Log24

Rosalind Krauss in 1979 —

Nanavira Thera in 1959 —

Cambridge University Press in 1999 —

See also Cube Bricks.

Related material from the same day —

See also …

Cube Bricks 1984 —

The above bricks appeared in some earlier Log24 posts.

In memory of a culture jammer *—

* "Mr. Lyons … made a living partly by buying,
reconditioning and selling used cars." —
— Ben Ratliff in The New York Times  this evening.

See also the previous post and, from Feb. 14 in
this  journal, the phrase "more global than local."

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.)

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 New York Times  at 9 PM ET June 23, 2011—

ROBERT FANO: I’m trying to think briefly how to put it.

GINO FANO: "On the Fundamental Postulates"—

"E la prova di questo si ha precisamente nel fatto che si è potuto costruire (o, dirò meglio immaginare) un ente per cui sono verificati tutti i postulati precedenti…."

"The proof of this is precisely the fact that you could build (or, to say it better, imagine) an entity by which are verified all previous assumptions…."

Also from the Times  article quoted above…

"… like working on a cathedral. We laid our bricks and knew that others might later replace them with better bricks. We believed in the cause even if we didn’t completely understand the implications.”

— Tom Van Vleck

Some art that is related, if only by a shared metaphor, to Van Vleck's cathedral—

The art is also related to the mathematics of Gino Fano.

For an explanation of this relationship (implicit in the above note from 1984),
see "The Fano plane revisualized—or: the eIghtfold cube."