Applying the "Go back 10" symbol above . . .
Wednesday, February 12, 2025
Annals of Apple Entertainment . . .
Katherine Neville’s The Eight — Enhanced!
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Katherine Neville’s The Eight — Enhanced!
Katherine Neville’s The Eight — Enhanced!
Friday, October 30, 2015
The Eight
“Continue a search for thirty-three and three.
Veiled forever is the secret door.”
— Katherine Neville, aka Cat Velis, in The Eight,
Ballantine Books, January 1989, page 140
"Close enough for government work."
— Stephen King in Doctor Sleep
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Monday, September 15, 2014
The Eight
The image at the end of today’s previous post A Seventh Seal
suggests a review of posts on Katherine Neville’s The Eight .
Update of 1:25 PM ET on Sept. 15, 2014:
Neville’s longtime partner is neurosurgeon and cognitive theorist
Karl H. Pribram. A quote from one of his books:
See also Sense and Sensibility.
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Friday, September 12, 2025
Lit Bits: Crazy Guggenheim
"Robert Langdon, Harvard professor of symbology,
arrives at the ultramodern Guggenheim Museum Bilbao…."
— Promotional book description at Amazon.com
"Continue a search for thirty-three and three."
— Sucker bait from Katherine Neville's masterpiece The Eight
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Sunday, April 20, 2025
The Harrowing of Literary Hell
Fans of the novel The Eight by Katherine Neville may recall
that the date April 4 plays a significant role in that fiction.
Related material from log24.com/log/pix25/ …
250420-Harrowing-of-Hell-post-on-April_4_2015.jpg —
250420-Cameron-post-on-April_4_2015-Holy_Saturday.jpg —
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Friday, February 28, 2025
Women’s Day Labyrinth
From a search in this journal for Neville "The Eight" —
For "the very essence of Logic as such" vide Quine.
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Sunday, August 25, 2024
Log Lady Lines
From the post "Log Lady" of June 12, 2020 —
"Battle of White has raged on endlessly.
Everywhere Black will strive to seal his fate."
— Katherine Neville's chess novel The Eight
For Nathalie Emmanuel, star of the recent Francis Ford Coppola
extravaganza "Megalopolis" and, more impressively, of
a John Woo film released to streaming on Aug. 23 . . .
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Wednesday, July 12, 2023
The Sunset of Dissolution
Dwight Garner today on the late Milan Kundera:
"Kundera’s novels, especially his later ones, could be abstract and
heavy-handed. His characters, at times, were little more than chess pieces.
Their author could be pretentious. His work is filled with observations such as:
'In the sunset of dissolution, everything is illuminated by the aura of nostalgia,
even the guillotine.' But his best fiction retains its moments of sweep and power."
Illustration for Florence King's 1989 review of The Eight , a novel
by Katherine Neville that features prominently the date April 4.
See also "Dissolution" in this journal.
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Tuesday, June 14, 2022
Der Einsatz . . . Continues.
Katherine Neville, author of The Eight —
"Nine is a very powerful Nordic number."
in The Magic Circle , Ballantine paperback, 1999, p. 339.
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Thursday, May 19, 2022
True Confessions! … 8!
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Wednesday, March 17, 2021
Sunday, August 23, 2020
Sprechen Sie Neutsch?
Image added to post on Tuesday, November 4, 2025 —
End of added image. Also on Nov. 4, 2025 . . .
Publication year added to the Coordinates excerpt below.
Related images —
Chess Knight
(in German, Springer)
See also…
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Sunday, June 14, 2020
PC Language Game
The above Nat Friedman is not to be confused with
the Nat Friedman of “Hyperseeing,” discussed here June 12.
“One game is real and one’s a metaphor.
Untold times this wisdom’s come too late.
Battle of White has raged on endlessly.
Everywhere Black will strive to seal his fate.
Continue a search for thirty-three and three.
Veiled forever is the secret door.”
— Katherine Neville, aka Cat Velis, in The Eight,
Ballantine Books, January 1989, page 140
Related literary remarks —
The Old Man and the Bull
The Old Man and the Topic
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Friday, June 12, 2020
Log Lady
“Just as these lines that merge to form a key
Are as chess squares; when month and day are four;
Don’t risk another chance to move to mate.
One game is real and one’s a metaphor.
Untold times this wisdom’s come too late.
Battle of White has raged on endlessly.
Everywhere Black will strive to seal his fate.
Continue a search for thirty-three and three.
Veiled forever is the secret door.”
— Katherine Neville, aka Cat Velis, in The Eight,
Ballantine Books, January 1989, page 140
“One game is real and one’s a metaphor” —
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Tuesday, June 9, 2020
Number
“Nine is a very powerful Nordic number.“
— Katherine Neville, author of The Eight
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Wednesday, April 8, 2020
A Midrash for Steiner
(The late Mark Steiner, not the late George Steiner.)
See Katherine Neville’s novel The Eight ,
Log24 posts tagged Crucible Raiders, and
St. Isidore, whose feast day is April 4 —
Mark Steiner’s book The Applicability of Mathematics
as a Philosophical Problem (Harvard University Press, 2002,
$36.50) is available for free at a website named for St. Isidore.)
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Saturday, December 28, 2019
Caballo Blanco
“The key is the cocktail that begins the proceedings.”
– Brian Harley, Mate in Two Moves
-actions-500w.jpg)
“Just as these lines that merge to form a key
Are as chess squares . . . .” — Katherine Neville, The Eight
“The complete projective group of collineations and dualities of the
[projective] 3-space is shown to be of order [in modern notation] 8! ….
To every transformation of the 3-space there corresponds
a transformation of the [projective] 5-space. In the 5-space, there are
determined 8 sets of 7 points each, ‘heptads’ ….”
— George M. Conwell, “The 3-space PG (3, 2) and Its Group,”
The Annals of Mathematics , Second Series, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Jan., 1910),
pp. 60-76.
“It must be remarked that these 8 heptads are the key to an elegant proof….”
— Philippe Cara, “RWPRI Geometries for the Alternating Group A8,” in
Finite Geometries: Proceedings of the Fourth Isle of Thorns Conference
(July 16-21, 2000), Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001, ed. Aart Blokhuis,
James W. P. Hirschfeld, Dieter Jungnickel, and Joseph A. Thas, pp. 61-97.
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Monday, December 2, 2019
D8: The Black Queen’s Square
The previous post quoted some dialogue from Victor Hugo's
novel about the French Revolution, Ninety-Three.
This suggests a look at the following non-fiction book:
Compare and contrast with the novel The Eight , by Katherine Neville,
about chess and the French Revolution.
Neville's birthday, April 4, plays a major role in her novel. The dies natalis
(in the Roman Catholic sense) of the above Birth of the Chess Queen
author, on the other hand, was reportedly November 20, 2019.
Following a link in this journal from November 20 leads to remarks
that might interest the subjects of an upcoming film, "The Two Popes."
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Thursday, January 24, 2019
Night at the Social Media
See also Katherine Neville, Karl Pribram, and Cooper Hewitt in this journal.
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Thursday, August 9, 2018
True Grids
From a search in this journal for "True Grid,"
a fanciful description of the 3×3 grid —
"This is the garden of Apollo,
the field of Reason…."
– John Outram, architect
A fanciful instance of the 4×2 grid in
a scene from the film "The Master" —
A fanciful novel referring to the number 8,
and a not -so-fanciful reference:
Illustrated above are Katherine Neville's novel The Eight and the
"knight" coordinatization of the 4×2 grid from a page on the exceptional
isomorphism between PSL(3,2) (alias GL(3,2)) and PSL(2,7) — groups
of, respectively, degree 7 and degree 8.
Literature related to the above remarks on grids:
Ross Douthat's New York Times column yesterday purported, following
a 1946 poem by Auden, to contrast students of the humanities with
technocrats by saying that the former follow Hermes, the latter Apollo.
I doubt that Apollo would agree.
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Friday, July 27, 2018
Thursday, April 5, 2018
D8
The above title may be regarded as a poetic variant
of the title of Katherine Neville's 1988 novel The Eight .
Related material —
See also The Black Queen, a note from 2001.
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Thursday, March 8, 2018
Women’s Day: The Hateful Eight
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Sunday, October 15, 2017
An Interesting Symbol
"His story is tragic and fascinating, but also
an interesting symbol for the 20th century."
— "Pawn Sacrifice" review by Jordan Hoffman,
Sept. 18, 2015
See as well William J. Lombardy's obituary in
today's online New York Times .
Other symbols —
Logo for a current New York Times series —
A 1989 New York Times illustration for Florence King's review of The Eight ,
a novel by Katherine Neville that features prominently the date April 4 —
Illustration by Rodrigo Shopis
See also recent posts now tagged Five Movements for Lombardy.
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Monday, February 20, 2017
At 3:33*
* A reference to a line in a poem in a novel
by Katherine Neville, The Eight (1988)
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Friday, October 21, 2016
Wednesday, August 31, 2016
The Lost Crucible
Yesterday's post The Eightfold Cube in Oslo suggests a review of
posts that mention The Lost Crucible.
(The crucible in question is from a book by Katherine Neville,
The Eight . Any connection with Arthur Miller's play "The Crucible"
is purely coincidental.)
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Saturday, May 14, 2016
The Hourglass Code
A version of the I Ching’s Hexagram 19:
From Katherine Neville's The Eight , a book on the significance
of the date April 4 — the author's birthday —
|
The Eight by Katherine Neville —
“What does this have to do with why we’re here?” |
Related material: Posts now tagged Hourglass Code.
See also the hourglass in a search for Pilgrim's Progress Illustration.
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Monday, April 4, 2016
Cube for Berlin
Foreword by Sir Michael Atiyah —
"Poincaré said that science is no more a collection of facts
than a house is a collection of bricks. The facts have to be
ordered or structured, they have to fit a theory, a construct
(often mathematical) in the human mind. . . .
… Mathematics may be art, but to the general public it is
a black art, more akin to magic and mystery. This presents
a constant challenge to the mathematical community: to
explain how art fits into our subject and what we mean by beauty.
In attempting to bridge this divide I have always found that
architecture is the best of the arts to compare with mathematics.
The analogy between the two subjects is not hard to describe
and enables abstract ideas to be exemplified by bricks and mortar,
in the spirit of the Poincaré quotation I used earlier."
— Sir Michael Atiyah, "The Art of Mathematics"
in the AMS Notices , January 2010
Judy Bass, Los Angeles Times , March 12, 1989 —
"Like Rubik's Cube, The Eight demands to be pondered."
As does a figure from 1984, Cullinane's Cube —
For natural group actions on the Cullinane cube,
see "The Eightfold Cube" and
"A Simple Reflection Group of Order 168."
See also the recent post Cube Bricks 1984 —
Related remark from the literature —
Note that only the static structure is described by Felsner, not the
168 group actions discussed by Cullinane. For remarks on such
group actions in the literature, see "Cube Space, 1984-2003."
(From Anatomy of a Cube, Sept. 18, 2011.)
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Midnight for Paris
Illustration for Florence King's 1989 review of The Eight , a novel
by Katherine Neville that features prominently the date April 4.
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