The second Logos figure in the previous post
summarized affine group actions on partitions
that generate a group of about 1.3 trillion
permutations of a 4x4x4 cube (shown below)—
Click for further details.
The second Logos figure in the previous post
summarized affine group actions on partitions
that generate a group of about 1.3 trillion
permutations of a 4x4x4 cube (shown below)—
Click for further details.
This new URL will forward to http://m759.net/wordpress/?s=Solomon+Cube.
The new URL topdot.art refers to depictions of
the top dot (or point, or vertex) in a vertex-edge diagram
of a square, cube, or hypercube that has been rotated
so that the bottom dot (or point, or vertex), represented by
all-zero coordinates in a labeling, is at the bottom …
and the top dot (or point, or vertex), represented by
all-one coordinates in a labeling, is at the top.
See (for instance) the Log24 post Physicality (Oct. 5, 2022).
Related philosophical remarks: Einheit .
"Infinity Cube" … hinged plaything, for sale —
"Eightfold Cube" … un hinged concept, not for sale—
See as well yesterday's Trickster Fuge ,
and a 1906 discussion of the eightfold cube:
For the late Brian O'Doherty, from posts now tagged "Pless Birthday 2022" —
This post was suggested by an obituary of O'Doherty and by
"The Life and Work of Vera Stepen Pless" in
Notices of the American Mathematical Society , December 2022.
The title is by Henry James.*
For examples, see the Sept. 19 webpage below . . .
… and, in this journal, posts from that same date now tagged Cube Codes.
*
Cartoon version of George Eliot, author of Middlemarch ,
and Ada Lovelace, programming pioneer —
See as well an earlier vision of a data cube for mythologies
by Claude Lévi-Strauss —
Name Tag | .Space | .Group | .Art |
---|---|---|---|
Box4 |
2×2 square representing the four-point finite affine geometry AG(2,2). (Box4.space) |
S4 = AGL(2,2) (Box4.group) |
(Box4.art) |
Box6 |
3×2 (3-row, 2-column) rectangular array representing the elements of an arbitrary 6-set. |
S6 | |
Box8 | 2x2x2 cube or 4×2 (4-row, 2-column) array. | S8 or A8 or AGL(3,2) of order 1344, or GL(3,2) of order 168 | |
Box9 | The 3×3 square. | AGL(2,3) or GL(2,3) | |
Box12 | The 12 edges of a cube, or a 4×3 array for picturing the actions of the Mathieu group M12. | Symmetries of the cube or elements of the group M12 | |
Box13 | The 13 symmetry axes of the cube. | Symmetries of the cube. | |
Box15 |
The 15 points of PG(3,2), the projective geometry of 3 dimensions over the 2-element Galois field. |
Collineations of PG(3,2) | |
Box16 |
The 16 points of AG(4,2), the affine geometry of 4 dimensions over the 2-element Galois field. |
AGL(4,2), the affine group of |
|
Box20 | The configuration representing Desargues's theorem. | ||
Box21 | The 21 points and 21 lines of PG(2,4). | ||
Box24 | The 24 points of the Steiner system S(5, 8, 24). | ||
Box25 | A 5×5 array representing PG(2,5). | ||
Box27 |
The 3-dimensional Galois affine space over the 3-element Galois field GF(3). |
||
Box28 | The 28 bitangents of a plane quartic curve. | ||
Box32 |
Pair of 4×4 arrays representing orthogonal Latin squares. |
Used to represent elements of AGL(4,2) |
|
Box35 |
A 5-row-by-7-column array representing the 35 lines in the finite projective space PG(3,2) |
PGL(3,2), order 20,160 | |
Box36 | Eurler's 36-officer problem. | ||
Box45 | The 45 Pascal points of the Pascal configuration. | ||
Box48 | The 48 elements of the group AGL(2,3). | AGL(2,3). | |
Box56 |
The 56 three-sets within an 8-set or |
||
Box60 | The Klein configuration. | ||
Box64 | Solomon's cube. |
— Steven H. Cullinane, March 26-27, 2022
"… Mathematics may be art, but to the general public it is
a black art, more akin to magic and mystery."
— Sir Michael Atiyah, quoted here on April 4, 2016.
Supercube.space, supercube.group, supercube.art.
See also the Supercube channel at are.na.
The new URL supercube.space forwards to http://box759.wordpress.com/.
The term supercube is from a 1982 article by Solomon W. Golomb.
The related new URL supercube.group forwards to a page that
describes how the 2x2x2 (or eightfold, or "super") cube's natural
underlying automorphism group is Klein's simple group of order 168.
For further context, see the new URL supercube.art.
For some background, see the phrase Cube Space in this journal.
" Welcher Art ist die ursprüngliche Einheit,
daß sie sich in diese Scheidung auseinanderwirft,
und in welchem Sinn sind die Geschiedenen
hier als Wesung der Ab-gründigkeit gerade einig?
Hier kann es sich nicht um irgend eine »Dialektik«
handeln, sondern nur um die Wesung des Grundes
(der Wahrheit also) selbst."
"Before time began, there was the Cube." — Optimus Prime
Shown below is an illustration from "The Puzzle Layout Problem" —
Exercise: Using the above numerals 1 through 24
(with 23 as 0 and 24 as ∞) to represent the points
∞, 0, 1, 2, 3 … 22 of the projective line over GF(23),
reposition the labels 1 through 24 in the above illustration
so that they appropriately* illustrate the cube-parts discussed
by Iain Aitchison in his March 2018 Hiroshima slides on
cube-part permutations by the Mathieu group M24.
A note for Northrop Frye —
Interpenetration in the eightfold cube — the three midplanes —
A deeper example of interpenetration:
Aitchison has shown that the Mathieu group M24 has a natural
action on the 24 center points of the subsquares on the eightfold
cube's six faces (four such points on each of the six faces). Thus
the 759 octads of the Steiner system S(5, 8, 24) interpenetrate
on the surface of the cube.
* "Appropriately" — I.e. , so that the Aitchison cube octads correspond
exactly, via the projective-point labels, to the Curtis MOG octads.
New York Review of Books , Dec. 16, 2021 issue —
Lorrie Moore on the documentary series "Couples Therapy" —
"Few of the people sitting on the couch avoid the cliché of
one person (a man) playing fruitlessly with a plastic puzzle
while the other speaks tearfully and avails herself of a
Kleenex box. In season 1, there is literally a Rubik’s cube,
and no one ever solves it, an unfortunate but apt metaphor.
During one session, when the cube has been placed out of reach,
one of the husbands gets up to look for it, finding it on a shelf."
See also . . .
"The bond with reality is cut." — Hans Freudenthal
From "A Four-Color Theorem:
Function Decomposition Over a Finite Field" —
Related material —
An image from Monday's post
"Scholastic Observation" —
“WHEN I IMAGINE THE CUBE, I see a structure in motion.
I see the framework of its edges, its corners, and its flexible joints,
and the continuous transformations in front of me (before you start
to worry, I assure you that I can freeze it anytime I like). I don’t see
a static object but a system of dynamic relations. In fact, this is only
half of that system. The other half is the person who handles it.
Just like everything else in our world, a system is defined by
its place within a network of relations—to humans, first of all.”
— Rubik, Erno. Cubed (p. 165). Flatiron Books. Kindle Ed., 2020.
Compare and contrast — Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament.
Promotional material —
“Did you buckle up?” — Harlan Kane
The publication date of The Enigma Cube reported above was February 13, 2020.
Related material — Log24 posts around that date now tagged The Reality Bond.
See also this journal on November 29, 2011 —The Flight from Ennui.
Related illustration from earlier in 2011 —
See also this journal on 20 Sept. 2011 — Relativity Problem Revisited —
as well as Congregated Light.
Exercise: Use the Guitart 7-cycles below to relate the 56 triples
in an 8-set (such as the eightfold cube) to the 56 triangles in
a well-known Klein-quartic hyperbolic-plane tiling. Then use
the correspondence of the triples with the 56 spreads of PG(3,2)
to construct M24.
Click image below to download a Guitart PowerPoint presentation.
See as well earlier posts also tagged Triangles, Spreads, Mathieu.
Stevens's Omega and Alpha (see previous post) suggest a review.
Omega — The Berlekamp Garden. See Misère Play (April 8, 2019).
Alpha — The Kinder Garten. See Eighfold Cube.
Illustrations —
The sculpture above illustrates Klein's order-168 simple group.
So does the sculpture below.
Cube Bricks 1984 —
See as well an obituary for Mrs. Wertham from 1987.
Related art —
Friday, July 11, 2014
|
For further details, search the Web for "Wertham Professor" + Eck.
Metaphysical conceit | literature | Britannica.com
|
This post's title refers to a metaphysical conceit
in the previous post, Desperately Seeking Clarity.
Related material —
The source of the above mystical octahedron —
See also Jung's Imago Dei in this journal.
The opening lines of Eliot's Four Quartets —
"Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past."
Perhaps.
Those who prefer geometry to rhetoric may also prefer
to Eliot's lines the immortal opening of the Transformers saga —
"Before time began, there was the Cube."
One version of the Cube —
Clicking on Zong in the above post leads to a 2005 article
in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society .
See also the eightfold cube and interality .
Click to enlarge:
Above are the 7 frames of an animated gif from a Wikipedia article.
* For the Furey of the title, see a July 20 Quanta Magazine piece —
See also the eightfold cube in this journal.
"Before time began . . . ." — Optimus Prime
From a post of July 25, 2008, “56 Triangles,” on the Klein quartic
and the eightfold cube —
“Baez’s discussion says that the Klein quartic’s 56 triangles
can be partitioned into 7 eight-triangle Egan ‘cubes’ that
correspond to the 7 points of the Fano plane in such a way
that automorphisms of the Klein quartic correspond to
automorphisms of the Fano plane. Show that the
56 triangles within the eightfold cube can also be partitioned
into 7 eight-triangle sets that correspond to the 7 points of the
Fano plane in such a way that (affine) transformations of the
eightfold cube induce (projective) automorphisms of the Fano plane.”
Related material from 1975 —
More recently …
The title was suggested by the name "ARTI" of an artificial
intelligence in the new film 2036: Origin Unknown.
The Eye of ARTI —
See also a post of May 19, "Uh-Oh" —
— and a post of June 6, "Geometry for Goyim" —
Mystery box merchandise from the 2011 J. J. Abrams film Super 8
An arty fact I prefer, suggested by the triangular computer-eye forms above —
This is from the July 29, 2012, post The Galois Tesseract.
See as well . . .
A star figure and the Galois quaternion.
The square root of the former is the latter.
See also a passage quoted here a year ago today
(May the Fourth, "Star Wars Day") —
For Greta Gerwig and Saoirse Ronan —
See also a Log24 post from the above Cube Theory date —
April 12, 2016 — Lyrics for a Cartoon Graveyard — as well as . . .
James Propp in the current Math Horizons on the eightfold cube —
For another puerile approach to the eightfold cube,
see Cube Space, 1984-2003 (Oct. 24, 2008).
“We have now reached
a point where we see
not the art but the space first….
An image comes to mind
of a white, ideal space
that, more than any single picture,
may be the archetypal image
of 20th-century art.”
“Space: what you
damn well have to see.”
— James Joyce, Ulysses
Another view of the previous post's art space —
More generally, see Solomon's Cube in Log24.
See also a remark from Stack Exchange in yesterday's post Backstory,
and the Stack Exchange math logo below, which recalls the above
cube arrangement from "Affine groups on small binary spaces" (1984).
"And as the characters in the meme twitch into the abyss
that is the sky, this meme will disappear into whatever
internet abyss swallowed MySpace."
—Staff writer Kamila Czachorowski, Harvard Crimson today
From Log24 posts tagged Art Space —
From a recent paper on Kummer varieties,
arXiv:1208.1229v3 [math.AG] 12 Jun 2013,
“The Universal Kummer Threefold,” by
Qingchun Ren, Steven V Sam, Gus Schrader, and
Bernd Sturmfels —
Two such considerations —
“The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church
is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare to-morrow
at breakfast.”
— G. K. Chesterton
Or Sunday dinner.
Platonic |
Shakespearean |
Not to mention Euclid and Picasso. | |
|
|
In the above pictures, Euclid is represented by |
A KUNSTforum.as article online today (translation by Google) —
Update of Sept. 7, 2016: The corrections have been made,
except for the misspelling "Cullinan," which was caused by
Google translation, not by KUNSTforum.
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.)
The following page quotes "Raiders of the Lost Crucible,"
a Log24 post from Halloween 2015.
From KUNSTforum.as, a Norwegian art quarterly, issue no. 1 of 2016.
Related posts — See Lyche Eightfold.
Related aesthetics —
"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
“… the A B C of being….” — Wallace Stevens
Scholia —
Compare to my own later note, from March 4, 2010 —
“It seems that Guitart discovered these ‘A, B, C’ generators first,
though he did not display them in their natural setting,
the eightfold cube.” — Borromean Generators (Log24, Oct. 19)
See also Raiders of the Lost Crucible (Halloween 2015)
and “Guitar Solo” from the 2015 CMA Awards on ABC.
An eightfold cube appears in this detail
of a photo by Josefine Lyche of her
installation "4D Ambassador" at the
Norwegian Sculpture Biennial 2015 —
(Detail from private Instagram photo.)
Catalog description of installation —
Google Translate version —
In a small bedroom to Foredragssalen populate
Josefine Lyche exhibition with a group sculptures
that are part of the work group 4D Ambassador
(2014-2015). Together they form an installation
where she uses light to amplify the feeling of
stepping into a new dimension, for which the title
suggests, this "ambassadors" for a dimension we
normally do not have access to. "Ambassadors"
physical forms presents nonphysical phenomena.
Lyches works have in recent years been placed
in something one might call an "esoteric direction"
in contemporary art, and defines itself this
sculpture group humorous as "glam-minimalist."
She has in many of his works returned to basic
geometric shapes, with hints to the occult,
"new space-age", mathematics and where
everything in between.
See also Lyche + "4D Ambassador" in this journal and
her website page with a 2012 version of that title.
For Aaron Sorkin and Walter Isaacson —
Related material —
Bauhaus Cube, Design Cube, and
Nabokov's Transparent Things .
Click to enlarge:
For the hypercube as a vector space over the two-element field GF(2),
see a search in this journal for Hypercube + Vector + Space .
For connections with the related symplectic geometry, see Symplectic
in this journal and Notes on Groups and Geometry, 1978-1986.
For the above 1976 hypercube (or tesseract ), see "Diamond Theory,"
by Steven H. Cullinane, Computer Graphics and Art , Vol. 2, No. 1,
Feb. 1977, pp. 5-7.
Spielerei —
"On the most recent visit, Arthur had given him
a brightly colored cube, with sides you could twist
in all directions, a new toy that had just come onto
the market."
— Daniel Kehlmann, F: A Novel (2014),
translated from the German by
Carol Brown Janeway
Nicht Spielerei —
A figure from this journal at 2 AM ET
on Monday, August 3, 2015
Also on August 3 —
FRANKFURT — "Johanna Quandt, the matriarch of the family
that controls the automaker BMW and one of the wealthiest
people in Germany, died on Monday in Bad Homburg, Germany.
She was 89."
MANHATTAN — "Carol Brown Janeway, a Scottish-born
publishing executive, editor and award-winning translator who
introduced American readers to dozens of international authors,
died on Monday in Manhattan. She was 71."
Related material — Heisenberg on beauty, Munich, 1970
Omega is a Greek letter, Ω , used in
mathematics to denote a set on which
a group acts.
The incidences of points and planes in the
Möbius 84 configuration (8 points and 8 planes,
with 4 points on each plane and 4 planes on each point),
were described by Coxeter in a 1950 paper.*
A table from Monday's post summarizes Coxeter's
remarks, which described the incidences in
spatial terms, with the points and planes as the vertices
and face-planes of two mutually inscribed tetrahedra —
Monday's post, "Gallucci's Möbius Configuration,"
may not be completely intelligible unless one notices
that Coxeter has drawn some of the intersections in his
Fig. 24, a schematic representation of the point-plane
incidences, as dotless, and some as hollow dots. The figure,
"Gallucci's version of Möbius's 84," is shown below.
The hollow dots, representing the 8 points (as opposed
to the 8 planes ) of the configuration, are highlighted in blue.
Here a plane (represented by a dotless intersection) contains
the four points that are represented in the square array as lying
in the same row or same column as the plane.
The above Möbius incidences appear also much earlier in
Coxeter's paper, in figures 6 and 5, where they are shown
as describing the structure of a hypercube.
In figures 6 and 5, the dotless intersections representing
planes have been replaced by solid dots. The hollow dots
have again been highlighted in blue.
Figures 6 and 5 demonstrate the fact that adjacency in the set of
16 vertices of a hypercube is isomorphic to adjacency in the set
of 16 subsquares of a square 4×4 array, provided that opposite
sides of the array are identified, as in Fig. 6. The digits in
Coxeter's labels above may be viewed as naming the positions
of the 1's in (0,1) vectors (x4, x3, x2, x1) over the two-element
Galois field.† In that context, the 4×4 array may be called, instead
of a Möbius hypercube , a Galois tesseract .
* "Self-Dual Configurations and Regular Graphs,"
Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society,
Vol. 56 (1950), pp. 413-455
† The subscripts' usual 1-2-3-4 order is reversed as a reminder
that such a vector may be viewed as labeling a binary number
from 0 through 15, or alternately as labeling a polynomial in
the 16-element Galois field GF(24). See the Log24 post
Vector Addition in a Finite Field (Jan. 5, 2013).
Tom Hanks as Indiana Langdon in Raiders of the Lost Articulation :
An unarticulated (but colored) cube:
A 2x2x2 articulated cube:
A 4x4x4 articulated cube built from subcubes like
the one viewed by Tom Hanks above:
A screenshot of the new page on the eightfold cube at Froebel Decade:
Click screenshot to enlarge.
The New Yorker on Cubism:
"The style wasn’t new, exactly— or even really a style,
in its purest instances— though it would spawn no end
of novelties in art and design. Rather, it stripped naked
certain characteristics of all pictures. Looking at a Cubist
work, you are forced to see how you see. This may be
gruelling, a gymnasium workout for eye and mind.
It pays off in sophistication."
— Online "Culture Desk" weblog, posted today by Peter Schjeldahl
Non-style from 1911:
See also Cube Symmetry Planes in this journal.
A comment at The New Yorker related to Schjeldahl's phrase "stripped naked"—
"Conceptualism is the least seductive modern-art movement."
POSTED 4/11/2013, 3:54:37 PM BY CHRISKELLEY
(The "conceptualism" link was added to the quoted comment.)
Continued from April 2, 2012.
Some predecessors of the Cullinane design cubes of 1984
that lack the Cullinane cubes' symmetry properties—
Kohs cubes (see 1920 article)
Wechsler cubes (see Wechsler in this journal), and
Horowitz cubes (see links below).
Yesterday's post Child's Play displayed a cube formed
by a Hasse diagram of the 8 subsets of a 3-set.*
This suggests a review of a post from last January—
* See a comment on yesterday's post relating it to earlier,
very similar, remarks by Margaret Masterman.
I was unaware yesterday that those remarks exist.
A search today (Élie Cartan's birthday) for material related to triality*
yielded references to something that has been called a Bhargava cube .
Two pages from a 2006 paper by Bhargava—
Bhargava's reference [4] above for "the story of the cube" is to…
Higher Composition Laws I:
A New View on Gauss Composition,
and Quadratic Generalizations
Manjul Bhargava
The Annals of Mathematics
Second Series, Vol. 159, No. 1 (Jan., 2004), pp. 217-250
Published by: Annals of Mathematics
Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3597249
A brief account in the context of embedding problems (click to enlarge)—
For more ways of slicing a cube,
see The Eightfold Cube —
* Note (1) some remarks by Tony Smith
related to the above Dynkin diagram
and (2) another colorful variation on the diagram.
The following picture provides a new visual approach to
the order-8 quaternion group's automorphisms.
Click the above image for some context.
Here the cube is called "eightfold" because the eight vertices,
like the eight subcubes of a 2×2×2 cube,* are thought of as
independently movable. See The Eightfold Cube.
See also…
Related material: Robin Chapman and Karen E. Smith
on the quaternion group's automorphisms.
* See Margaret Wertheim's Christmas Eve remarks on mathematics
and the following eightfold cube from an institute she co-founded—
Photo by Norman Brosterman
fom the Inventing Kindergarten
exhibit at The Institute for Figuring
(co-founded by Margaret Wertheim)
R.D. Carmichael’s seminal 1931 paper on tactical configurations suggests
a search for later material relating such configurations to block designs.
Such a search yields the following—
“… it seems that the relationship between
BIB [balanced incomplete block ] designs
and tactical configurations, and in particular,
the Steiner system, has been overlooked.”
— D. A. Sprott, U. of Toronto, 1955
The figure by Cullinane included above shows a way to visualize Sprott’s remarks.
For the group actions described by Cullinane, see “The Eightfold Cube” and
“A Simple Reflection Group of Order 168.”
Update of 7:42 PM Sept. 18, 2011—
From a Summer 2011 course on discrete structures at a Berlin website—
A different illustration of the eightfold cube as the Steiner system S(3, 4, 8)—
Note that only the static structure is described by Felsner, not the
168 group actions discussed (as above) by Cullinane. For remarks on
such group actions in the literature, see “Cube Space, 1984-2003.”
Yesterday’s midday post, borrowing a phrase from the theology of Marvel Comics,
offered Rubik’s mechanical contrivance as a rather absurd “Cosmic Cube.”
A simpler candidate for the “Cube” part of that phrase:
The Eightfold Cube
As noted elsewhere, a simple reflection group* of order 168 acts naturally on this structure.
“Because of their truly fundamental role in mathematics,
even the simplest diagrams concerning finite reflection groups
(or finite mirror systems, or root systems—
the languages are equivalent) have interpretations
of cosmological proportions.”
— Alexandre V. Borovik in “Coxeter Theory: The Cognitive Aspects“
Borovik has a such a diagram—
The planes in Borovik’s figure are those separating the parts of the eightfold cube above.
In Coxeter theory, these are Euclidean hyperplanes. In the eightfold cube, they represent three of seven projective points that are permuted by the above group of order 168.
In light of Borovik’s remarks, the eightfold cube might serve to illustrate the “Cosmic” part of the Marvel Comics phrase.
For some related theological remarks, see Cube Trinity in this journal.
Happy St. Augustine’s Day.
* I.e., one generated by reflections : group actions that fix a hyperplane pointwise. In the eightfold cube, viewed as a vector space of 3 dimensions over the 2-element Galois field, these hyperplanes are certain sets of four subcubes.
Prequel — (Click to enlarge)
Background —
See also Rubik in this journal.
* For the title, see Groups Acting.
The New York Times has a skateboarder obit with a URL date of July 9.
Here is an earlier version from the LA Times—
By Keith Thursby, Los Angeles Times
Chris Cahill, one of the original Dogtown Z-Boys
who brought seismic changes to skateboarding
with their style and attitude, has died. He was 54.
Cahill was found June 24 at his Los Angeles home,
said Larry Dietz of the Los Angeles County
coroner's office. A cause of death has not been
determined and tests are ongoing, Dietz said.
Related material from Midsummer Day, June 24, the day Cahill was found dead—
The Gleaming and The Cube.
An illustration from the latter—
The above was adapted from a 1996 cover—
Vintage Books, July 1996. Cover: Evan Gaffney.
For the significance of the flames,
see PyrE in the book. For the significance
of the cube in the altered cover, see
The 2×2×2 Cube and The Diamond Archetype.
See the signature link in last night's post for a representation of Madison Avenue.
For a representation by Madison Avenue, see today's New York Times—
"As a movement Pop Art came and went in a flash, but it was the kind of flash that left everything changed. The art public was now a different public— larger, to be sure, but less serious, less introspective, less willing or able to distinguish between achievement and its trashy simulacrum. Moreover, everything connected with the life of art— everything, anyway, that might have been expected to offer some resistance to this wholesale vulgarization and demoralization— was now cheapened and corrupted. The museums began their rapid descent into show biz and the retail trade. Their exhibitions were now mounted like Broadway shows, complete with set designers and lighting consultants, and their directors pressed into service as hucksters, promoting their wares in radio and television spots and selling their facilities for cocktail parties and other entertainments, while their so-called education programs likewise degenerated into sundry forms of entertainment and promotion. The critics were co-opted, the art magazines commercialized, and the academy, which had once taken a certain pride in remaining aloof from the blandishments of the cultural marketplace, now proved eager to join the crowd— for there was no longer any standard in the name of which a sellout could be rejected. When the boundary separating art and fashion was breached, so was the dividing line between high art and popular culture, and upon all those institutions and professions which had been painstakingly created to preserve high art from the corruptions of popular culture. The effect was devastating. Some surrendered their standards with greater alacrity than others, but the drift was unmistakable and all in the same direction— and the momentum has only accelerated with the passage of time."
— Hilton Kramer, The Triumph of Modernism: The Art World, 1985-2005 , publ. by Ivan R. Dee on Oct. 26, 2006, pp. 146-147
Related material— Rubik in this journal, Exorcist in this journal, and For the Class of '11.
The title refers not to numbers of the form p 3, p prime, but to geometric cubes with p 3 subcubes.
Such cubes are natural models for the finite vector spaces acted upon by general linear groups viewed as permutation groups of degree (not order ) p 3.
For the case p =2, see The Eightfold Cube.
For the case p =3, see the "External links" section of the Nov. 30, 2009, version of Wikipedia article "General Linear Group." (That is the version just prior to the Dec. 14, 2009, revision by anonymous user "Greenfernglade.")
For symmetries of group actions for larger primes, see the related 1985 remark* on two -dimensional linear groups—
"Actions of GL(2,p ) on a p ×p coordinate-array
have the same sorts of symmetries,
where p is any odd prime."
It was a dark and stormy night…
— Page 180, Logicomix
“… the class of reflections is larger in some sense over an arbitrary field than over a characteristic zero field.”
– Julia Hartmann and Anne V. Shepler, “Jacobians of Reflection Groups”
For some context, see the small cube in “A Simple Reflection Group of Order 168.”
See also the larger cube in “Many Dimensions” + Whitehead in this journal (scroll down to get past the current post).
That search refers to a work by Whitehead published in 1906, the year at the top of the Logicomix page above—
A related remark on axiomatics that has metaphysical overtones suitable for a dark and stormy night—
“An adequate understanding of mathematical identity requires a missing theory that will account for the relationships between formal systems that describe the same items. At present, such relationships can at best be heuristically described in terms that invoke some notion of an ‘intelligent user standing outside the system.'”
— Gian-Carlo Rota, “Syntax, Semantics, and…” in Indiscrete Thoughts . See also the original 1988 article.
"An image comes to mind of a white, ideal space
that, more than any single picture, may be
the archetypal image of 20th-century art."
"May be" —
Image from this journal
at noon (EST) Tuesday
"The geometry of unit cubes is a meeting point
of several different subjects in mathematics."
— Chuanming Zong
"A meeting point" —
The above death reportedly occurred "early Wednesday in Beijing."
Another meeting point —
(Click on logo and on meeting image for more details.)
See also "no ordinary venue."
There is more than one way
to look at a cube.
From Cambridge U. Press on Feb. 20, 2006 —
and from this journal on June 30, 2010 —
In memory of Wu Guanzhong, Chinese artist
who died in Beijing on June 25, 2010 —
See also this journal on Feb. 20, 2006
(the day The Cube was published).
Keanu vs. the Devil, continued
Al Pacino and Keanu Reeves in Devil's Advocate
For Keanu —
For Keanu's mentor —
… There is a Cave
Within the Mount of God, fast by his Throne,
Where light and darkness in perpetual round
Lodge and dislodge by turns, which makes through Heav'n
Grateful vicissitude, like Day and Night….
— Paradise Lost , by John Milton
Click on figure for details. |
Al Pacino in Devil's Advocate |
A search for “Chinese Cube” (based on the the previous entry’s title) reveals the existence of a most interesting character, who…
“… has attempted in his books to produce a Science and Art of Reasoning using the simplest of the Platonic solids, the Cube. [His] model also parallels, in some ways, the Cube of Space constructed from the Sepher Yetzirah’s attributions for the Hebrew letters and their direction. [He] elucidated his theories at great length….”
— More…
For related remarks, see the link to Solomon’s Cube from the previous entry.
Then of course there is…
Click on figure for details.
From the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, Jan. 26, 2005:
What is known about unit cubes
by Chuanming Zong, Peking University
Abstract: Unit cubes, from any point of view, are among the simplest and the most important objects in n-dimensional Euclidean space. In fact, as one will see from this survey, they are not simple at all….
From Log24, now:
What is known about the 4×4×4 cube
by Steven H. Cullinane, unaffiliated
Abstract: The 4×4×4 cube, from one point of view, is among the simplest and the most important objects in n-dimensional binary space. In fact, as one will see from the links below, it is not simple at all.
The Klein Correspondence, Penrose Space-Time, and a Finite Model
Related material:
Monday's entry Just Say NO and a poem by Stevens,
From Log24 posts tagged Art Space —
From a paper on Kummer varieties,
arXiv:1208.1229v3 [math.AG] 12 Jun 2013,
“The Universal Kummer Threefold,” by
Qingchun Ren, Steven V Sam, Gus Schrader,
and Bernd Sturmfels —
Two such considerations —
"Those early works are succinct and uncompromising
in how they give shape to the philosophical perplexities
of form and idea…."
J. J. Charlesworth, artnet news, Dec. 16, 2014
"Form" and "idea" are somewhat synonymous,
as opposed to "form" and "substance." A reading:
The Dream of the Expanded Field continues…
From Klein's 1893 Lectures on Mathematics —
"The varieties introduced by Wirtinger may be called Kummer varieties…."
— E. Spanier, 1956
From this journal on March 10, 2013 —
From a recent paper on Kummer varieties,
arXiv:1208.1229v3 [math.AG] 12 Jun 2013,
"The Universal Kummer Threefold," by
Qingchun Ren, Steven V Sam, Gus Schrader, and Bernd Sturmfels —
Two such considerations —
Update of 10 PM ET March 7, 2014 —
The following slides by one of the "Kummer Threefold" authors give
some background related to the above 64-point vector space and
to the Weyl group of type E7, W (E7):
The Cayley reference is to "Algorithm for the characteristics of the
triple ϑ-functions," Journal für die Reine und Angewandte
Mathematik 87 (1879): 165-169. <http://eudml.org/doc/148412>.
To read this in the context of Cayley's other work, see pp. 441-445
of Volume 10 of his Collected Mathematical Papers .
A NY Times researcher from this morning’s previous post
tweeted last fall about art forgery and China.
Related material — Art Cube.
Illustration from December 25, 2013.
"She never looked up while her mind rotated the facts,
trying to see them from all sides, trying to piece them
together into theory. All she could think was that she
was flunking an IQ test."
— Steve Martin, An Object of Beauty
"So you should not feel so all alone…"
— Adapted song lyric
"Chang noted that 'the story starts slowly, for
1. Chang, Margaret A. "The King in the Window". |
Some will prefer exposition more closely related to Chicago.
From a Log24 search for that word . . .
The above phrase "the intersection of storytelling and visual arts"
suggests a review . . .
Some exposition that does not go back thousands of years —
Cullinane Diamond Theorem Research Report by https://you.com/?chatMode=research on March 3, 2024 Overview of the Cullinane Diamond Theorem The Cullinane Diamond Theorem is a mathematical concept developed by Steven H. Cullinane that explores the symmetrical properties of certain geometric patterns. It is particularly concerned with the structure of finite projective geometry as it relates to the 35 square patterns found in R. T. Curtis's Miracle Octad Generator (MOG). The theorem asserts that every G-image of a diamond figure D possesses some form of ordinary or color-interchange symmetry. Symmetry and Group Theory The theorem is deeply rooted in group theory, with G being isomorphic to the affine group A on the linear 4-space over the finite field GF(2). This group has a significant order of 322,560 and underlies the symmetry of both the diamond-theorem figures and the square patterns of the MOG . The 35 structures of the 840 G-images of D are isomorphic to the 35 lines in the 3-dimensional projective space over GF(2), which explains the symmetry of the line diagrams and the two-color patterns. The Diamond Theorem in Various Dimensions The diamond theorem can be applied to different cases, such as the 4×4, 2×2, and even 3-dimensional cubes like the 2x2x2 and 4x4x4 cubes. The generalized statement of the theorem involves inscribing a white diamond in a black square and dividing it into four quadrants, each with a diagonal split into black and white halves. Algebraic Implications The theorem has algebraic implications, such as the ability to express every 4-coloring as a sum of three 2-colorings. This algebraic formulation is useful for demonstrating that certain four-colored graphic images can form a ring under multiplication. There is also an infinite family of such 'diamond' rings, isomorphic to rings of matrices over GF(4). Philosophical and Cultural Context Steven H. Cullinane has also explored the philosophical implications of the diamond theorem, referring to it in the context of Plato's Meno dialogue and opposing it to the 'Story Theory of truth' as discussed by Richard J. Trudeau. The theorem is seen as a correct statement of the relation between geometry and the physical universe. Clarification on Cullinan Diamonds It is important to note that the Cullinane Diamond Theorem is unrelated to the Cullinan diamond, which is a famous large gemstone discovered in South Africa and now part of the British Crown Jewels. The Cullinan diamond has its own historical and cultural significance, with its various cut shapes and ownership history. In summary, the Cullinane Diamond Theorem is a mathematical concept that reveals the symmetrical properties of certain geometric patterns, with applications in group theory and algebra. It also has philosophical implications, drawing connections to classical ideas about truth and geometry. |
Instagram ad for You.com AI in research mode
"Show me ALL your sources, babe."
— Line adapted from Leonardo DiCaprio
The epigraph of the previous post —
"To Phaedrus, this backlight from the conflict between
the Sophists and the Cosmologists adds an entirely
new dimension to the Dialogues of Plato." — Robert M. Pirsig
Related reading and art for academic nihilists — See . . .
Reading and art I prefer —
Love in the Ruins , by Walker Percy, and . . .
Van Gogh (by Ed Arno) and an image and
a passage from The Paradise of Childhood
(by Edward Wiebé):
Epigraph for Cormac McCarthy —
"When I got to high school the first place I went was to the library. It was just a small room with a desk and maybe a thousand books. Maybe not that. But among them was a volume of Berkeley. I dont know what it was doing there. Probably because Berkeley was a bishop. Well. Almost certainly because Berkeley was a bishop. But I sat in the floor and I read A New Theory of Vision. And it changed my life. I understood for the first time that the visual world was inside your head. All the world, in fact. I didnt buy into his theological speculations but the physiology was beyond argument. I sat there for a long time. Just letting it soak in."
— McCarthy, Cormac. Stella Maris (p. 39). |
From this journal on April 18, 2023 —
" NY Times columnist's advice to the recent Harvard donor of $300 million —
'At least make them build you some weird pharaonic monument.' "
Illustration suggested by my own high-school library reading many years ago —
Click to enlarge:
"Before time began, there was the Cube." — Optimus Prime
"Sharpie, we have condensed six dimensions into four,
then we either work by analogy into six, or we have to use math
that apparently nobody but Jake and my cousin Ed understands.
Unless you can think of some way to project six dimensions into three–
you seem to be smart at such projections."
I closed my eyes and thought hard. "Zebbie, I don't think it can be done.
Maybe Escher could have done it."
From Chapter 23, "Poetry," by Adam Parkes, in Writing in 1910–11, the English poet and critic T. E. Hulme claimed that the two major traditions in poetry, romanticism and classicism, were as different as a well and a bucket. According to the romantic party, Hulme explained, humankind is “intrinsically good, spoilt by circumstance”; that is, our nature is “a well, a reservoir full of possibilities.” For the classical party, however, human nature is “like a bucket”; it is “intrinsically limited, but disciplined by order and tradition to something fairly decent” (Hulme 1987: 117). But it was not only that romanticism and classicism were as dissimilar as a well and a bucket; their contents were different, too. To draw water from the well of romanticism was, in effect, to pour a “pot of treacle over the dinner table,” while the classical bucket was more likely to be full of little stones – or jewels, perhaps. Romanticism, in Hulme’s view, was the result of displaced religious fervor; it represented the return of religious instincts that the “perverted rhetoric of Rationalism” had suppressed, so that “concepts that are right and proper in their own sphere are spread over, and so mess up, falsify and blur the clear outlines of human experience” (Hulme 1987: 118). Classicism, by contrast, traded in dry goods – dry, hard goods, to be precise. Hulme left little doubt as to which side he was on. “It is essential to prove,” he argued, “that beauty may be in small, dry things. The great aim is accurate, precise and definite description. . . . I prophesy that a period of dry, hard, classical verse is coming” (Hulme 1987: 131–3). If by “dry, hard, classical verse” Hulme meant poems looking like the fragments of Sappho, he didn’t have to wait long to see his prophecy fulfilled.
The hard sand breaks,
Far off over the leagues of it, 228
playing on the wide shore, So wrote Hilda Doolittle in “Hermes of the Ways,” the first poem that she signed “H. D., Imagiste” at the behest of her fellow American expatriate Ezra Pound. From Pound’s perspective, the Imagist movement that he co-founded in 1912 with H. D. and the English poet Richard Aldington was finished well before the First World War began in August 1914; throughout this war-torn decade, however, Imagism continued to spawn the poetry of “small, dry things” whose coming Hulme had predicted a few years before. Indeed, modernist poets weren’t content merely to break down the extended heroic narratives – the “spilt religion,” as Hulme put it – of their treacly nineteenthcentury predecessors; they insisted on breaking down small things into ever-smaller particles and subparticles. This logic of disintegration is clearly at work in poems like “Hermes of the Ways,” where each line is metrically unique, creating a sense of perpetual freshness – an apotheosis of modernity, as it were. REFERENCE Hulme, T. E. (1987). Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art, ed. Herbert Read. London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul. First published 1924. |
Compare and contrast:
Jeremy Gray,
Plato's Ghost: The Modernist Transformation of Mathematics,
Princeton University Press, first edition Sept. 22, 2008 —
"Here, modernism is defined as an autonomous body of ideas,
having little or no outward reference, placing considerable emphasis
on formal aspects of the work and maintaining a complicated—
indeed, anxious— rather than a naïve relationship with the
day-to-day world, which is the de facto view of a coherent group
of people, such as a professional or discipline-based group
that has a high sense of the seriousness and value of what it is
trying to achieve. This brisk definition…."
(Quoted at the webpage Solomon's Cube.)
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/anthropic —
"Questions abound about how the various proposals intersect with
anthropic reasoning and the infamous multiverse idea."
— Natalie Wolchover, WIRED, 16 June 2019
A more recent, and notable, use of "anthropic" :
https://techcrunch.com/2023/09/25/
amazon-to-invest-up-to-4-billion-in-ai-startup-anthropic/ —
"As part of the investment agreement, Anthropic will use
Amazon’s cloud giant AWS as a primary cloud provider for
mission-critical workloads . . . ."
The cloud giant appeared here recently :
Sarah Larson in The New Yorker yesterday —
"Having revealed itself, the Perelman Performing Arts Center (PAC NYC),
designed by Joshua Ramus and his firm, REX, retains an air of mystery:
it’s a giant marble-sheathed cube, beige and opaque by day and warmly
aglow by night, fronted by a two-story staircase that evokes the approach
to a Mayan temple or the gangway to an alien spacecraft. What’s inside?"
Always an interesting question . . .
From "Made for Love" (2021) — Lyle Herringbone:
See as well yesterday's post
Monday, May 8, 2017
New Pinterest Board
|
The face at lower left above is that of an early Design edgelord.
A product of that edgelord's school —
See a design by Prince-Ramus in today's New York Times —
Remarks quoted here on the above San Diego date —
A related void —
"We need the word 'metaphor' for the whole double unit, and to use it sometimes for one of the two components in separation from the other is as injudicious as that other trick by which we use 'the meaning' here sometimes for the work that the whole double unit does and sometimes for the other component–the tenor, as I am calling it–the underlying idea or principal subject which the vehicle or figure means. It is not surprising that the detailed analysis of metaphors, if we attempt it with such slippery terms as these, sometimes feels like extracting cube-roots in the head."
— I. A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric . |
* Nowak: See the central image in "An Art Director's Top Nine," Log24 yesterday.
** Levinson: See Variety on the "Euphoria" character.
"I’m really interested in exploring space."
— New Yorker cover artist for the Aug. 28, 2023, issue.
Related cinematic art . . .
From a search in this journal for Nocturnal —
For some Bright Art Blocks Moments , see Cube Epiphany .
The colors surrounding Watson's body in the above
"bandeau" photo suggest a review. A search in this journal
for Green+Orange+Black yields . . .
In the above image, the "hard core of objectivity" is represented
by the green-and-white eightfold cube. The orange and black are,
of course, the Princeton colors.
See The Eightfold Cube and . . .
Art is magic delivered from
the lie of being truth.
— Theodor Adorno, Minima moralia,
London, New Left Books, 1974, p. 222
(First published in German in 1951.)
The director, Carol Reed, makes…
impeccable use of the beauty of black….
— V. B. Daniel on The Third Man
I see your ironical smile.
— Hans Reichenbach
Adorno, The Third Man, and Reichenbach
are illustrated below (l. to r.) above the names of
cities with which they are associated.
Continued from April 18 .
"Working with words to create art
and working with your hands to create art
seem like two separate activities to me."
— Cover artist, The New Yorker , on April 17
See also Alphabet Blocks in this journal
as well as Escher's Verbum.
|
Religious remarks in the Times Literary Supplement
issue dated April 7, 2023 (Good Friday) suggest a
review of other remarks — from July 1, 2019 —now
tagged The Exploded Cube. Some will prefer more useful
types of explosions.
Mank, Baez, Collins — A trip back to Christmas Eve, 2021.
Related art (via Baez) for Josefine Lyche —
See also Lyche in Log24 posts tagged Star Cube.
Kitty in Uncanny X-Men #168 (April 1983)
"Try Bing Chat, Kitty."
* A Harvard phrase for a process analogous to that of the Hogwarts Sorting Hat.
From last night's update to the previous post —
The use of binary coordinate systems
Natural physical transformations of square or cubical arrays See "The Thing and I." |
From a post of May 1, 2016 —
Mathematische Appetithäppchen: Autor: Erickson, Martin —
"Weitere Informationen zu diesem Themenkreis finden sich |
Sometimes the word "preform" is not a misspelling.
"… there are present in every psyche forms which are unconscious
but nonetheless active — living dispositions, ideas in the Platonic sense,
that preform and continually influence our thoughts and feelings and actions."
The Source: Jung on a facultas praeformandi . . .
Illustration —
"A primordial image . . . .
the axial system of a crystal"
For those who prefer a Jewish approach to these matters —
(Post last updated at about 2:10 PM ET on Jan. 23, 2023.)
From Gilles Châtelet, Introduction to Figuring Space Metaphysics does have a catalytic effect, which has been described in a very beautiful text by the mathematician André Weil: Nothing is more fertile, all mathematicians know, than these obscure analogies, these murky reflections of one theory in another, these furtive caresses, these inexplicable tiffs; also nothing gives as much pleasure to the researcher. A day comes when the illusion vanishes: presentiment turns into certainty … Luckily for researchers, as the fogs clear at one point, they form again at another.4 André Weil cuts to the quick here: he conjures these 'murky reflections', these 'furtive caresses', the 'theory of Galois that Lagrange touches … with his finger through a screen that he does not manage to pierce.' He is a connoisseur of these metaphysical 'fogs' whose dissipation at one point heralds their reforming at another. It would be better to talk here of a horizon that tilts thereby revealing a new space of gestures which has not as yet been elucidated and cut out as structure. 4 A. Weil, 'De la métaphysique aux mathématiques', (Oeuvres, vol. II, p. 408.) |
For gestures as fogs, see the oeuvre of Guerino Mazzola.
For some clearer remarks, see . . .
Illustrations of object and gestures
from finitegeometry.org/sc/ —
Object
Gestures
An earlier presentation
of the above seven partitions
of the eightfold cube:
|
Related material: Galois.space .
"If the window is this matrix of ambi- or multivalence,
and the bars of the windows-the grid-are what help us
to see, to focus on, this matrix, they are themselves
the symbol of the symbolist work of art. They function as
the multilevel representation through which the work of art
can allude, and even reconstitute, the forms of Being."
— Page 59, Rosalind Krauss, "Grids," MIT Press,
October , Vol. 9 (Summer, 1979), pp. 50-64
Related material —
Click the above image for a related Log24 post of 15 years ago today.
A related literary remark —
"Imagine Raiders of the Lost Ark set in 20th-century London, and then
imagine it written by a man steeped not in Hollywood movies but in Dante
and the things of the spirit, and you might begin to get a picture…."
— Doug Thorpe in an Amazon.com book review, not of Dark Materials.
"Was ist Raum, wie können wir ihn
erfassen und gestalten?"
The Theory and
Organization of the
Bauhaus (1923)
A relevant illustration:
At math.stackexchange.com on March 1-12, 2013:
“Is there a geometric realization of the Quaternion group?” —
The above illustration, though neatly drawn, appeared under the
cloak of anonymity. No source was given for the illustrated group actions.
Possibly they stem from my Log24 posts or notes such as the Jan. 4, 2012,
note on quaternion actions at finitegeometry.org/sc (hence ultimately
from my note “GL(2,3) actions on a cube” of April 5, 1985).
These references will not appeal to those who enjoy modernism as a religion.
(For such a view, see Rosalind Krauss on grids and another writer's remarks
on the religion's 100th anniversary this year.)
Some related nihilist philosophy from Cormac McCarthy —
"Forms turning in a nameless void."
The date — January 9, 2010 — of the Guardian book review
in the previous post was noted here by a top 40 music list
from that same date in an earlier year.
Update of 4:07 AM ET the same morning:
Fans of Cormac McCarthy's recent adventures in unreality
might enjoy interpreting the time — 3:25 AM ET — of this post
as the date 3/25, and comparing the logos, both revisited
and new, in a Log24 post from 3/25 . . .
Helen Mirren with plastic Gankyil .
. . . with the logo of a venue whose motto is
"Reality is not enough."
The above 1975 book by Robert Greer Cohn, Modes of Art, is
Volume I of a planned three-volume work.
The passage below is from a review of Cohn's Vol. II, Ways of Art —
Franklin, Ursula (1987) "Book Review: A Critical Work II. . . . . Those not familiar with the author's epistemology should begin with Appendix A of Ways of Art , a schematic demonstration of his tetrapolar-polypolar-dialectic, especially as it concerns the development of the French novel within the European tradition. But this dialectic, which has antecedents in Kierkegaard, Mallarme and Joyce, underlies all art, because: "this dimensional pulsation, or tetrapolar (and polypolar) higher vibrancy is, in short, the stuff of life: life is vibrant in this more complex way as well as in the more bipolar sense" (7). Cohn shows that "far out enough" the male or linear and the female or circular, the male vertical and the female horizontal dimensions "tend to merge as in relativity theory" (19). Ways of Art shows us the way through a historical becoming of art in its complex dialectic in which the metonymic (horizontal) axis constantly interrelates with the metaphoric (vertical). "Life is the mother, art the father" (vii); hence Cohn's quarrel with most contemporary Feminism, which is pronounced throughout the volume. Firmly grounded in its author's tetra-polypolar epistemology, this beautiful book becomes, however, at no point dryly abstract; it is the mature work of a true humanist who stands in clear and open opposition to the dehumanizing trend of "the quasi-scientific reductionism and abstract gimmickry of a great deal of current academic literary study, bellwethered by the structuralists, post-structuralists, and deconstructionists" (vi). Abundant footnotes constitute a substantial part of Ways of Art , on occasion developing insights almost into essays demonstrating crucial points along the general flow of the tradition from "Obscure Beginnings;' the opening chapter, to our "Contemporaries;' the last. Cohn reminds us that "In the Beginning was the Word;' for the Judaeo-Christian tradition at least, which his study fervently embraces; thus, for example, in Appendix 0 on "The Dance of the Sexes;' he censures "those who live by slogans, camps, and peer-opinion, the countless little bastard cults which characterize an era which has massively veered away from our free and beautiful Greco-Judaeo-Christian tradition" (332). Cohn traces man's way and that of his myths and rituals culminating in his art from that beginning along the lines of Freud, Neumann and Cassirer, and many others, always demonstrating the underlying polypolar dialectical rhythm. Thus in "From Barbarism to Young Culture;' we follow the Celts to Druidic ritual, Hebrew beginnings to the Psalms, Dionysian ritual to Greek tragedy, and thence to the beginnings of French dramatic literature originating in the Quem quaeritis sequence of the medieval Mass. Along the way arises artistic symbolism, for Cohn synonymous with "effective poetry;' to finally "ripen in France as never before" (99). Table I (134) graphs this development from the twelfth to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The author traces the rise of the artistic vocation from its antecedents in the double function of bard and priest, with the figure of Ronsard at the crossroads of that dying institution and the nascent concept of personal glory. "The Enlightenment Vocation" is exemplified in Montaigne, who humanizes the French cultural elite and points the way to French classicism and, farther down the road, after the moral collapse with the outgoing reign of Louis XIV, toward the Age of Reason. Clearly the most significant figure of the French Enlightenment for all of Western civilization is Rousseau, and Cohn beautifully shows us why this is so. Subsequently, "the nineteenth-century stage of the writer's journey will lead, starting from the crossroads of Rousseau, primarily in these two directions: the imperialistic and visionary prose of Balzac, the equally ambitious poetry of Mallarme", brothers under the skin" (199). And these two paths will then be reconciled in Proust's monumental A la recherche du temps perdu . . . . . |
The above title is that of a Log24 post on St. Cecilia's Day in 2017
that quoted some earlier All Souls' Day remarks from Berlin.
From that post —
Exercise: Explain why the lead article in the November issue of
Notices of the American Mathematical Society misquotes Weyl
and gives the misleading impression that the example above,
the eightfold cube , might be part of the mathematical pursuit
known as geometric group theory .
Background: Earlier instances here of the phrase "geometric group theory."
The exercise posted here on Sept. 11, 2022, suggests a
more precisely stated problem . . .
The 24 coordinate-positions of the 4096 length-24 words of the
extended binary Golay code G24 can be arranged in a 4×6 array
in, of course, 24! ways.
Some of these ways are more geometrically natural than others.
See, for instance, the Miracle Octad Generator of R. T. Curtis.
What is the size of the largest subcode C of G24 that can be
arranged in a 4×6 array in such a way that the set of words of C
is invariant under the symmetry group of the rectangle itself, i.e. the
four-group of the identity along with horizontal and vertical reflections
and 180-degree rotation.
Recent Log24 posts tagged Bitspace describe the structure of
an 8-dimensional (256-word) code in a 4×6 array that has such
symmetry, but it is not yet clear whether that "cube-motif" code
is a Golay subcode. (Its octads are Golay, but possibly not all its
dodecads; the octads do not quite generate the entire code.)
Magma may have an answer, but I have had little experience in
its use.
* Footnote of 30 September 2022. The 4×6 problem is a
special case of a more general symmetric embedding problem.
Given a linear code C and a mapping of C to parts of a geometric
object A with symmetry group G, what is the largest subcode of C
invariant under G? What is the largest such subcode under all
such mappings from C to A?
Some background for the exercise of 9/11 —
Vera Pless, "More on the uniqueness of the Golay codes,"
Discrete Mathematics 106/107 (1992) 391-398 —
"Several people [1-2,6] have shown that
any set of 212 binary vectors of length 24,
distance ≥ 8, containing 0, must be the
unique (up to equivalence) [24,12,8] Golay code."
[1] P. Delsarte and J.M. Goethals, "Unrestricted codes
with the Golay parameters are unique,"
Discrete Math. 12 (1975) 211-224.
[2] A. Neumeier, private communication, 1990.
[6] S.L. Snover, "The uniqueness of the
Nordstrom-Robinson and the Golay binary codes,"
Ph.D. Thesis, Dept. of Mathematics,
Michigan State Univ., 1973.
Related images —
"Before time began, there was the Cube."
"Remember, remember the fifth of November"
Note the three quadruplets of parallel edges in the 1984 figure above.
The above Gates article appeared earlier, in the June 2010 issue of
Physics World , with bigger illustrations. For instance —
Exercise: Describe, without seeing the rest of the article,
the rule used for connecting the balls above.
Wikipedia offers a much clearer picture of a (non-adinkra) tesseract —
And then, more simply, there is the Galois tesseract —
For parts of my own world in June 2010, see this journal for that month.
The above Galois tesseract appears there as follows:
See also the Klein correspondence in a paper from 1968
in yesterday's 2:54 PM ET post.
"And, as with all retold tales that are in people's hearts,
there are only good and bad things and black and white
things and good and evil things and no in-between anywhere."
— John Steinbeck, author's epigraph to The Pearl
From the Season 4 finale of Westworld :
uploading Dolores's pearl at Hoover Dam —
For those who prefer greater theological simplicity . . .
Optimus Prime on a different Hoover Dam figure, that of
the AllSpark: "Before time began, there was the Cube."
Simplifying even more . . .
“A set having three members is a single thing
wholly constituted by its members but distinct from them.
After this, the theological doctrine of the Trinity as
‘three in one’ should be child’s play.”
– Max Black, Caveats and Critiques: Philosophical Essays
in Language, Logic, and Art , Cornell U. Press, 1975
As above, Black's theology forms a cube.
Related material — The Eightfold Cube.
See also . . .
"… 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."
— Sir Michael Atiyah, “The Art of Mathematics”
in the AMS Notices , January 2010
"The successful artist shares with the politician
a recurrent temptation to indulge in emotional claptrap.
Bernard Bosanquet in Three Lectures on Aesthetic (1915)
proposed that this urge to chase after tears or laughter
could be quelled by attaching the art-emotion to a particular object
and not a set of reactions. His consequent definition of art was
'feeling expressed for expression’s sake.' Notice, however, that
this is something only the deranged would dream of wanting in
real life. Our everyday expressions of feeling are spontaneous and
practical; they are never 'for expression’s sake.' By contrast,
aesthetic feeling is self-sufficient."
— David Bromwich in The Nation, July 11, 2022
A Particular Object —
"Tell it Skewb." — Motto adapted from Emily Dickinson.
"As of 2022, it is the oldest web browser still being maintained,,,,"
"The speed benefits of text-only browsing are most apparent
when using low bandwidth internet connections, or older computer
hardware that may be slow to render image-heavy content."
— Wikipedia [“Older” link added.]
And then there is . . .
See as well the LYNX of Oslo artist Josefine Lyche.
Update of June 30, 2022 —
Lyche, whose art often incorporates mathematical notions,
has not yet, as far as I know, explored the Borromean link
(three rings, linked mutually but not pairwise) in her art.
Remarks by a different math fan, Evelyn Lamb —
"I have had a thing for the Borromean rings for years now.
There’s something so poetic about them. The three rings
are strong together, but they fall apart if any one of them
is removed. Alternatively, the three rings are trapped together
until one of them leaves and sets the others free. I’m kind of
surprised there isn’t a Wisława Szymborska poem or
Tom Stoppard play that explores the metaphorical possibilities
in the Borromean rings." — Scientific American , Sept. 30, 2016.
See also the Lamb date Sept. 30, 2016, as well as work
by Lyche, in Log24 posts tagged Star Cube.
Related material — The Log24 post Borromean Generators.
Continued from April 12, 2022.
"It’s important, as art historian Reinhard Spieler has noted,
that after a brief, unproductive stay in Paris, circa 1907,
Kandinsky chose to paint in Munich. That’s where he formed
the Expressionist art group Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) —
and where he avoided having to deal with cubism."
— David Carrier,
Remarks by Louis Menand in The New Yorker today —
"The art world isn’t a fixed entity.
It’s continually being reconstituted
as new artistic styles emerge."
(Adapted from Encyclopaedia Britannica,
Eleventh Edition (1911), Crystallography .)
"Before time began, there was the Cube."
— Optimus Prime
See as well Verbum (February 18, 2017).
Related dramatic music —
"Westworld Season 4 begins at Hoover Dam,
with William looking to buy the famous landmark.
What does he consider to be 'stolen' data that is inside?"
From "When Novelists Become Cubists," by Andre Furlani—
"The architectonics of a narrative," Davenport says,
"are emphasized and given a role to play in dramatic effect
when novelists become Cubists; that is, when they see
the possibilities of making a hieroglyph, a coherent symbol,
an ideogram of the total work. A symbol comes into being
when an artist sees that it is the only way to get all the meaning in."
* See "Starlight Like Intuition" by Delmore Schwartz.
The "Twelve" of the title may be regarded as cube edges.
From a Jamestown (NY) Post-Journal article yesterday on
"the sold-out 10,000 Maniacs 40th anniversary concert at
The Reg Lenna Center Saturday" —
" 'The theater has a special place in our hearts. It’s played
a big part in my life,' Gustafson said.
Before being known as The Reg Lenna Center for The Arts,
it was formerly known as The Palace Theater. He recalled
watching movies there as a child…."
This, and the band's name, suggest some memories perhaps
better suited to the cinematic philosophy behind "Plan 9 from
Outer Space."
"With the Tablet of Ahkmenrah and the Cube of Rubik,
my power will know no bounds!"
— Kahmunrah in a novelization of Night at the Museum:
Battle of the Smithsonian , Barron's Educational Series
The above 3×3 Tablet of Ahkmenrah image comes from
a Log24 search for the finite (i.e., Galois) field GF(3) that
was, in turn, suggested by last night's post "Making Space."
See as well a mysterious document from a website in Slovenia
that mentions a 3×3 array "relating to nine halls of a mythical
palace where rites were performed in the 1st century AD" —
Powered by WordPress