it shorter.
                             Blaise Pascal

S'io credessi che mia risposta fosse
a persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma per cio che giammai di questo fondo
non torno vivo alcun, s'i'odo il vero,
senza tema d'infamia ti rispondo.
                             Dante, 1302

For translations of the Dante (including one by Dorothy Sayers), see everything2.com.

An anonymous author there notes that Dante describes a flame in which is encased a damned soul. The flame vibrates as the soul speaks:

If I thought that I were making
Answer to one that might return to view
The world, this flame should evermore
    cease shaking.

But since from this abyss, if I hear true,
None ever came alive, I have no fear
Of infamy, but give thee answer due.

-- Dante, Inferno, Canto 27, lines 61-66,
    translated by Dorothy Sayers

Updike says,

“Yes, there is a ton of information on the web but much of it is grievously inaccurate, unedited, unattributed and juvenile. The electronic marvels that abound around us serve, I have the impression, to inflame what is most informally and non-critically human about us. Our computer screens stare back at us with a kind of giant, instant aw-shucks, disarming in its modesty.”

Note Updike’s use of “inflame.”

For an aw-shucks version of “what is most informally and non-critically human about us,” as well as a theological flame, see both the previous entry and the above report from Hell.

Note that the web serves also to correct material that is inaccurate, unedited, unattributed, and juvenile. For examples, see Mathematics and Narrative. The combination of today’s entry for Pascal’s birthday with that web page serves both to light one candle and to curse the darkness.