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Wednesday, July 30, 2003

Wednesday July 30, 2003

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:45 am

Transcendental Meditation

Transcendental Man
New books on
Ralph Waldo Emerson
for his bicentennial.
by John Updike

The bicentennial of Ralph Waldo Emerson was on May 25, 2003. For a commemoration of Emerson on that date, click on the picture below of Harvard University’s Room 305, Emerson Hall.

This will lead you to a discussion of the properties of a 5×5 array, or matrix, with a symbol of mystical unity at its center. Although this symbol of mystical unity, the number “1,” is not, pace the Shema, a transcendental number, the matrix is, as perhaps a sort of Emersonian compensation, what postmodernists would call phallologocentric. It is possible that Emerson is a saint; if so, his feast day (i.e., date of death), April 27, might reveal to us the sort of miraculous fact hoped for by Fritz Leiber in my previous entry. A check of my April 27 notes shows us, lo and behold, another phallologocentric 5×5 array, this one starring Warren Beatty. This rather peculiar coincidence is, perhaps, the sort of miracle appropriate to a saint who is, as this week’s politically correct New Yorker calls him, a Big Dead White Male.

Leiber’s fiction furnishes “a behind-the-scenes view of the time change wars.”

“It’s quarter to three…” — St. Frank Sinatra

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Monday, April 28, 2003

Monday April 28, 2003

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: 4403, Octad, Octad Generator — m759 @ 12:07 am

ART WARS:

Toward Eternity

April is Poetry Month, according to the Academy of American Poets. It is also Mathematics Awareness Month, funded by the National Security Agency; this year's theme is "Mathematics and Art."

Some previous journal entries for this month seem to be summarized by Emily Dickinson's remarks:

"Because I could not stop for Death–
He kindly stopped for me–
The Carriage held but just Ourselves–
And Immortality.

………………………
Since then–'tis Centuries–and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses' Heads
Were toward Eternity– "

Consider the following journal entries from April 7, 2003:

Math Awareness Month

April is Math Awareness Month.
This year's theme is "mathematics and art."

An Offer He Couldn't Refuse

Today's birthday: Francis Ford Coppola is 64.

"There is a pleasantly discursive treatment
of Pontius Pilate's unanswered question
'What is truth?'."

— H. S. M. Coxeter, 1987, introduction to Richard J. Trudeau's remarks on the "Story Theory" of truth as opposed to the "Diamond Theory" of truth in The Non-Euclidean Revolution

From a website titled simply Sinatra:

"Then came From Here to Eternity. Sinatra lobbied hard for the role, practically getting on his knees to secure the role of the street smart punk G.I. Maggio. He sensed this was a role that could revive his career, and his instincts were right. There are lots of stories about how Columbia Studio head Harry Cohn was convinced to give the role to Sinatra, the most famous of which is expanded upon in the horse's head sequence in The Godfather. Maybe no one will know the truth about that. The one truth we do know is that the feisty New Jersey actor won the Academy Award as Best Supporting Actor for his work in From Here to Eternity. It was no looking back from then on."

From a note on geometry of April 28, 1985:

The "horse's head" figure above is from a note I wrote on this date 18 years ago. The following journal entry from April 4, 2003, gives some details:

The Eight

Today, the fourth day of the fourth month, plays an important part in Katherine Neville's The Eight. Let us honor this work, perhaps the greatest bad novel of the twentieth century, by reflecting on some properties of the number eight. Consider eight rectangular cells arranged in an array of four rows and two columns. Let us label these cells with coordinates, then apply a permutation.

Decimal
labeling

Binary
labeling

Algebraic
labeling

Permutation
labeling

The resulting set of arrows that indicate the movement of cells in a permutation (known as a Singer 7-cycle) outlines rather neatly, in view of the chess theme of The Eight, a knight. This makes as much sense as anything in Neville's fiction, and has the merit of being based on fact. It also, albeit rather crudely, illustrates the "Mathematics and Art" theme of this year's Mathematics Awareness Month.

The visual appearance of the "knight" permutation is less important than the fact that it leads to a construction (due to R. T. Curtis) of the Mathieu group M₂₄ (via the Curtis Miracle Octad Generator), which in turn leads logically to the Monster group and to related "moonshine" investigations in the theory of modular functions. See also "Pieces of Eight," by Robert L. Griess.

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Friday, April 4, 2003

Friday April 4, 2003

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: 4403, Octad, Octad Generator — m759 @ 3:33 pm

The Eight

Decimal
labeling

Binary
labeling

Algebraic
labeling

IMAGE- Knight figure for April 4
Permutation
labeling

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Friday, November 8, 2002

Friday November 8, 2002

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 3:33 am

Religious Symbolism
at Princeton

In memory of Steve McQueen (“The Great Escape” and “The Thomas Crown Affair”… see preceding entry) and of Rudolf Augstein (publisher of Der Spiegel), both of whom died on November 7 (in 1980 and 2002, respectively), in memory of the following residents of

The Princeton Cemetery
of the Nassau Presbyterian Church
Established 1757

SYLVIA BEACH (1887-1962), whose father was pastor of the First Presbyterian Church, founded Shakespeare & Company, a Paris bookshop which became a focus for struggling expatriate writers. In 1922 she published James Joyce’s Ulysses when others considered it obscene, and she defiantly closed her shop in 1941 in protest against the Nazi occupation.

KURT GÖDEL (1906-1978), a world-class mathematician famous for a vast array of major contributions to logic, was a longtime professor at the Institute for Advanced Study, founded in 1930. He was a corecipient of the Einstein Award in 1951.

JOHN (HENRY) O’HARA (1905-1970) was a voluminous and much-honored writer. His novels, Appointment in Samarra (1934) and Ten North Frederick (1955), and his collection of short stories, Pal Joey (1940), are among his best-known works.

and of the long and powerful association of Princeton University with the Presbyterian Church, as well as the theological perspective of Carl Jung in Man and His Symbols, I offer the following “windmill,” taken from the Presbyterian Creedal Standards website, as a memorial:

The background music Les Moulins de Mon Coeur, selected yesterday morning in memory of Steve McQueen, continues to be appropriate.

“A is for Anna.”
— James Joyce

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Saturday, July 20, 2002

Saturday July 20, 2002

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Change Logos, Eightfold Cube, four-set, Map Systems, Octad, Octad Generator, Strange Change — m759 @ 10:13 pm

ABSTRACT: Finite projective geometry explains the surprising symmetry properties of some simple graphic designs– found, for instance, in quilts. Links are provided for applications to sporadic simple groups (via the "Miracle Octad Generator" of R. T. Curtis), to the connection between orthogonal Latin squares and projective spreads, and to symmetry of Walsh functions.

We regard the four-diamond figure D above as a 4×4 array of two-color diagonally-divided square tiles.

Let G be the group of 322,560 permutations of these 16 tiles generated by arbitrarily mixing random permutations of rows and of columns with random permutations of the four 2×2 quadrants.

THEOREM: Every G-image of D (as at right, below) has some ordinary or color-interchange symmetry.

Example:

For an animated version, click here.

Remarks:

Some of the patterns resulting from the action of G on D have been known for thousands of years. (See Jablan, Symmetry and Ornament, Ch. 2.6.) It is perhaps surprising that the patterns' interrelationships and symmetries can be explained fully only by using mathematics discovered just recently (relative to the patterns' age)– in particular, the theory of automorphism groups of finite geometries.

Using this theory, we can summarize the patterns' properties by saying that G is isomorphic to the affine group A on the linear 4-space over GF(2) and that the 35 structures of the 840 = 35 x 24 G-images of D are isomorphic to the 35 lines in the 3-dimensional projective space over GF(2).

This can be seen by viewing the 35 structures as three-sets of line diagrams, based on the three partitions of the four-set of square two-color tiles into two two-sets, and indicating the locations of these two-sets of tiles within the 4×4 patterns. The lines of the line diagrams may be added in a binary fashion (i.e., 1+1=0). Each three-set of line diagrams sums to zero– i.e., each diagram in a three-set is the binary sum of the other two diagrams in the set. Thus, the 35 three-sets of line diagrams correspond to the 35 three-point lines of the finite projective 3-space PG(3,2).

For example, here are the line diagrams for the figures above:

Shown below are the 15 possible line diagrams resulting from row/column/quadrant permutations. These 15 diagrams may, as noted above, be regarded as the 15 points of the projective 3-space PG(3,2).

The symmetry of the line diagrams accounts for the symmetry of the two-color patterns. (A proof shows that a 2nx2n two-color triangular half-squares pattern with such line diagrams must have a 2×2 center with a symmetry, and that this symmetry must be shared by the entire pattern.)

Among the 35 structures of the 840 4×4 arrays of tiles, orthogonality (in the sense of Latin-square orthogonality) corresponds to skewness of lines in the finite projective space PG(3,2). This was stated by the author in a 1978 note. (The note apparently had little effect. A quarter-century later, P. Govaerts, D. Jungnickel, L. Storme, and J. A. Thas wrote that skew (i.e., nonintersecting) lines in a projective space seem "at first sight not at all related" to orthogonal Latin squares.)

We can define sums and products so that the G-images of D generate an ideal (1024 patterns characterized by all horizontal or vertical "cuts" being uninterrupted) of a ring of 4096 symmetric patterns. There is an infinite family of such "diamond" rings, isomorphic to rings of matrices over GF(4).

The proof uses a decomposition technique for functions into a finite field that might be of more general use.

The underlying geometry of the 4×4 patterns is closely related to the Miracle Octad Generator of R. T. Curtis– used in the construction of the Steiner system S(5,8,24)– and hence is also related to the Leech lattice, which, as Walter Feit has remarked, "is a blown up version of S(5,8,24)."

For a movable JavaScript version of these 4×4 patterns, see The Diamond 16 Puzzle.

The above is an expanded version of Abstract 79T-A37, "Symmetry invariance in a diamond ring," by Steven H. Cullinane, Notices of the American Mathematical Society, February 1979, pages A-193, 194.

For a discussion of other cases of the theorem, click here.

Related pages:

The Diamond 16 Puzzle

Diamond Theory in 1937:
A Brief Historical Note

Notes on Finite Geometry

Geometry of the 4×4 Square

Binary Coordinate Systems

The 35 Lines of PG(3,2)

Map Systems:
Function Decomposition over a Finite Field

The Diamond Theorem–
The 2×2, the 2x2x2, the 4×4, and the 4x4x4 Cases

Diamond Theory

Latin-Square Geometry