The title refers to a man called by John Baez
“The infamous pseudohistorian Eric Temple Bell.”
(See my post The Magpie.)
Today the American Mathematical Society (AMS) has
an obituary for Donald Babbitt (1936-2020), who
reportedly died on October 10.
Babbitt is the co-author of an article on Bell from the
June/July 2013 AMS Notices .
Art suggested by a search in this journal for Bennington, by the Kurt Vonnegut
novel Timequake , and by the works of Eric Temple Bell.
"… Évariste was born on October 25, 1811."
— Eric Temple Bell, Men of Mathematics
Related material —
But seriously . . .
From Sunday evening's In Memoriam post —
The "from Princeton" remark in the previous post came from
Princeton, but originated with a retired professor in Rochester,
NY, one Joseph Neisendorfer.
Another remark by Neisendorfer, from his weblog —
Those familiar with the chapter on Galois in the
Eric Temple Bell classic Men of Mathematics
will know that the words quoted above by
Neisendorfer are definitely not those of Albert Einstein.
"Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore…."
— Edgar Allan Poe, 1845 (link added)
"The infamous pseudohistorian Eric Temple Bell
begins his book 'The Magic of Numbers' as follows:
The hero of our story is Pythagoras…."
Related material —
See also "Temple Bell" in this journal.
Prequel from 1961 (click image for context):
Detail that may be interpreted as the Chinese
3×3 "Holy Field" and a Chinese temple bell—
"Ting-a-ling." — Kurt Vonnegut.
Galois and Abel vs. Rubik
"Abel was done to death by poverty, Galois by stupidity.
In all the history of science there is no completer example
of the triumph of crass stupidity…."
— Eric Temple Bell, Men of Mathematics
Gray Space (Continued)
… For The Church of Plan 9.
(Mathematics and Narrative, continued)
Narrative—
The Ring and The Stone from yesterday's post, and…
"In Medieval Jewish, Christian and Islamic legends,
the Seal of Solomon was a magical signet ring
said to have been possessed by King Solomon…."
— Wikipedia article, Seal of Solomon
Mathematics—
A fact related to the mathematical
"Solomon's seal" described above by Bell:
The reference to Edge is as follows—
[3] Edge, W. L., Quadrics over GF(2) and
their relevance for the cubic surface group,
Canadian J. Maths. 11 (1959) ….
(This reference relates Hirschfeld's remarks
quoted above to the 64-point affine space
illustrated below (via the associated
63-point projective space PG (5, 2)).
As for the narrative's Stone…
Part I: Timothy Gowers on equivalence relations
Part II: Martin Gardner on normal subgroups
Part III: Evariste Galois on normal subgroups
"In all the history of science there is no completer example
of the triumph of crass stupidity over untamable genius…."
— Eric Temple Bell, Men of Mathematics
See also an interesting definition and Weyl on Galois.
Update of 6:29 PM EDT Oct. 30, 2011—
For further details, see Herstein's phrase
"a tribute to the genius of Galois."
"On the one-ton temple bell
a moon-moth, folded into sleep,
sits still." — Haiku by Buson
From the day author Stieg Larsson died—
The Nine (November 9th, 2004).
See also Pandora's Box (September 16th, 2006).
"…as we saw, there are two different Latin squares of order 4…."
— Peter J. Cameron, "The Shrikhande Graph," August 26, 2010
Cameron counts Latin squares as the same if they are isotopic .
Some further context for Cameron's remark—
Cover Illustration Number 1 (1976):
Cover Illustration Number 2 (1991):
The Shrikhande Graph
______________________________________________________________________________
This post was prompted by two remarks…
1. In a different weblog, also on August 26, 2010—
The Accidental Mathematician— "The Girl Who Played with Fermat's Theorem."
"The worst thing about the series is the mathematical interludes in The Girl Who Played With Fire….
Salander is fascinated by a theorem on perfect numbers—
one can verify it for as many numbers as one wishes, and it never fails!—
and then advances through 'Archimedes, Newton, Martin Gardner,*
and a dozen other classical mathematicians,' all the way to Fermat’s last theorem."
2. "The fact that the pattern retains its symmetry when you permute the rows and columns
is very well known to combinatorial theorists who work with matrices."
[My italics; note resemblance to the Brualdi-Ryser title above.]
–Martin Gardner in 1976 on the diamond theorem
* Compare Eric Temple Bell (as quoted at the MacTutor history of mathematics site)—
"Archimedes, Newton, and Gauss, these three, are in a class by themselves
among the great mathematicians, and it is not for ordinary mortals
to attempt to range them in order of merit."
This is from the chapter on Gauss in Men of Mathematics .
Happy Rohatsu
“The Buddha was enlightened on the eighth of December when he looked up at the morning star, the planet we call Venus.”
— Shodo Harada Roshi, Dharma Talk
On the one-ton temple bell
a moon-moth, folded into sleep,
sits still.~by Taniguchi Buson
(translated by X.J. Kennedy)
Commentary on poetry of Buson:
Poetry as an open space
for lightening of Being“… a cleft of existence from where the time is to extend to eternity. It is a place where ‘nothing’ crosses with ‘being’ or the ‘clearing’ in Heidegger’s term, the only light place in the dark forest.”
In other words,
From Here to Eternity.
For more on Zen, see the
entry of May 2, 2003.
For more on a Temple Bell, see the
entry of May 1, 2003.
For more on Venus, see the
entry of March 28, 2003.
For more on the morning star, see the
entry of December 8, 2002.
Rhymes with Puck
Readings for May Day, also known as Beltane.
I. The Playboy of the Western World
II. Beltane
III. A is for Art
Bell/Taine
In 1993, The Mathematical Association of America published Constance Reid’s
THE SEARCH FOR E. T. BELL
also known as John Taine.
This is a biography of Eric Temple Bell, a mathematician and writer on mathematics, who also wrote fiction under the name John Taine.
On page 194, Reid records a question Bell’s son asked as a child. Passing a church and seeing a cross on the steeple, he inquired, “Why is the plus up there?”
For an answer that makes some sort of sense
consider the phrase “A is for Art,” so aptly illustrated by Olivia Newton-John in “Wrestling Pablo Picasso,” then examine the photograph of ballerina Margaret “Puck” Petit on page 195 of Reid’s book. Puck, as the mother of Leslie Caron (see Terpsichore’s Birthday), clearly deserves an A+.
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