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Ratan Naval Tata was born on Dec. 28, 1937, in Bombay, now Mumbai, during the British Raj. His family belonged to the Parsi religion, a small Zoroastrian community that originated in Persia, fled persecution by the Muslim majority there centuries ago and found refuge in India. Mr. Tata became a leader of that community. — New York Times obituary on 9 October 2024 |
See also theta functions in this journal.
For those who prefer narratives to mathematics . . .
Tiger at the Fire Temple
(With apologies to Kipling.)
And as den mother for this Romulus and Remus . . .
"Se necesita una poca de gracia." — Song lyric.
From a post this morning by Peter J. Cameron
in memory of John Horton Conway —
| ” This happened at a conference somewhere in North America. I was chairing the session at which he was to speak. When I got up to introduce him, his title had not yet been announced, and the stage had a blackboard on an easel. I said something like ‘The next speaker is John Conway, and no doubt he is going to tell us what he will talk about.’ John came onto the stage, went over to the easel, picked up the blackboard, and turned it over. On the other side were revealed five titles of talks. He said, ‘I am going to give one of these talks. I will count down to zero; you are to shout as loudly as you can the number of the talk you want to hear, and the chairman will judge which number is most popular.’ “ |
Thursday, August 21, 2014
NoxFiled under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 1:00 AM ( A sequel to Lux ) “By groping toward the light we are made to realize — Arthur Koestler, The Call Girls: A Tragi-Comedy ,
Robin Williams and the Stages of Math i) shock & denial A related description of the process — “You know how sometimes someone tells you a theorem, — Tom Leinster yesterday at The n-Category Café |
From the 1955 film "Blackboard Jungle" —
From a trailer for the recent film version of A Wrinkle in Time —
Detail of the phrase "quantum tesseract theorem":
From the 1962 book —
"There's something phoney
in the whole setup, Meg thought.
There is definitely something rotten
in the state of Camazotz."
Related mathematics from Koen Thas that some might call a
"quantum tesseract theorem" —
Some background —
See also posts tagged Dirac and Geometry. For more
background on finite geometry, see a web page
at Thas's institution, Ghent University.
From a review in the April 2013 issue of
Notices of the American Mathematical Society—
"The author clearly is passionate about mathematics
as an art, as a creative process. In reading this book,
one can easily get the impression that mathematics
instruction should be more like an unfettered journey
into a jungle where an individual can make his or her
own way through that terrain."
From the book under review—
"Every morning you take your machete into the jungle
and explore and make observations, and every day
you fall more in love with the richness and splendor
of the place."
— Lockhart, Paul (2009-04-01). A Mathematician's Lament:
How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and
Imaginative Art Form (p. 92). Bellevue Literary Press.
Kindle Edition.
Related material: Blackboard Jungle in this journal.
See also Galois Space and Solomon's Mines.
"The novel has a parallel narrative that eventually
converges with the main story."
— Wikipedia on a book by Foer's novelist brother
Public Squares
An image from the online New York Times
on the date, July 6,
of the above Atlantic article —
An image from "Blackboard Jungle," 1955 —
"Through the unknown, remembered gate . . . ."
Quixote Vive! — Terry Gilliam, June 4, 2017
Review of a post from March 7, 2017 —
|
"The supervisory read-only memory (SROM)
— Elliot Williams at Hackaday , March 4, 2017, From a reply to a comment on the above story —
"You are singing a very fearful and oppressive tune. A perhaps less oppressive tune —
Related scene — Richard Kiley in "Blackboard Jungle," 1955:
|
"Try the grey stuff, it's delicious
Don't believe me? Ask the dishes"
— Disney's "Beauty and the Beast"
Related material —
|
Friday, April 1, 2016 Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 12:00 AM
See also the previous post and the usual suspects. |
Happy birthday to Saoirse Ronan.
"When the first Harry Potter book appeared, in 1997,
it was just a year before the universal search engine
Google was launched. And so Hermione Granger,
that charming grind, still goes to the Hogwarts library
and spends hours and hours working her way through
the stacks, finding out what a basilisk is or how to
make a love potion."
— Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker issue dated
St. Valentine's Day, 2011
More recently, Gopnik writes that …
"Arguing about non-locality went out of fashion, in this
account, almost the way 'Rock Around the Clock'
displaced Sinatra from the top of the charts."
— Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker issue dated
St. Andrew's Day, 2015
This journal on Valentine's Day, 2011 —
"One heart will wear a valentine." — Sinatra
"… she has written a love letter to Plato, whom
she regards as having given us philosophy.
He is, in her view, as relevant today as he ever
was — which is to say, very."
— New York Times review of a book by
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, April 18, 2014
Wednesday, March 13, 2013
|
"I pondered deeply, then, over the
adventures of the jungle. And after
some work with a colored pencil
I succeeded in making my first drawing.
My Drawing Number One.
It looked something like this:
I showed my masterpiece to the
grown-ups, and asked them whether
the drawing frightened them.
But they answered: 'Why should
anyone be frightened by a hat?'"
* For the title, see Plato Thanks the Academy (Jan. 3).
Happy Feast of Saint Nicholas.
For Jack and Jill.
The above motivational video is from the web page of a middle school
math teacher who was shot to death yesterday morning.
Related journalism —
See also "S in a Diamond" (here, October 2013)
and "Superman Comes to the Supermarket,"
by Norman Mailer (Esquire , November 1960).
In a recent film, Amy Adams asked Superman,
"What's the S stand for?"
One possible answer, in light of Stephen King's
recent sequel to The Shining and of
the motivational video above—
Steam.
Quoted in the March 13 post Blackboard Jungle:
"Every morning you take your machete into the jungle
and explore and make observations, and every day
you fall more in love with the richness and splendor
of the place."
— Paul Lockhart, A Mathematician's Lament
More from Lockhart's jungle—
|
Mathematical objects, even if initially inspired by some aspect of reality (e.g., piles of rocks, the disc of the moon), are still nothing more than figments of our imagination. Not only that, but they are created by us and are endowed by us with certain characteristics; that is, they are what we ask them to be…. … in Mathematical Reality, because it is an imaginary place, I actually can have pretty much whatever I want…. The point is that there is no reality to any of this, so there are no rules or restrictions other than the ones we care to impose…. Make up anything you want, so long as it isn’t boring. Of course this is a matter of taste, and tastes change and evolve. Welcome to art history! — Lockhart, Paul (2009-04-01). A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form (pp. 100-104). Bellevue Literary Press. Kindle Edition. |
Related material in this journal: Bellevue and Wechsler.
See also Gombrich in this journal and in the following:
Related material (Click for some background.) —
A phrase from last night's post— "God's empty chair."
For related material from this journal, see The Empty Chair.
A related scene from mathematics education (the theme of the new March 2011 AMS Notices )—
"Plato acknowledges how khora challenges our normal categories
of rational understanding. He suggests that we might best approach it
through a kind of dream consciousness."
–Richard Kearney, quoted here Sunday afternoon
"You make me feel like I'm living a teenage dream."
– Song at Sunday night's Grammy awards
Again, this couldn't happen again.
This is that "once in a lifetime,"
this is the thrill divine.
The great 1949 days (according to Jack Kerouac)—
On the Road—
Shearing began to play his chords; they rolled out of the piano in great rich showers, you'd think the man wouldn't have time to line them up. They rolled and rolled like the sea. Folks yelled for him to "Go!" Dean was sweating; the sweat poured down his collar. "There he is! That's him! Old God! Old God Shearing! Yes! Yes! Yes!" And Shearing was conscious of the madman behind him, he could hear every one of Dean's gasps and imprecations, he could sense it though he couldn't see. "That's right!" Dean said. "Yes!" Shearing smiled; he rocked. Shearing rose from the piano, dripping with sweat; these were his great 1949 days before he became cool and commercial. When he was gone Dean pointed to the empty piano seat. "God's empty chair," he said.
"Plato acknowledges how khora challenges our normal categories
of rational understanding. He suggests that we might best approach it
through a kind of dream consciousness."
—Richard Kearney, quoted here yesterday afternoon
"You make me feel like I'm living a teenage dream."
— Song at last night's Grammy awards
Richard Kiley in "Blackboard Jungle" (1955)
Note the directive on the blackboard.
Quoted here last year on this date—
Alexandre Borovik's Mathematics Under the Microscope (American Mathematical Society, 2010)—
"Once I mentioned to Gelfand that I read his Functions and Graphs ; in response, he rather sceptically asked me what I had learned from the book. He was delighted to hear my answer: 'The general principle of always looking at the simplest possible example.'….
So, let us look at the principle in more detail:
Always test a mathematical theory on the simplest possible example…
This is a banality, of course. Everyone knows it; therefore, almost no one follows it."
Related material— Geometry Simplified and A Simple Reflection Group of Order 168.
"Great indeed is the riddle of the universe.
Beautiful indeed is the source of truth."
– Shing-Tung Yau, Chairman,
Department of Mathematics, Harvard University
"Always keep a diamond in your mind."
– King Solomon at the Paradiso
Image from stoneship.org
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