Log24

The Jewel
in Venn’s Lotus

See also a prequel to
Ramanujan’s Flowering Tree—

Flowering Judas.

* “Every city has its gates, which need not be of stone. Nor need soldiers be upon them or watchers before them. At first, when cities were jewels in a dark and mysterious world, they tended to be round and they had protective walls. To enter, one had to pass through gates, the reward for which was shelter from the overwhelming forests and seas, the merciless and taxing expanse of greens, whites, and blues–wild and free–that stopped at the city walls.

In time the ramparts became higher and the gates more massive, until they simply disappeared and were replaced by barriers, subtler than stone, that girded every city like a crown and held in its spirit.”

— Mark Helprin, Winter’s Tale

This journal on Aug. 17, 2008:

That post linked to an earlier post illustrating
the triangle formed by Harvard, by the
Mystic River at Somerville, and
by Bunker Hill Community College–

That post also linked to the Wikipedia article
Triangulation, which now states that
“Some members of the U.S. Democratic
Party, in particular the left, insist that
triangulation is ‘dead.'”

Perhaps. Click the image below
for some background.

For a view of Somerville from Harvard for Zinn,
see May 31, 2006. For a view of Summertime
for Auchincloss, see the NY Times obituary
of a political figure who died on Sunday.

On that day, this journal pictured a different
metaphor from Robert Stone’s Father Egan—
the jewel in the lotus–

Euclid’s classic construction
of the equilateral triangle
offers a different view of
the jewel in Venn’s lotus–

For a more poetic approach to
this metaphor, see Log24 on
another Sunday– July 1, 2007.

Happy birthday, Rick Warren.