The previous post displayed part of a page from
a newspaper published the day Olivia Newton-John
turned 21 — Friday, September 26, 1969.
A meditation, with apologies to Coleridge:
In Xanadu did Newton-John
A stately pleasure-square decree
Where Aleph the sacred symbol ran
Through subsquares measureless to man.
A related video —
Beware, beware, her flashing eyes, her floating hair:
Set design —
As opposed to block design —
In a nutshell —
Epigraph to "The Aleph," a 1945 story by Borges:
O God! I could be bounded in a nutshell,
and count myself a King of infinite space…
— Hamlet, II, 2
The story in book form, 1949
A 2006 biography of geometer H.S.M. Coxeter:
The Aleph (implicit in a 1950 article by Coxeter):
The details:
Related material: Group Actions, 1984-2009.
See Coxeter + Aleph in this journal.
Epigraph to "The Aleph," a 1945 story by Borges:
"O God! I could be bounded in a nutshell,
and count myself a King of infinite space…"
– Hamlet, II, 2
In the Beginning…
"As is well known, the Aleph is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet."
– Borges, "The Aleph" (1945)
From some 1949 remarks of Weyl—
"The relativity problem is one of central significance throughout geometry and algebra and has been recognized as such by the mathematicians at an early time."
— Hermann Weyl, "Relativity Theory as a Stimulus in Mathematical Research," Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society , Vol. 93, No. 7, Theory of Relativity in Contemporary Science: Papers Read at the Celebration of the Seventieth Birthday of Professor Albert Einstein in Princeton, March 19, 1949 (Dec. 30, 1949), pp. 535-541
Weyl in 1946—:
"This is the relativity problem: to fix objectively a class of equivalent coordinatizations and to ascertain the group of transformations S mediating between them."
— Hermann Weyl, The Classical Groups , Princeton University Press, 1946, p. 16
Coxeter in 1950 described the elements of the Galois field GF(9) as powers of a primitive root and as ordered pairs of the field of residue-classes modulo 3—
"… the successive powers of the primitive root λ or 10 are
λ = 10, λ2 = 21, λ3 = 22, λ4 = 02,
λ5 = 20, λ6 = 12, λ7 = 11, λ8 = 01.
These are the proper coordinate symbols….
(See Fig. 10, where the points are represented in the Euclidean plane as if the coordinate residue 2 were the ordinary number -1. This representation naturally obscures the collinearity of such points as λ4, λ5, λ7.)"
Coxeter's Figure 10 yields...
The Aleph
The details:
Coxeter's phrase "in the Euclidean plane" obscures the noncontinuous nature of the transformations that are automorphisms of the above linear 2-space over GF(3).
Three links with a Borges flavor—
Related material
The 236 in yesterday evening's NY lottery may be
viewed as the 236 in March 18's Defining Configurations.
For some background, see Configurations and Squares.
A new illustration for that topic—
This shows a reconcilation of the triples described by Sloane
in Defining Configurations with the square geometric
arrangement described by Coxeter in the Aleph link above.
Note that the 56 from yesterday's midday NY lottery
describes the triples that appear both in the Eightfold Way
link above and also in a possible source for
the eight triples of Sloane's 83 configuration—
The geometric square arrangement discussed in the Aleph link
above appears in a different, but still rather Borgesian, context
in yesterday morning's Minimalist Icon.
The "secret, subterranean river" of Shulevitz is
a flow of thought favorable to the cause of feminism,
but not necessarily to other "revolutionary" ideas.
Compare and contrast:
"Where Alph, the sacred river, ran"
— Coleridge, Kubla Khan
"Where Aleph the sacred symbol ran"
— Cullinane, "The Coxeter Aleph"
For group discussion:
How (if at all) is the "finitude" of Heidegger related to
mathematical finitude and The King of Infinite Space ?
Now added to a Likewise.com list —
The Portage to San Cristobal of A. H.
Related reading —
On a letter from Hebrew, the fentanyl of languages —
From some Canadian legal boilerplate —
E. Be able to provide complete, clean, unencumbered
chain of title for the Project, must have all the rights,
releases and clearances necessary to produce, own and
exploit the Project and for deployment of the Project . . . .
Weak Links in the Chain of Title —
A 2006 biography of geometer H.S.M. Coxeter:
The Aleph (implicit in a 1950 article by Coxeter):
Click on images
for further details.
The above phrase "the intersection of storytelling and visual arts"
suggests a review . . .
Storytelling —
Visual arts —
"This pattern is a square divided into nine equal parts.
It has been called the 'Holy Field' division and
was used throughout Chinese history for many
different purposes, most of which were connected
with things religious, political, or philosophical."
– The Magic Square: Cities in Ancient China,
by Alfred Schinz, Edition Axel Menges, 1996, p. 71
A Midrash for Michener —
For a connection of the above "Holy Field"
with pure mathematics, see Coxeter's Aleph.
"János Bolyai was a nineteenth-century mathematician who
set the stage for the field of non-Euclidean geometry."
— Transylvania Now , October 26, 2018
From Coxeter and the Relativity Problem —
Desiring the exhilarations of changes:
The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The A B C of being,
The ruddy temper, the hammer
Of red and blue, the hard sound—
Steel against intimation—the sharp flash,
The vital, arrogant, fatal, dominant X.
At the Googleplex .
For those whose only interest in higher mathematics
is as a path to the occult …
Plato's Diamond and the Hebrew letter Aleph —
and some related (if only graphically) mathematics —
Click the above image for some related purely mathematical remarks.
The image of art historian Rosalind Krauss in the previous post
suggests a review of a page from her 1979 essay "Grids" —
The previous post illustrated a 3×3 grid. That cultist space does
provide a place for a few "vestiges of the nineteenth century" —
namely, the elements of the Galois field GF(9) — to hide.
See Coxeter's Aleph in this journal.
There are various ways to coordinatize a 3×3 array
(the Chinese "Holy Field'). Here are some —
See Cullinane, Coxeter, and Knight tour.
Yes. See …
The 48 actions of GL(2,3) on a 3×3 coordinate-array A,
when matrices of that group right-multiply the elements of A,
with A =
| (1,1) (1,0) (1,2) (0,1) (0,0) (0,2) (2,1) (2,0) (2,2) |
Actions of GL(2,p) on a pxp coordinate-array have the
same sorts of symmetries, where p is any odd prime.
Note that A, regarded in the Sallows manner as a magic square,
has the constant sum (0,0) in rows, columns, both diagonals, and
all four broken diagonals (with arithmetic modulo 3).
For a more sophisticated approach to the structure of the
ninefold square, see Coxeter + Aleph.
(Continued from this morning)
The above stylized "N," based on
an 8-cycle in the 9-element Galois field
GF(9), may also be read as an Aleph.
Graphic designers may prefer a simpler,
bolder version:
"Now the serpent was more subtle
than any beast of the field…."
— Genesis 3:1
"“The serpent’s eyes shine
As he wraps around the vine….”
– Don Henley
"Nine is a vine."
— Folk rhyme
Click images for some background.
"… myths are stories, and like all narratives
they unravel through time, whereas grids
are not only spatial to start with,
they are visual structures that explicitly reject
a narrative or sequential reading of any kind."
— Rosalind Krauss in "Grids,"
October (Summer 1979), 9: 50-64.
Counterexample—
The Ninefold Square
See Coxeter and the Aleph and Ayn Sof—
| Mathematics and Narrative, Illustrated |
|
Mathematics |
 Narrative |
See last year's Day of the Tetraktys.
Those who prefer Hebrew to Greek may consult Coxeter and the Aleph.
See also last midnight's The Aleph as well as Saturday morning's
An Ordinary Evening in Hartford and Saturday evening's
For Whom the Bell (with material from March 20, 2011).
For connoisseurs of synchronicity, there is …
THE LAST CONCERT
Cached from http://mrpianotoday.com/tourdates.htm —
The last concert of Roger Williams — March 20, 2011 —
|
March 20 |
"Roger Williams" In Concert, |
Palm Desert, CA |
Background music… Theme from "Somewhere in Time"
The source of the mysterious generic
3×3 favicon with one green cell —
— has been identified.
For minimalists, here is a purer 3×3 matrix favicon—
This may, if one likes, be viewed as the "nothing"
present at the Creation. See Jim Holt on physics.
See also Visualizing GL(2,p), Coxeter and the Aleph, and Ayn Sof.
The LA Times on last weekend's film "Thor"—
"… the film… attempts to bridge director Kenneth Branagh's high-minded Shakespearean intentions with Marvel Entertainment's bottom-line-oriented need to crank out entertainment product."
Those averse to Nordic religion may contemplate a different approach to entertainment (such as Taymor's recent approach to Spider-Man).
A high-minded— if not Shakespearean— non-Nordic approach to groups acting—
"What was wrong? I had taken almost four semesters of algebra in college. I had read every page of Herstein, tried every exercise. Somehow, a message had been lost on me. Groups act . The elements of a group do not have to just sit there, abstract and implacable; they can do things, they can 'produce changes.' In particular, groups arise naturally as the symmetries of a set with structure. And if a group is given abstractly, such as the fundamental group of a simplical complex or a presentation in terms of generators and relators, then it might be a good idea to find something for the group to act on, such as the universal covering space or a graph."
— Thomas W. Tucker, review of Lyndon's Groups and Geometry in The American Mathematical Monthly , Vol. 94, No. 4 (April 1987), pp. 392-394
"Groups act "… For some examples, see
Related entertainment—
High-minded— Many Dimensions—
Not so high-minded— The Cosmic Cube—
One way of blending high and low—
The high-minded Charles Williams tells a story
in his novel Many Dimensions about a cosmically
significant cube inscribed with the Tetragrammaton—
the name, in Hebrew, of God.
The following figure can be interpreted as
the Hebrew letter Aleph inscribed in a 3×3 square—
The above illustration is from undated software by Ed Pegg Jr.
For mathematical background, see a 1985 note, "Visualizing GL(2,p)."
For entertainment purposes, that note can be generalized from square to cube
(as Pegg does with his "GL(3,3)" software button).
For the Nordic-averse, some background on the Hebrew connection—
(A continuation of this morning's Coxeter and the Aleph)
"You've got to pick up every stitch… Must be the season of the witch."
— Donovan song at the end of Nicole Kidman's "To Die For"
| Mathematics and Narrative, Illustrated | |
|
|
Narrative |
"As is well known, the Aleph is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet.
Its use for the strange sphere in my story may not be accidental.
For the Kabbala, the letter stands for the En Soph ,
the pure and boundless godhead; it is also said that it takes
the shape of a man pointing to both heaven and earth, in order to show
that the lower world is the map and mirror of the higher; for Cantor's
Mengenlehre , it is the symbol of transfinite numbers,
of which any part is as great as the whole."
— Borges, "The Aleph"
From WorldLingo.com —
|
"Infinite Jest… now stands as the principal contender
for what serious literature can aspire to
in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries."
— All Things Shining, a work of pop philosophy published January 4th
"You're gonna need a bigger boat." — Roy Scheider in "Jaws"
"We're gonna need more holy water." — "Season of the Witch," a film opening tonight
See also, with respect to David Foster Wallace, infinity, nihilism,
and the above reading of "Ayn Sof" as "nothingness,"
the quotations compiled as "Is Nothing Sacred?"
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