“That corpse you planted
last year in your garden,
Has it begun to sprout?
Will it bloom this year?
Or has the sudden frost
disturbed its bed?”
— T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land“
Click the book for a video.
(Continued from August 13. See also Coxeter Graveyard.)
Here the tombstone says
"GEOMETRY… 600 BC — 1900 AD… R.I.P."
In the geometry of Plato illustrated below,
"the figure of eight [square] feet" is not , at this point
in the dialogue, the diamond in Jowett's picture.
An 1892 figure by Jowett illustrating Plato's Meno—
Jowett's picture is nonetheless of interest for
its resemblance to a figure drawn some decades later
by the Toronto geometer H. S. M. Coxeter.
A similar 1950 figure by Coxeter illustrating a tesseract—
For a less scholarly, but equally confusing, view of the number 8,
see The Eight , a novel by Katherine Neville.
Suggested by an Oct. 18 piece in the Book Bench section
of the online New Yorker magazine—
Related material suggested by the "Shouts and Murmurs" piece
in The New Yorker , issue dated Oct. 24, 2011—
"a series of e-mails from a preschool teacher planning to celebrate
the Day of the Dead instead of Halloween…"
A search for Coxeter + Graveyard in this journal yields…
Here the tombstone says "GEOMETRY… 600 BC — 1900 AD… R.I.P."
A related search for Plato + Tombstone yields an image from July 6, 2007…
Here Plato's poems to Aster suggested
the "Star and Diamond" tombstone.
The eight-rayed star is an ancient symbol of Venus
and the diamond is from Plato's Meno .
The star and diamond are combined in a figure from
12 AM on September 6th, 2011—
The Diamond Star
See Configurations and Squares.
That webpage explains how Coxeter
united the diamond and the star.
Those who prefer narrative to mathematics may consult
a definition of the Spanish word lucero from March 28, 2003.
From the Grave
in yesterday's New York Times:
"From the grave, Albert Einstein
poured gasoline on the culture wars
between science and religion this week…."
An announcement of a
colloquium at Princeton:
Above: a cartoon,
"Coxeter exhuming Geometry,"
with the latter's tombstone inscribed
"GEOMETRY
600 B.C. —
1900 A.D.
R.I.P."
The above is from
The Paradise of Childhood,
a work first published in 1869.
"I need a photo-opportunity,
I want a shot at redemption.
Don't want to end up a cartoon
In a cartoon graveyard."
— Paul Simon
Albert Einstein,
1879-1955:
"It is quite clear to me that the religious paradise of youth, which was thus lost, was a first attempt to free myself from the chains of the 'merely-personal,' from an existence which is dominated by wishes, hopes and primitive feelings. Out yonder there was this huge world, which exists independently of us human beings and which stands before us like a great, eternal riddle, at least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking. The contemplation of this world beckoned like a liberation…."
— Autobiographical Notes, 1949
Related material:
A commentary on Tom Wolfe's
"Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died"–
"The Neural Buddhists," by David Brooks,
in the May 13 New York Times:
"The mind seems to have
the ability to transcend itself
and merge with a larger
presence that feels more real."
A New Yorker commentary on
a new translation of the Psalms:
"Suddenly, in a world without
Heaven, Hell, the soul, and
eternal salvation or redemption,
the theological stakes seem
more local and temporal:
'So teach us to number our days.'"
and a May 13 Log24 commentary
on Thomas Wolfe's
"Only the Dead Know Brooklyn"–
"… all good things — trout as well as
eternal salvation — come by grace
and grace comes by art
and art does not come easy."
"Art isn't easy."
— Stephen Sondheim,
quoted in
Solomon's Cube.
For further religious remarks,
consult Indiana Jones and the
Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
and The Librarian:
Return to King Solomon's Mines.
— Glenna Whitley, “Voodoo Justice,”
The New York Times, March 20, 1994
In Other Game News:
Related material:
and
The proportions of
the above rectangle
may suggest to some
a coffin; they are
meant to suggest
a monolith.
See Log24 four years ago
on this date:
Religious Symbolism
at Princeton.
Compare and contrast
with last month’s entries
related to a Princeton
Coxeter colloquium:
Thanks to Peter Woit’s weblog
for a link to the above illustration.
This picture of
“Coxeter Exhuming Geometry”
suggests the following comparison:
For the second tombstone,
see this morning’s entry,
Birth, Death, and Symmetry.
Further details on the geometry
underlying the second tombstone:
The above is from
Variable Resolution 4–k Meshes:
Concepts and Applications (pdf),
by Luiz Velho and Jonas Gomes.
See also Symmetry Framed
and The Garden of Cyrus.
| “That corpse you planted last year in your garden, Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?” — T. S. Eliot, “The Waste Land“ |
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