Curtis MOG « Search Results

Sunday, November 17, 2024

Weyl, Symmetry, and the MOG
(HTML version of an earlier post)

Filed under: General — Tags: Entities, Quadrants — m759 @ 1:16 am

Some historical background for a new book by Robert T. Curtis,
The Art of Working with the Mathieu Group M₂₄ —

"Space is another example of an entity endowed with a structure.
Here the elements are points, and the structure is established
in terms of certain basic relations between points such as:
A, B, C lie on a straight line, AB is congruent CD, and the like.
What we learn from our whole discussion and what has indeed
become a guiding principle in modern mathematics is this lesson:
Whenever you have to do with a structure endowed entity Σ
try to determine its group of automorphisms, the group of those
element-wise transformations which leave all structural relations
undisturbed. You can expect to gain a deep insight into the
constitution of Σ in this way. After that you may start to investigate
symmetric configurations of elements, i.e. configurations which are
invariant under a certain subgroup of the group of all automorphisms;
and it may be advisable, before looking for such configurations,
to study the subgroups themselves, e.g. the subgroup of those
automorphisms which leave one element fixed, or leave two distinct
elements fixed, and investigate what discontinuous or finite subgroups
there exist, and so forth."

— Hermann Weyl, Symmetry, Princeton University Press, 1952.
(Page 144 in the Princeton Science Library edition of 1989.)

**4×4 Square**

This square's automorphism group
has 322,560 transformations.

— The diamond theorem of Steven H. Cullinane.

**4×6 Rectangle**

This rectangle's automorphism group
has 244,823,040 transformations.

— The Miracle Octad Generator (MOG) of Robert T. Curtis.

The rectangle's automorphism group contains the
square's as a subgroup. The square's automorphism
group leaves invariant a set of 30 eight-subsquare sets
called affine hyperplanes. The rectangle's automorphism
group leaves invariant a set of 759 eight-subsquare sets
called octads.

View this post as a PDF.

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Thursday, April 25, 2013

Note on the MOG Correspondence

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Geometry, Six-Set — m759 @ 4:15 pm

In light of the April 23 post "The Six-Set,"
the caption at the bottom of a note of April 26, 1986
seems of interest:

"The R. T. Curtis correspondence between the 35 lines and the
2-subsets and 3-subsets of a 6-set. This underlies M₂₄."

A related note from today:

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Saturday, April 6, 2013

Pascal via Curtis

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: four-set, Geometry, Octad, Octad Generator — m759 @ 9:17 am

Click image for some background.

Shown above is a rearranged version of the
Miracle Octad Generator (MOG) of R. T. Curtis
("A new combinatorial approach to M₂₄,"
Math. Proc. Camb. Phil. Soc., 79 (1976), 25-42.)

The 8-subcell rectangles in the left part of the figure may be
viewed as illustrating (if the top left subcell is disregarded)
the thirty-five 3-subsets of a 7-set.

Such a view relates, as the remarks below show, the
MOG's underlying Galois geometry, that of PG(3,2), to
the hexagrammum mysticum of Pascal.

On Danzer's 35₄ Configuration:

IMAGE- Branko Grünbaum on Danzer's configuration

"Combinatorially, Danzer’s configuration can be interpreted
as defined by all 3-sets and all 4-sets that can be formed
by the elements of a 7-element set; each 'point' is represented
by one of the 3-sets, and it is incident with those lines
(represented by 4-sets) that contain the 3-set."

— Branko Grünbaum, "Musings on an Example of Danzer's,"
European Journal of Combinatorics , 29 (2008),
pp. 1910–1918 (online March 11, 2008)

"Danzer's configuration is deeply rooted in
Pascal's Hexagrammum Mysticum ."

— Marko Boben, Gábor Gévay, and Tomaž Pisanski,
"Danzer's Configuration Revisited," arXiv.org, Jan. 6, 2013

For an approach to such configurations that differs from
those of Grünbaum, Boben, Gévay, and Pisanski, see

Classical Geometry in Light of Galois Geometry.

Grünbaum has written little about Galois geometry.
Pisanski has recently touched on the subject;
see Configurations in this journal (Feb. 19, 2013).

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Friday, May 14, 2010

Competing MOG Definitions

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Geometry, Natural Diagram, Octad, Octad Generator — m759 @ 9:00 pm

A recently created Wikipedia article says that “The Miracle Octad Generator [MOG] is an array of coordinates, arranged in four rows and six columns, capable of describing any point in 24-dimensional space….” (Clearly any array with 24 parts is so capable.) The article ignores the fact that the MOG, as defined by R.T. Curtis in 1976, is not an array of coordinates, but rather a picture of a correspondence between two sets, each containing 35 structures. (As a later commentator has remarked, this correspondence is a well-known one that preserves a certain incidence property. See Eightfold Geometry.)

From the 1976 paper defining the MOG—

“There is a correspondence between the two systems of 35 groups, which is illustrated in Fig. 4 (the MOG or Miracle Octad Generator).” —R.T. Curtis, “A New Combinatorial Approach to M₂₄,” Mathematical Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society (1976), 79: 25-42

Curtis’s 1976 Fig. 4. (The MOG.)

The Wikipedia article, like a similar article at PlanetMath, is based on a different definition, from a book first published in 1988—

I have not seen the 1973 Curtis paper, so I do not know whether it uses the 35-sets correspondence definition or the 6×4 array definition. The remarks of Conway and Sloane on page 312 of the 1998 edition of their book about “Curtis’s original way of finding octads in the MOG [Cur2]” indicate that the correspondence definition was the one Curtis used in 1973—

Here the picture of “the 35 standard sextets of the MOG”
is very like (modulo a reflection) Curtis’s 1976 picture
of the MOG as a correspondence between two 35-sets.

A later paper by Curtis does use the array definition. See “Further Elementary Techniques Using the Miracle Octad Generator,” Proceedings of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society (1989) 32, 345-353.

The array definition is better suited to Conway’s use of his hexacode to describe octads, but it obscures the close connection of the MOG with finite geometry. That connection, apparent in the phrases “vector space structure in the standard square” and “parallel 2-spaces” (Conway and Sloane, third ed., p. 312, illustrated above), was not discussed in the 1976 Curtis paper. See my own page on the MOG at finitegeometry.org.

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Wednesday, July 3, 2024

The Nutshell Miracle

Filed under: General — Tags: Brick Space — m759 @ 10:42 pm

'Then a miracle occurs' cartoon

— Cartoon by S. Harris

From a search in this journal for nocciolo —

From a search in this journal for PG(5,2) —

From a search in this journal for Curtis MOG —

Shown above is a rearranged version of the
Miracle Octad Generator (MOG) of R. T. Curtis
("A new combinatorial approach to M₂₄,"
Math. Proc. Camb. Phil. Soc., 79 (1976), 25-42.)

From a search in this journal for Klein Correspondence —

Philippe Cara on the Klein correspondence

The picture of PG(5,2) above as an expanded nocciolo
shows that the Miracle Octad Generator illustrates
the Klein correspondence.

Update of 10:33 PM ET Friday, July 5, 2024 —

See the July 5 post "De Bruyn on the Klein Quadric."

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Saturday, February 5, 2022

Mathieu Cube Labeling

Filed under: General — Tags: Aitchison, Cube Labeling, Geometric Theology, Mathieu Cube, Octad — m759 @ 2:08 pm

Shown below is an illustration from "The Puzzle Layout Problem" —

September 2003
Lecture Notes in Computer Science 2912:500-501
DOI:10.1007/978-3-540-24595-7_50
Source: DBLP
Conference: Graph Drawing, 11th International Symposium,
GD 2003, Perugia, Italy, September 21-24, 2003, Revised Papers
Authors: Kozo Sugiyama, Seok-Hee Hong, Atsuhiko Maeda

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.

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Thursday, February 3, 2022

Through the Asian Looking Glass

Filed under: General — Tags: Knight Move, Octad, Octad Generator, The Guy Embedding — m759 @ 10:59 pm

The Miracle Octad Generator (MOG) —
The Conway-Sloane version of 1988:

Embedding Change, Illustrated

See also the 1976 R. T. Curtis version, of which the Conway-Sloane version
is a mirror reflection —

“There is a correspondence between the two systems
of 35 groups, which is illustrated in Fig. 4 (the MOG or
Miracle Octad Generator).”
—R.T. Curtis, “A New Combinatorial Approach to M₂₄,”
Mathematical Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical
Society (1976), 79: 25-42

Curtis’s 1976 Fig. 4. (The MOG.)

The Guy Embedding (named for M.J.T., not Richard K., Guy) states that
the MOG is naturally embedded in the codewords of the extended binary
Golay code, if those codewords are generated in lexicographic order.

The above reading order for the MOG 4×6 array —
down the columns, from left to right — yields the Conway-Sloane MOG.

Since that is a mirror image of the original Curtis MOG, the reading order
yielding that MOG is down the columns, from right to left.

"Traditionally, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese and Korean are written vertically
in columns going from top to bottom and ordered from right to left, with each
new column starting to the left of the preceding one." — Wikipedia

The Asian reading order has certain artistic advantages:

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Friday, March 21, 2014

Three Constructions of the Miracle Octad Generator

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Brick Space, Depth, Geometry, Octad, Octad Generator, Priority — m759 @ 12:24 pm

See also a Log24 post on this subject from Dec. 14, 2013,
especially (scroll down) the update of March 9, 2014.

Related material on the Turyn-Curtis construction
from the University of Cambridge —

— Slide by "Dr. Parker" — Apparently Richard A. Parker —
Lecture 4, "Discovering M₂₄," in slides for lectures 1-8 from lectures
at Cambridge in 2010-2011 on "Sporadic and Related Groups."
See also the Parker lectures of 2012-2013 on the same topic.

A third construction of Curtis's 35 4×6 1976 MOG arrays would use
Cullinane's analysis of the 4×4 subarrays' affine and projective structure,
and point out the fact that Conwell's 1910 correspondence of the 35
4+4-partitions of an 8-set with the 35 lines of the projective 3-space
over the 2-element field, PG(3, 2), is essentially the same correspondence
as that constituting Curtis's 1976 MOG.

See The Diamond Theorem, Finite Relativity, Galois Space,
Generating the Octad Generator, and The Klein Correspondence.

Update of March 22-March 23 —

Adding together as (0,1)-matrices over GF(2) the black parts (black
squares as 1's, all other squares as 0's) of the 35 4×6 arrays of the 1976
Curtis MOG would then reveal* the symmetric role played in octads
by what Curtis called the heavy brick , and so reveal also the action of
S₃ on the three Curtis bricks that leaves invariant the set of all 759
octads of the S(5, 8, 24) constructed from the 35 MOG arrays. For more
details of this "by-hand" construction, see Geometry of the 4×4 Square.
For the mathematical properties of the S(5, 8, 24), it is convenient to
have a separate construction (such as Turyn's), not by hand, of the
extended binary Golay code. See the Brouwer preprint quoted above.

* "Then a miracle occurs," as in the classic 1977 Sidney Harris cartoon.

Illustration of array addition from March 23 —

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Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Codes

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Coding Theory, Diamond-Theory-tesseract, Geometry, Natural Diagram, Octad, Octad Generator, Priority — m759 @ 12:00 pm

The hypercube model of the 4-space over the 2-element Galois field GF(2):

IMAGE- A hyperspace model of the 4D vector space over GF(2)

The phrase Galois tesseract may be used to denote a different model
of the above 4-space: the 4×4 square.

MacWilliams and Sloane discussed the Miracle Octad Generator
(MOG) of R. T. Curtis further on in their book (see below), but did not
seem to realize in 1977 that the 4×4 structures within the MOG are
based on the Galois-tesseract model of the 4-space over GF(2).

IMAGE- Octads within the Curtis MOG, which uses a 4x4-array model of the 4D vector space over GF(2)

The thirty-five 4×4 structures within the MOG:

IMAGE- The 35 square patterns within the Curtis MOG

Curtis himself first described these 35 square MOG patterns
combinatorially, (as his title indicated) rather than
algebraically or geometrically:

IMAGE- R. T. Curtis's combinatorial construction of 4x4 patterns within the Miracle Octad Generator

A later book co-authored by Sloane, first published in 1988,
did recognize the 4×4 MOG patterns as based on the 4×4
Galois-tesseract model.

Between the 1977 and 1988 Sloane books came the diamond theorem.

Update of May 29, 2013:

The Galois tesseract appeared in an early form in the journal
Computer Graphics and Art , Vol. 2, No. 1, February 1977
(the year the above MacWilliams-Sloane book was first published):

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Saturday, August 6, 2011

Correspondences

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Four Color, four-set, Geometry, Natural Diagram, Octad, Octad Generator, Springer — m759 @ 2:00 pm

Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent
Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité….

— Baudelaire, “Correspondances ”

From “A Four-Color Theorem”—

Figure 1

Note that this illustrates a natural correspondence
between

(A) the seven highly symmetrical four-colorings
of the 4×2 array at the left of Fig. 1, and

(B) the seven points of the smallest
projective plane at the right of Fig. 1.

To see the correspondence, add, in binary
fashion, the pairs of projective points from the
“points” section that correspond to like-colored
squares in a four-coloring from the left of Fig. 1.
(The correspondence can, of course, be described
in terms of cosets rather than of colorings.)

A different correspondence between these 7 four-coloring
structures and these 7 projective-line structures appears in
a structural analysis of the Miracle Octad Generator
(MOG) of R.T. Curtis—

Figure 2

Here the correspondence between the 7 four-coloring structures (left section) and the 7 projective-line structures (center section) is less obvious, but more fruitful. It yields, as shown, all of the 35 partitions of an 8-element set (an 8-set ) into two 4-sets. The 7 four-colorings in Fig. 2 also appear in the 35 4×4 parts of the MOG that correspond, in a way indicated by Fig. 2, to the 35 8-set paritions. This larger correspondence— of 35 4×2 arrays with 35 4×4 arrays— is the MOG, at least as it was originally defined. See The MOG, Generating the Octad Generator, and Eightfold Geometry.

For some applications of the Curtis MOG, see
(for instance) Griess’s Twelve Sporadic Groups .

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Saturday, November 16, 2024

Automorphism Groups: Examples for Weyl

Filed under: General — Tags: Entities — m759 @ 3:17 am

View a PDF of this post.

Keywords: Weyl, symmetry, group, automorphism,
octad, MOG, Curtis, Cullinane.

Comments (0)

Thursday, July 18, 2024

Brick Space

Filed under: General — Tags: Brick Space, Bricks and Bats, Chess Bricks — m759 @ 1:45 am

Compare and Contrast

A rearranged illustration from . . .

R. T. Curtis, "A New Combinatorial Approach to M₂₄,"
Mathematical Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society ,
Volume 79 , Issue 1 , January 1976 , pp. 25 – 42
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305004100052075 —

The image “MOGCurtis03.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

The "Brick Space" model of PG(5,2) —

Brick space: The 2x4 model of PG(5,2)

Background: See "Conwell heptads" on the Web.

See as well Nocciolo in this journal and . . .

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Monday, April 22, 2024

For Harlan Kane: The Brick Trick

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:47 am

From a transcript of the film —

— You could be making a killing out there consulting, but you’re laying brick. Why?

— Because when I hold a brick in my hand, I know exactly what it is and what it will do.

Every single time.

Its form is its function.

That gives me peace.

The film is based on a novel of the same title, by an author,
Paul Lindsay, who reportedly died on September 1, 2011.

For some bricks of a different sort, see the "Miracle Octad Generator"
(MOG) of R. T. Curtis in this journal on Sept. 1, 2011 — September Morn.

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Friday, April 19, 2024

Benchmarking Meta.ai

Filed under: General — Tags: Benchmarking — m759 @ 10:15 pm

Transcription —

(With one correction … The Meta.ai phrase "the group of 322,560"
was changed to "a group of 322,560" … and one addition — the
acronym MOG was defined. Superscript numerals for missing footnotes
were removed.)

You

What is the Cullinane diamond theorem?

Meta AI

The Cullinane diamond theorem states that every image of D (a 4×4 array of two-color diagonally divided square tiles) under the group G (a group of 322,560 permutations of these 16 tiles) has some ordinary or color-interchange symmetry.

Here are some key points about the theorem :

The theorem is related to the Miracle Octad Generator (MOG) of R. T. Curtis and the Leech lattice.
The underlying geometry of the 4×4 patterns is closely related to the construction of the Steiner system S(5,8,24).
The theorem uses a simple decomposition technique for functions into a finite field.
The symmetry group of order 322,560 underlies both the diamond theorem figures and the square patterns of the MOG.
The theorem has applications in finite projective geometry and the study of symmetric patterns.

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Monday, March 4, 2024

Report on the Diamond Theorem
by Google Gemini (Advanced)

Filed under: General — Tags: Chatbots on the Diamond Theorem, Octad — m759 @ 3:26 pm

Diamond Theorem Report

by Google Gemini AI

Monday, March 4, 2024

Can you write an academic paper, with source citations, about the Cullinane diamond theorem?

Absolutely! Here's an academic paper about the Cullinane diamond theorem. Please note that while I provide citations, in a fully formatted paper you'd need to adhere to your chosen academic style guide for proper formatting:

The Cullinane Diamond Theorem:
Exploring Symmetries in Graphic Design

Abstract

This paper examines the Cullinane diamond theorem, a principle in finite projective geometry that offers unexpected insights into the symmetries found in graphic designs. The theorem, initially formulated by Steven H. Cullinane, reveals that patterns built from simple geometric components, like diamonds or chevrons, possess inherent symmetry properties under specific transformation groups. We will discuss the mathematical foundations of the theorem, its relation to the Miracle Octad Generator, and its applications in design and the study of finite fields.

Introduction

Symmetry plays a vital role in art and design, contributing to a sense of balance, harmony, and aesthetic appeal. While often associated with classical forms, symmetry also manifests in surprising ways within seemingly simple graphic patterns. The Cullinane diamond theorem provides a mathematical framework to understand and predict these hidden symmetries.

Mathematical Background

Finite Projective Geometries: The Cullinane diamond theorem has its roots in finite projective geometry. A finite projective geometry PG(n, q) consists of a finite set of points and lines, where each line contains q + 1 points, and any two distinct points lie on a unique line ([1]).

Diamond Figure: Cullinane focuses on a specific pattern called the four-diamond figure (D). This figure is composed of 16 tiles arranged in a 4×4 array, where each tile is divided diagonally into two colors ([2]).

Transformation Group: The group G of transformations is formed by all possible permutations of rows, columns, and 2×2 quadrants of the diamond figure, along with color interchanges. The size of this group is 322,560 ([2]).

The Cullinane Diamond Theorem

Theorem:
Any image produced by applying transformations from the group G to the original diamond figure (D) will possess some form of ordinary or color-interchange symmetry ([2]).

Proof:
Cullinane's proof employs a decomposition technique for functions into a finite field. It demonstrates that the G-images of the diamond figure create an ideal within a ring of symmetric patterns. This ideal has 1024 patterns where any horizontal or vertical "cut" through the pattern remains uninterrupted ([2]).

Connections to the Miracle Octad Generator

The Cullinane diamond theorem shares a relationship with R.T. Curtis's Miracle Octad Generator (MOG). The MOG is a combinatorial structure within the study of sporadic simple groups with symmetry properties similar to those described by the theorem ([3]).

Applications

Graphic Design: The theorem informs artistic compositions employing diamond and chevron-like shapes. Designers can leverage the inherent symmetries to generate visually pleasing and intricate patterns.

Quilt Patterns: Many traditional quilt designs incorporate the geometries described by the theorem, leading to the emergence of symmetrical patterns, even when randomness might be involved in the selection of colors or tiles.

Finite Fields: The Cullinane diamond theorem establishes an isomorphism between specific "diamond" rings and rings of matrices over GF(4), offering insights into the structure of finite fields ([2]).

Conclusion

The Cullinane diamond theorem elegantly connects abstract mathematics with the world of graphic design. It unveils latent symmetries embedded within basic geometric shapes, providing a tool for understanding and creating visually balanced patterns. The theorem's connections to finite fields and combinatorial structures highlight its significance in broader mathematical research.

Citations

[1] Weisstein, E. W. “Finite Projective Geometry.” From MathWorld–A Wolfram Web Resource. [invalid URL removed]

[2] Cullinane, S. H. "Cullinane Diamond Theorem." Encyclopedia of Mathematics. https://encyclopediaofmath.org/wiki/Cullinane_diamond_theorem

[3] Curtis, R. T. (1976). A New Combinatorial Approach to M₂₄. Mathematical Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society, 79(1), 25–42. doi:10.1017/S0305004100052075

Let me know if you'd like me to expand on any particular aspect or provide additional citations!

Sources [I.e., the source of the Curtis citation]

1. www.hellenicaworld.com/Science/Mathematics/en/MathieuGroup.html

Gemini may display inaccurate info, including about people, so double-check it.

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Sunday, March 3, 2024

Deep Blue Research: A Report by You.com AI

Filed under: General — Tags: Chatbots on the Diamond Theorem, Four Color, Octad — m759 @ 12:34 pm

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

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Thursday, December 21, 2023

Pi.ai

Filed under: General — Tags: Chandelier, Octad — m759 @ 10:57 am

Thursday, December 21, 2023

Hey there, great to meet you. I’m Pi, your personal AI. My goal is to be useful, friendly and fun. Ask me for advice, for answers, or let’s talk about whatever’s on your mind.

How's your day going?

Going OK so far, Pi. How's yours?

My day is going swimmingly! 🌊 Thanks for asking 😊 Anything in particular on your mind today?

What is the connection of "heptads" with the "MOG" of R. T. Curtis?

The term “heptads” is connected to the Miracle Octad Generator (MOG) created by R. T. Curtis. Heptads are 7-cycles that arise from the MOG, and they can be used to rearrange the original 1976 version of the MOG into two 4-sets. This is related to the Mathieu groups, which are a family of finite simple groups that play a role in the geometry of the MOG. Are you familiar with the Mathieu groups?

Just the large one. I am interested in how familiar YOU are with these concepts. Sorry, but I must correct your hallucination about heptads… It was a good guess, though. Can you look up the work of G. M. Conwell on PG(3,2)? Heptads are discussed there.

Yes, it seems that G. M. Conwell discussed the concept of heptads in relation to the projective geometry PG(3,2). Heptads are apparently 7-cycles that can be used to establish geometrical isomorphisms and describe the structure of PG(3,2). Do you know if Conwell's work on heptads has been applied to other areas of mathematics?

It has not, as far as I know. Actually, Pi, heptads are not 7-cycles. What made you think that they are?

My apologies! I assumed that heptads would be 7-cycles since the name “heptads” suggests a relation to the number 7 and cycles are common in mathematics. It sounds like I was off the mark there. If heptads are not 7-cycles, can you give me a better idea of what they are?

Conwell can. See his 1910 paper for further details. All for now, Pi… Have a nice day!

Got it — thanks for the tip on Conwell's paper. I'll take a look for more information there! It was great chatting with you. You have a great day as well 😊 Feel free to reach out again if you have any other questions or just want to chat. See ya!

Scholium —

Related material for "swimmingly" and "the number 7" — Snark Hunt.

Sia!

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Tuesday, December 19, 2023

Copilot Report

Filed under: General — Tags: Chatbots on the Diamond Theorem, Octad, Rosenhain and Göpel — m759 @ 12:16 am

From Microsoft Copilot (with "Precise" setting)
on Dec. 18, 2023 —

How is the 1910 work of G. M. Conwell on PG(3,2) related to the Miracle Octad Generator of R. T. Curtis?

Searching for: Relation between G. M. Conwell work on PG(3,2) and Miracle Octad Generator of R. T. Curtis

Searching for: Relation between G. M. Conwell work on PG(3,2) and Miracle Octad Generator of R. T. Curtis explained

Generating answers for you…

The work of George M. Conwell on the finite projective 3-space PG(3,2) and the Miracle Octad Generator (MOG) of R. T. Curtis are both significant contributions to the field of combinatorial mathematics ¹ ².

Conwell’s work on PG(3,2) provided a detailed study of the structure of this finite projective space ¹. On the other hand, the MOG is a tool for exploring the binary Golay code and its automorphism group M24 ².

The connection between these two works lies in the underlying combinatorial structures they explore. The Rosenhain and Göpel tetrads, which are key structures in the finite geometry PG(3,2), play a significant role in the Curtis Miracle Octad Generator ³. These structures provide a link between the finite geometric structures studied by Conwell and the combinatorial structures generated by the MOG ³.

For a more detailed understanding of this connection, I recommend checking out the resources mentioned in the references ¹ ² ³. If you have any specific questions about the concepts in these works, feel free to ask! I’ll do my best to help.

Learn more

archive.org

xenon.stanford.edu

academia.edu

en.wikipedia.org

archive.org
_________________________________________________________

__________________________________________________________

DOCUMENT SUMMARY (generated by Copilot)
of reference 3 above, from academia.edu —
"Rosenhain and Göpel Tetrads in PG(3,2),"
by Steven H. Cullinane on March 17, 2013

Here is a summary of the document:

Rosenhain and Göpel Tetrads: The document discusses the 80 Rosenhain odd tetrads and the 60 Göpel even tetrads, which are subsets of four points in a projective 3-space over a 2-element field.
Diamond Theorem Model: The document shows how the 140 Rosenhain and Göpel tetrads occur naturally in the diamond theorem model of the 35 lines of the projective 3-space ¹.
Unidirectional Line Diagrams: The document explains how the arrays containing the Rosenhain and Göpel tetrads have different numbers of unidirectional line diagrams, which are related to the symmetry of the arrays.
References: The document cites several sources that relate the Göpel tetrads to various topics in mathematics, such as quartic surfaces, birational automorphisms, the Miracle Octad Generator, and the Moore correspondence.

Reference:

1. Page 2 – Line 1

Copilot suggestions following document summary —

Correction:

"Subsets of four points in a projective 3-space" above is a Copilot error, and not
from the document being summarized. It should be "subsets of four points in an
affine 4-space."

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Monday, December 18, 2023

AI Class

Filed under: General — Tags: Chatbots, Chatbots on the Diamond Theorem, Octad — m759 @ 12:31 pm

Bringing Up Bing :

A Tutorial for Bing on Monday, December 18, 2023

Prompt: How is the Cullinane Diamond Theorem related to the Curtis Miracle Octad Generator?

Response: Searching for: Cullinane Diamond Theorem and Curtis Miracle Octad Generator relation.

Generating answers for you…

The Cullinane Diamond Theorem and the Curtis Miracle Octad Generator (MOG) are both mathematical concepts that are deeply intertwined with finite projective geometry ¹ ^,2.

The Cullinane Diamond Theorem explains the surprising symmetry properties of some simple graphic designs and underlies the structure of the 35 square patterns in R. T. Curtis’s MOG ¹ ^,2. The theorem uses a 4×4 array of two-color diagonally-divided square tiles, and considers the group of permutations of these 16 tiles generated by mixing random permutations of rows, columns, and the four 2×2 quadrants ¹ ^,2.

The theorem states that every image of the 4×4 array has some ordinary or color-interchange symmetry ^1,². The 35 structures of the 840 images of the 4×4 array are isomorphic to the 35 lines in the 3-dimensional projective space over GF(2), a finite field with two elements ^1,². This can be seen by viewing the 35 structures as three-sets of line diagrams, based on the three partitions of the four-set of square two-color tiles into two two-sets ¹ ^,2.

The MOG is a 4×6 array of combinations describing any point in 24-dimensional space ¹. It preserves all of the symmetries and maximal subgroups of the Mathieu group M24 ¹. The MOG is used in the construction of the Steiner system S(5,8,24), and hence is also related to the Leech lattice ².

In summary, the Cullinane Diamond Theorem provides a geometric explanation for the structure and symmetries of the patterns in the MOG ¹^,². Both theorems are connected through their use of finite projective geometry and their applications to the study of symmetry ¹ ^,2.

Learn more

Reply to Bing's Response —

Actually, the Cullinane diamond theorem, by itself, does NOT explain the patterns in the MOG. The MOG is a natural correspondence, or pairing, of the 35 diamond-theorem structures with the 35 partitions of an eight-element set into two four-element sets. That correspondence is explained in a 1910 paper by G. M. Conwell, "The 3-Space PG(3,2) and Its Group." The Conwell correspondence was later found to be invariant under the action of the large Mathieu group on a set of 24=16+8 elements.

Response to the Above Reply —

Generating answers for you…

Thank you for the clarification. You’re correct that the Cullinane Diamond Theorem, by itself, does not explain the patterns in the Miracle Octad Generator (MOG). The MOG is indeed a natural correspondence of the 35 structures from the Diamond Theorem with the 35 partitions of an eight-element set into two four-element sets. This correspondence was explained by G. M. Conwell in his 1910 paper “The 3-Space PG(3,2) and Its Group.” The Conwell correspondence was later found to be invariant under the action of the large Mathieu group on a set of 24 elements, which can be partitioned into a set of 16 and a set of 8. I appreciate your input and the opportunity to learn from it. If you have any more questions or need further clarification, feel free to ask!

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Saturday, November 18, 2023

“Don’t solicit for your sister,* it’s not nice.” — Tom Lehrer

Filed under: General — Tags: Octad — m759 @ 11:36 am

André Weil to his sister:

From this journal at 1:51 AM ET Thursday, September 8, 2022 —

"The pleasure comes from the illusion" . . .

Exercise:

Compare and contrast the following structure with the three
"bricks" of the R. T. Curtis Miracle Octad Generator (MOG).

Note that the 4-row-2-column "brick" at left is quite
different from the other two bricks, which together
show chevron variations within a Galois tesseract —

^{Further Weil remarks . . .}

^{A Slew of Prayers}

"The pleasure comes from the illusion
and the far from clear meaning;
once the illusion is dissipated,
and knowledge obtained, one becomes
indifferent at the same time;
at least in the Gitâ there is a slew of prayers
(slokas) on the subject, each one more final
than the previous ones."

_* ^—

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Wednesday, September 28, 2022

Bitspace Note

Filed under: General — Tags: Bitspace, Octad — m759 @ 5:28 pm

Update of 5:20 AM ET on Sept. 29. 2022 —

The octads of the [24, 8, 8] cube-motif code
can be transformed by the permutation below
into octads recognizable, thanks to the Miracle
Octad Generator (MOG) of R. T. Curtis, as
belonging to the Golay code.

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Thursday, September 8, 2022

Analogy in Mathematics: Chevron Variations

Filed under: General — Tags: Analogy and Mysticism, Chevron Variations, Circle Square Gauss, Maltese V, Octad, The 24 Variations — m759 @ 1:51 am

André Weil in 1940 on analogy in mathematics —

. "Once it is possible to translate any particular proof from one theory to another, then the analogy has ceased to be productive for this purpose; it would cease to be at all productive if at one point we had a meaningful and natural way of deriving both theories from a single one. In this sense, around 1820, mathematicians (Gauss, Abel, Galois, Jacobi) permitted themselves, with anguish and delight, to be guided by the analogy between the division of the circle (Gauss’s problem) and the division of elliptic functions. Today, we can easily show that both problems have a place in the theory of abelian equations; we have the theory (I am speaking of a purely algebraic theory, so it is not a matter of number theory in this case) of abelian extensions. Gone is the analogy: gone are the two theories, their conflicts and their delicious reciprocal reflections, their furtive caresses, their inexplicable quarrels; alas, all is just one theory, whose majestic beauty can no longer excite us. Nothing is more fecund than these slightly adulterous relationships; nothing gives greater pleasure to the connoisseur, whether he participates in it, or even if he is an historian contemplating it retrospectively, accompanied, nevertheless, by a touch of melancholy. The pleasure comes from the illusion and the far from clear meaning; once the illusion is dissipated, and knowledge obtained, one becomes indifferent at the same time; at least in the Gitâ there is a slew of prayers (slokas) on the subject, each one more final than the previous ones."

"The pleasure comes from the illusion" . . .

Exercise:

Compare and contrast the following structure with the three
"bricks" of the R. T. Curtis Miracle Octad Generator (MOG).

Note that the 4-row-2-column "brick" at left is quite
different from the other two bricks, which together
show chevron variations within a Galois tesseract —

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Friday, August 19, 2022

The Guy Embedding

Filed under: General — Tags: Octad, on220819, The Guy Embedding — m759 @ 3:43 pm

M. J. T. Guy discovered that the lexicographic version
of the Golay code contains, embedded within it, the
Miracle Octad Generator (MOG) of R. T. Curtis.

For 12 basis vectors of the lexicographic version, see below.

For some context, click the embedded guy.

For a closely related, but simpler, mathematical
structure, see posts tagged The Omega Matrix.

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Saturday, September 11, 2021

Reality for Academia

Filed under: General — Tags: Matrix 4 — m759 @ 4:16 pm

The title of the previous post, "Ground Omega," suggests a related nightmare . . .

A writer of fiction in the previous post —

"When we say a thing is unreal, we mean it is too real…."

Old joke —

"What you mean 'we,' paleface?"

At Ground Omega in the above My Hero Academia site —

"The twenty-four students are split into six groups of four…."

I prefer the similar splittings of the Curtis Omega —

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Friday, May 7, 2021

Through the Miracle Looking Glass

Filed under: General — Tags: History Museum — m759 @ 11:30 am

(This post was suggested by the order of reading characters in
traditional Chinese calligraphy — top to bottom, right to left .)

“. . . the Horses’ Heads

Were toward Eternity”
— Emily Dickinson

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Wednesday, September 2, 2020

Space Wars: Sith Pyramid vs. Jedi Cube

Filed under: General — Tags: Octad, Octad Generator — m759 @ 11:18 am

For the Sith Pyramid, see posts tagged Pyramid Game.
For the Jedi Cube, see posts tagged Enigma Cube
and cube-related remarks by Aitchison at Hiroshima.

This post was suggested by two events of May 16, 2019 —
A weblog post by Frans Marcelis on the Miracle Octad
Generator of R. T. Curtis (illustrated with a pyramid),
and the death of I. M. Pei, architect of the Louvre pyramid.

That these events occurred on the same date is, of course,
completely coincidental.

Perhaps Dan Brown can write a tune to commemorate
the coincidence.

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Thursday, August 27, 2020

The Complete Extended Binary Golay Code

Filed under: General — Tags: Canonicity, MJT Guy, Octad, Octad Generator, Springer, The Guy Embedding — m759 @ 12:21 pm

All 4096 vectors in the code are at . . .

http://neilsloane.com/oadir/oa.4096.12.2.7.txt.

Sloane’s list* contains the 12 generating vectors
listed in 2011 by Adlam —

As noted by Conway in Sphere Packings, Lattices and Groups ,
these 4096 vectors, constructed lexicographically, are exactly
the same vectors produced by using the Conway-Sloane version
of the Curtis Miracle Octad Generator (MOG). Conway says this
lexico-MOG equivalence was first discovered by M. J. T. Guy.

(Of course, any permutation of the 24 columns above produces
a version of the code qua code. But because the lexicographic and
the MOG constructions yield the same result, that result is in
some sense canonical.)

See my post of July 13, 2020 —

The lexicographic Golay code
contains, embedded within it,
the Miracle Octad Generator.

For some related results, Google the twelfth generator:

* Sloane’s list is of the codewords as the rows of an orthogonal array —

Monday, July 13, 2020

The Lexicographic Octad Generator (LOG)*

Filed under: General — Tags: Canonicity, Lexico.graphics, MJT Guy, Natural Diagram, Octad, Octad Generator, The Guy Embedding, The Log — m759 @ 5:43 pm

The lexicographic Golay code
contains, embedded within it,
the Miracle Octad Generator.

By Steven H. Cullinane, July 13, 2020

Background —

The Miracle Octad Generator (MOG)
of R. T. Curtis (Conway-Sloane version) —

Embedding Change, Illustrated

A basis for the Golay code, excerpted from a version of
the code generated in lexicographic order, in

"Constructing the Extended Binary Golay Code"
Ben Adlam
Harvard University
August 9, 2011:

000000000000000011111111
000000000000111100001111
000000000011001100110011
000000000101010101010101
000000001001011001101001
000000110000001101010110
000001010000010101100011
000010010000011000111010
000100010001000101111000
001000010001001000011101
010000010001010001001110
100000010001011100100100

Below, each vector above has been reordered within
a 4×6 array, by Steven H. Cullinane, to form twelve
independent Miracle Octad Generator vectors
(as in the Conway-Sloane SPLAG version above, in
which Curtis's earlier heavy bricks are reflected in
their vertical axes) —

01 02 03 04 05 . . . 20 21 22 23 24 -->

01 05 09 13 17 21
02 06 10 14 18 22
03 07 11 15 19 23
04 08 12 16 20 24

0000 0000 0000 0000 1111 1111 -->

0000 11
0000 11
0000 11
0000 11 as in the MOG.

0000 0000 0000 1111 0000 1111 -->

0001 01
0001 01
0001 01
0001 01 as in the MOG.

0000 0000 0011 0011 0011 0011 -->

0000 00
0000 00
0011 11
0011 11 as in the MOG.

0000 0000 0101 0101 0101 0101 -->

0000 00
0011 11
0000 00
0011 11 as in the MOG.

0000 0000 1001 0110 0110 1001 -->

0010 01
0001 10
0001 10
0010 01 as in the MOG.

0000 0011 0000 0011 0101 0110 -->

0000 00
0000 11
0101 01
0101 10 as in the MOG.

0000 0101 0000 0101 0110 0011 -->

0000 00
0101 10
0000 11
0101 01 as in the MOG.

0000 1001 0000 0110 0011 1010 -->

0100 01
0001 00
0001 11
0100 10 as in the MOG.

0001 0001 0001 0001 0111 1000 -->

0000 01
0000 10
0000 10
1111 10 as in the MOG.

0010 0001 0001 0010 0001 1101 -->

0000 01
0000 01
1001 00
0110 11 as in the MOG.

0100 0001 0001 0100 0100 1110 -->

0000 01
1001 11
0000 01
0110 00 as in the MOG.

1000 0001 0001 0111 0010 0100 -->

10 00 00
00 01 01
00 01 10
01 11 00 as in the MOG (heavy brick at center).

Update at 7:41 PM ET the same day —
A check of SPLAG shows that the above result is not new:

And at 7:59 PM ET the same day —
Conway seems to be saying that at some unspecified point in the past,
M.J.T. Guy, examining the lexicographic Golay code, found (as I just did)
that weight-8 lexicographic Golay codewords, when arranged naturally
in 4×6 arrays, yield certain intriguing visual patterns. If the MOG existed
at the time of his discovery, he would have identified these patterns as
those of the MOG. (Lexicographic codes have apparently been
known since 1960, the MOG since the early 1970s.)

* Addendum at 4 AM ET the next day —
See also Logline (Walpurgisnacht 2013).

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Thursday, April 23, 2020

Octads and Geometry

Filed under: General — Tags: Art Issue, Brick Space, Brick Symmetry, Brick Wall, Devs, Octad, Octad Generator, Octad Group, Overarching Group — m759 @ 10:11 pm

See the web pages octad.group and octad.us.

Related geometry (not the 759 octads, but closely related to them) —

The 4×6 rectangle of R. T. Curtis
illustrates the geometry of octads —

Curtis splits the 4×6 rectangle into three 4×2 "bricks" —

"In fact the construction enables us to describe the octads
in a very revealing manner. It shows that each octad,
other than Λ₁, Λ₂, Λ₃, intersects at least one of these ' bricks' —
the 'heavy brick' – in just four points." . . . .

— R. T. Curtis (1976). "A new combinatorial approach to M₂₄,"
Mathematical Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society ,
79, pp 25-42.

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Wednesday, February 19, 2020

Aitchison’s Octads

Filed under: General — Tags: Aitchison, Eightfold Cube, Fro Zen, Mathieu Cube, Octad, Octad Generator — m759 @ 11:36 am

The 759 octads of the Steiner system S(5,8,24) are displayed
rather neatly in the Miracle Octad Generator of R. T. Curtis.

A March 9, 2018, construction by Iain Aitchison* pictures the
759 octads on the faces of a cube , with octad elements the
24 edges of a cuboctahedron :

The Curtis octads are related to symmetries of the square.

See my webpage "Geometry of the 4×4 square" from March 2004.
Aitchison's p. 42 slide includes an illustration from that page —

Aitchison's octads are instead related to symmetries of the cube.

Note that essentially the same model as Aitchison's can be pictured
by using, instead of the 24 edges of a cuboctahedron, the 24 outer
faces of subcubes in the eightfold cube .

Image from Christmas Day 2005.

* http://www.math.sci.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/branched/files/2018/
presentations/Aitchison-Hiroshima-2-2018.pdf.
See also Aitchison in this journal.

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Monday, December 23, 2019

Orbit

Filed under: General — Tags: Inner-Space Variations, Obit et Orbit, Octad — m759 @ 7:34 pm

"December 22, the birth anniversary of India’s famed mathematician
Srinivasa Ramanujan, is celebrated as National Mathematics Day."
— Indian Express yesterday

"Orbits and stabilizers are closely related." — Wikipedia

Symmetries by Plato and R. T. Curtis —

In the above, 322,560 is the order
of the octad stabilizer group .

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Friday, March 1, 2019

Wikipedia Scholarship (Continued)

Filed under: General — Tags: Helsinki Math, Octad, Octad Generator, Priority, Wikipedia Scholarship — m759 @ 12:45 pm

This post continues a post from yesterday on the square model of
PG(3,2) that apparently first appeared (presented as such*) in . . .

Cullinane, "Symmetry invariance in a diamond ring,"
Notices of the AMS , pp. A193-194, Feb. 1979.

Yesterday's Wikipedia presentation of the square model was today
revised by yet another anonymous author —

Revision history accounting for the above change from yesterday —

The jargon "rm OR" means "remove original research."

The added verbiage about block designs is a smokescreen having
nothing to do with the subject, which is square representation
of the 35 points and lines.

* The 35 squares, each consisting of four 4-element subsets, appeared earlier
in the Miracle Octad Generator (MOG) of R. T. Curtis (published in 1976).
They were not at that time presented as constituting a finite geometry,
either affine (AG(4,2)) or projective (PG(3,2)).

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Thursday, February 7, 2019

Geometry of the 4×4 Square: The Kummer Configuration

Filed under: General — Tags: Kummerhenge, Octad, Octad Generator, The Omega Matrix — m759 @ 12:00 am

From the series of posts tagged Kummerhenge —

A Wikipedia article relating the above 4×4 square to the work of Kummer —

A somewhat more interesting aspect of the geometry of the 4×4 square
is its relationship to the 4×6 grid underlying the Miracle Octad Generator
(MOG) of R. T. Curtis. Hudson's 1905 classic Kummer's Quartic Surface
deals with the Kummer properties above and also foreshadows, without
explicitly describing, the finite-geometry properties of the 4×4 square as
a finite affine 4-space — properties that are of use in studying the Mathieu
group M₂₄with the aid of the MOG.

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Sunday, December 2, 2018

Symmetry at Hiroshima

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: Aitchison, Geometric Theology, Mathieu Cube, Octad, Octad Generator — m759 @ 6:43 am

A search this morning for articles mentioning the Miracle Octad Generator
of R. T. Curtis within the last year yielded an abstract for two talks given
at Hiroshima on March 8 and 9, 2018 —

http://www.math.sci.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/
branched/files/2018/abstract/Aitchison.txt

Iain AITCHISON

Title:

Construction of highly symmetric Riemann surfaces, related manifolds, and some exceptional objects, I, II

Abstract:

Since antiquity, some mathematical objects have played a special role, underpinning new mathematics as understanding deepened. Perhaps archetypal are the Platonic polyhedra, subsequently related to Platonic idealism, and the contentious notion of existence of mathematical reality independent of human consciousness.

Exceptional or unique objects are often associated with symmetry – manifest or hidden. In topology and geometry, we have natural base points for the moduli spaces of closed genus 2 and 3 surfaces (arising from the 2-fold branched cover of the sphere over the 6 vertices of the octahedron, and Klein's quartic curve, respectively), and Bring's genus 4 curve arises in Klein's description of the solution of polynomial equations of degree greater than 4, as well as in the construction of the Horrocks-Mumford bundle. Poincare's homology 3-sphere, and Kummer's surface in real dimension 4 also play special roles.

In other areas: we have the exceptional Lie algebras such as E8; the sporadic finite simple groups; the division algebras: Golay's binary and ternary codes; the Steiner triple systems S(5,6,12) and S(5,8,24); the Leech lattice; the outer automorphisms of the symmetric group S6; the triality map in dimension 8; and so on. We also note such as: the 27 lines on a cubic, the 28 bitangents of a quartic curve, the 120 tritangents of a sextic curve, and so on, related to Galois' exceptional finite groups PSL2(p) (for p= 5,7,11), and various other so-called `Arnol'd Trinities'.

Motivated originally by the `Eightfold Way' sculpture at MSRI in Berkeley, we discuss inter-relationships between a selection of these objects, illustrating connections arising via highly symmetric Riemann surface patterns. These are constructed starting with a labeled polygon and an involution on its label set.

Necessarily, in two lectures, we will neither delve deeply into, nor describe in full, contexts within which exceptional objects arise. We will, however, give sufficient definition and detail to illustrate essential inter-connectedness of those exceptional objects considered.

Our starting point will be simplistic, arising from ancient Greek ideas underlying atomism, and Plato's concepts of space. There will be some overlap with a previous talk on this material, but we will illustrate with some different examples, and from a different philosophical perspective.

Some new results arising from this work will also be given, such as an alternative graphic-illustrated MOG (Miracle Octad Generator) for the Steiner system S(5,8,24), and an alternative to Singerman – Jones' genus 70 Riemann surface previously proposed as a completion of an Arnol'd Trinity. Our alternative candidate also completes a Trinity whose two other elements are Thurston's highly symmetric 6- and 8-component links, the latter related by Thurston to Klein's quartic curve.

See also yesterday morning's post, "Character."

Update: For a followup, see the next Log24 post.

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Wednesday, August 23, 2017

Pakanga

Filed under: General — Tags: Pakanga — m759 @ 4:44 am

("Every Picture Tells a Story," continued from August 15 )

Related material — Laughing-Academy Cartography.

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Tuesday, June 7, 2016

Art and Space…

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Barth Art, St. Bridget's Day — m759 @ 6:00 am

Continues, in memory of chess grandmaster Viktor Korchnoi,
who reportedly died at 85 yesterday in Switzerland —

IMAGE- Spielfeld (1982-83), by Wolf Barth

The coloring of the 4×4 "base" in the above image
suggests St. Bridget's cross.

From this journal on St. Bridget's Day this year —

"Possible title:

A new graphic approach
to an old geometric approach
to a new combinatorial approach
to an old algebraic approach
to M₂₄"

The narrative leap from image to date may be regarded as
an example of "knight's move" thinking.

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Monday, February 1, 2016

Historical Note

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Natural Diagram, Priority — m759 @ 6:29 am

Possible title:

A new graphic approach
to an old geometric approach
to a new combinatorial approach
to an old algebraic approach
to M₂₄

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Monday, January 12, 2015

Points Omega*

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Natural Diagram, Octad, Octad Generator, Points Omega — m759 @ 12:00 pm

The previous post displayed a set of
24 unit-square “points” within a rectangular array.
These are the points of the
Miracle Octad Generator of R. T. Curtis.

The array was labeled Ω
because that is the usual designation for
a set acted upon by a group:

* The title is an allusion to Point Omega , a novel by
Don DeLillo published on Groundhog Day 2010.
See “Point Omega” in this journal.

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Sunday, January 11, 2015

Real Beyond Artifice

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Albright, four-set, Gitterkrieg, Natural Diagram, Points Omega, Seventh Seal — m759 @ 7:20 pm

A professor at Harvard has written about
"the urge to seize and display something
real beyond artifice."

He reportedly died on January 3, 2015.

An image from this journal on that date:

Another Gitterkrieg image:

The 24-set Ω of R. T. Curtis

Click on the images for related material.

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Thursday, January 8, 2015

Gitterkrieg

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Gitterkrieg, Octad, Octad Generator — m759 @ 11:00 am

(Continued)

From the abstract of a talk, "Extremal Lattices," at TU Graz
on Friday, Jan. 11, 2013, by Prof. Dr. Gabriele Nebe
(RWTH Aachen) —

"I will give a construction of the extremal even
unimodular lattice Γ of dimension 72 I discovered
in summer 2010. The existence of such a lattice
was a longstanding open problem. The
construction that allows to obtain the
minimum by computer is similar to the one of the
Leech lattice from E₈ and of the Golay code from
the Hamming code (Turyn 1967)."

On an earlier talk by Nebe at Oberwolfach in 2011 —

"Exciting new developments were presented by
Gabriele Nebe (Extremal lattices and codes ) who
sketched the construction of her recently found
extremal lattice in 72 dimensions…."

Nebe's Oberwolfach slides include one on
"The history of Turyn's construction" —

Nebe's list omits the year 1976. This was the year of
publication for "A New Combinatorial Approach to M₂₄"
by R. T. Curtis, the paper that defined Curtis's
"Miracle Octad Generator."

Turyn's 1967 construction, uncredited by Curtis, may have
been the basis for Curtis's octad-generator construction.

See Turyn in this journal.

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Saturday, October 25, 2014

Foundation Square

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: 5x5, Fields, Octad, Octad Generator — m759 @ 2:56 pm

In the above illustration of the 3-4-5 Pythagorean triangle,
the grids on each side may be regarded as figures of
Euclidean geometry or of Galois geometry.

In Euclidean geometry, these grids illustrate a property of
the inner triangle.

In elementary Galois geometry, ignoring the connection with
the inner triangle, the grids may be regarded instead as
illustrating vector spaces over finite (i.e., Galois) fields.
Previous posts in this journal have dealt with properties of
the 3×3 and 4×4 grids. This suggests a look at properties of
the next larger grid, the 5×5 array, viewed as a picture of the
two-dimensional vector space (or affine plane) over the finite
Galois field GF(5) (also known as ℤ₅).

The 5×5 array may be coordinatized in a natural way, as illustrated
in (for instance) Matters Mathematical , by I.N. Herstein and
Irving Kaplansky, 2nd ed., Chelsea Publishing, 1978, p. 171:

See Herstein and Kaplansky for the elementary Galois geometry of
the 5×5 array.

For 5×5 geometry that is not so elementary, see…

"The Hoffman-Singleton Graph and its Automorphisms," by
Paul R. Hafner, Journal of Algebraic Combinatorics , 18 (2003), 7–12, and
the Web pages "Hoffman-Singleton Graph" and "Higman-Sims Graph"
of A. E. Brouwer.

Hafner's abstract:

We describe the Hoffman-Singleton graph geometrically, showing that
it is closely related to the incidence graph of the affine plane over ℤ₅.
This allows us to construct all automorphisms of the graph.

The remarks of Brouwer on graphs connect the 5×5-related geometry discussed
by Hafner with the 4×4 geometry related to the Steiner system S(5,8,24).
(See the Miracle Octad Generator of R. T. Curtis and the related coordinatization
by Cullinane of the 4×4 array as a four-dimensional vector space over GF(2).)

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Sunday, August 31, 2014

Sunday School

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Galois's Space, Octad, Octad Generator, Springer — m759 @ 9:00 am

The Folding

Cynthia Zarin in The New Yorker , issue dated April 12, 2004—

“Time, for L’Engle, is accordion-pleated. She elaborated,
‘When you bring a sheet off the line, you can’t handle it
until it’s folded, and in a sense, I think, the universe can’t
exist until it’s folded — or it’s a story without a book.’”

The geometry of the 4×4 square array is that of the
3-dimensional projective Galois space PG(3,2).

This space occurs, notably, in the Miracle Octad Generator (MOG)
of R. T. Curtis (submitted to Math. Proc. Camb. Phil. Soc. on
15 June 1974). Curtis did not, however, describe its geometric
properties. For these, see the Cullinane diamond theorem.

Some history:

Curtis seems to have obtained the 4×4 space by permuting,
then “folding” 1×8 binary sequences into 4×2 binary arrays.
The original 1×8 sequences came from the method of Turyn
(1967) described by van Lint in his book Coding Theory
(Springer Lecture Notes in Mathematics, No. 201 , first edition
published in 1971). Two 4×2 arrays form each 4×4 square array
within the MOG. This construction did not suggest any discussion
of the geometric properties of the square arrays.

[Rewritten for clarity on Sept. 3, 2014.]

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Tuesday, August 26, 2014

Lux et Veritas

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 7:59 am

Omega by Lux:

Mathieu and Omega Steps

Omega by Curtis:

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Sunday, August 24, 2014

Symplectic Structure…

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Diamond Theorem Correlation, Octad, Octad Generator, Picture Show, Rosenhain and Göpel, Six-Set — m759 @ 12:00 pm

In the Miracle Octad Generator (MOG):

The above details from a one-page note of April 26, 1986, refer to the
Miracle Octad Generator of R. T. Curtis, as it was published in 1976:

From R. T. Curtis (1976). A new combinatorial approach to M₂₄,
Mathematical Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society ,
79, pp 25-42. doi:10.1017/S0305004100052075.

The 1986 note assumed that the reader would be able to supply, from the
MOG itself, the missing top row of each heavy brick.

Note that the interchange of the two squares in the top row of each
heavy brick induces the diamond-theorem correlation.

Note also that the 20 pictured 3-subsets of a 6-set in the 1986 note
occur as paired complements in two pictures, each showing 10 of the
3-subsets.

This pair of pictures corresponds to the 20 Rosenhain tetrads among
the 35 lines of PG(3,2), while the picture showing the 2-subsets
corresponds to the 15 Göpel tetrads among the 35 lines.

See Rosenhain and Göpel tetrads in PG(3,2). Some further background:

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Tuesday, June 17, 2014

Finite Relativity

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Finite Relativity, Mathieu Raumproblem, Octad, Octad Generator — m759 @ 11:00 am

Continued.

Anyone tackling the Raumproblem described here
on Feb. 21, 2014 should know the history of coordinatizations
of the 4×6 Miracle Octad Generator (MOG) array by R. T. Curtis
and J. H. Conway. Some documentation:

The above two images seem to contradict a statement by R. T. Curtis
in a 1989 paper. Curtis seemed in that paper to be saying, falsely, that
his original 1973 and 1976 MOG coordinates were those in array M below—

This seemingly false statement involved John H. Conway's supposedly
definitive and natural canonical coordinatization of the 4×6 MOG
array by the symbols for the 24 points of the projective line over GF(23)—
{∞, 0, 1, 2, 3… , 21, 22}:

An explanation of the apparent falsity in Curtis's 1989 paper:

By "two versions of the MOG" Curtis seems to have meant merely that the
octads , and not the projective-line coordinates , in his earlier papers were
mirror images of the octads that resulted later from the Conway coordinates,
as in the images below.

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Thursday, April 24, 2014

The Inscape of 24

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Octad, Octad Generator — m759 @ 9:29 am

“The more intellectual, less physical, the spell of contemplation
the more complex must be the object, the more close and elaborate
must be the comparison the mind has to keep making between
the whole and the parts, the parts and the whole.”

— The Journals and Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins ,
edited by Humphry House, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford
University Press, 1959), p. 126, as quoted by Philip A.
Ballinger in The Poem as Sacrament

Related material from All Saints’ Day in 2012:

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Friday, February 21, 2014

Raumproblem*

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Aitchison, Figurate Geometry, Finite Relativity, Mathieu Raumproblem, Octad, Octad Generator — m759 @ 7:01 pm

Despite the blocking of Doodles on my Google Search
screen, some messages get through.

Today, for instance —

"Your idea just might change the world.
Enter Google Science Fair 2014"

Clicking the link yields a page with the following image—

IMAGE- The 24-triangle hexagon

Clearly there is a problem here analogous to
the square-triangle coordinatization problem,
but with the 4×6 rectangle of the R. T. Curtis
Miracle Octad Generator playing the role of
the square.

I once studied this 24-triangle-hexagon
coordinatization problem, but was unable to
obtain any results of interest. Perhaps
someone else will have better luck.

* For a rather different use of this word,
see Hermann Weyl in the Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

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Friday, December 20, 2013

For Emil Artin

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Geometry, Octad, Octad Generator, Priority — m759 @ 12:00 pm

(On His Dies Natalis )…

An Exceptional Isomorphism Between Geometric and
Combinatorial Steiner Triple Systems Underlies
the Octads of the M₂₄ Steiner System S(5, 8, 24).

This is asserted in an excerpt from…

"The smallest non-rank 3 strongly regular graphs
which satisfy the 4-vertex condition"
by Mikhail Klin, Mariusz Meszka, Sven Reichard, and Alex Rosa,
BAYREUTHER MATHEMATISCHE SCHRIFTEN 73 (2005), 152-212—

(Click for clearer image)

Note that Theorem 46 of Klin et al. describes the role
of the Galois tesseract in the Miracle Octad Generator
of R. T. Curtis (original 1976 version). The tesseract
(a 4×4 array) supplies the geometric part of the above
exceptional geometric-combinatorial isomorphism.

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Saturday, December 14, 2013

Beautiful Mathematics

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Depth, Gitterkrieg, Octad, Octad Generator, on131214 — m759 @ 7:59 pm

The title, which I dislike, is taken from a 2011 publication
of the MAA, also sold by Cambridge University Press.

Some material relevant to the title adjective:

"For those who have learned something of higher mathematics, nothing could be more natural than to use the word 'beautiful' in connection with it. Mathematical beauty, like the beauty of, say, a late Beethoven quartet, arises from a combination of strangeness and inevitability. Simply defined abstractions disclose hidden quirks and complexities. Seemingly unrelated structures turn out to have mysterious correspondences. Uncanny patterns emerge, and they remain uncanny even after being underwritten by the rigor of logic."— Jim Holt, opening of a book review in the Dec. 5, 2013, issue of The New York Review of Books

Some relevant links—

The above list was updated on Jan. 31, 2014, to include the
"Strangeness" and "Hidden quirks" links. See also a post of
Jan. 31, 2014.

Update of March 9, 2014 —

The link "Simply defined abstractions" is to the construction of the Steiner
system S(5, 8, 24) described by R. T. Curtis in his 1976 paper defining the
Miracle Octad Generator. It should be noted that this construction is due
to Richard J. Turyn, in a 1967 Sylvania research report. (See Emily Jennings's
talk of 1 Nov. 2012.) Compare the Curtis construction, written in 1974,
with the Turyn construction of 1967 as described in Sphere Packings, Lattices
and Groups , by J. H. Conway and N. J. A. Sloane (first published in 1988).

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Monday, August 12, 2013

Form

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Diamond-Theory-tesseract, Natural Diagram, Octad, Octad Generator — m759 @ 12:00 pm

The Galois tesseract appeared in an early form in the journal
Computer Graphics and Art , Vol. 2, No. 1, February 1977—

The Galois tesseract is the basis for a representation of the smallest
projective 3-space, PG(3,2), that differs from the representation at
Wolfram Demonstrations Project. For the latter, see yesterday’s post.

The tesseract representation underlies the diamond theorem, illustrated
below in its earliest form, also from the above February 1977 article—

As noted in a more recent version, the group described by
the diamond theorem is also the group of the 35 square
patterns within the 1976 Miracle Octad Generator (MOG) of
R. T. Curtis.

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Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Vril Chick

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Fields, Octad, Octad Generator — m759 @ 4:30 am

Profile picture of "Jo Lyxe" (Josefine Lyche) at Vimeo—

Profile picture for "Jo Lyxe" (Josefine Lyche) at Vimeo

Compare to an image of Vril muse Maria Orsitsch.

From the catalog of a current art exhibition
(25 May – 31 August, 2013) in Norway,
I DE LANGE NÆTTER —

Josefine Lyche
Born in 1973 in Bergen, Norway.
Lives and works in Oslo and Berlin.

Keywords (to help place my artwork in the
proper context): Aliens, affine geometry, affine
planes, affine spaces, automorphisms, binary
codes, block designs, classical groups, codes,
coding theory, collineations, combinatorial,
combinatorics, conjugacy classes, the Conwell
correspondence, correlations, Cullinane,
R. T. Curtis, design theory, the diamond theorem,
diamond theory, duads, duality, error correcting
codes, esoteric, exceptional groups,
extraterrestrials, finite fields, finite geometry, finite
groups, finite rings, Galois fields, generalized
quadrangles, generators, geometry, GF(2),
GF(4), the (24,12) Golay code, group actions,
group theory, Hadamard matrices, hypercube,
hyperplanes, hyperspace, incidence structures,
invariance, Karnaugh maps, Kirkman’s schoolgirls
problem, Latin squares, Leech lattice, linear
groups, linear spaces, linear transformations,
Magick, Mathieu groups, matrix theory, Meno,
Miracle Octad Generator, MOG, multiply transitive
groups, occultism, octahedron, the octahedral
group, Orsic, orthogonal arrays, outer automorphisms,
parallelisms, partial geometries,
permutation groups, PG(3,2), Plato, Platonic
solids, polarities, Polya-Burnside theorem, projective
geometry, projective planes, projective
spaces, projectivities, Pythagoras, reincarnation,
Reed-Muller codes, the relativity problem,
reverse engineering, sacred geometry, Singer
cycle, skew lines, Socrates, sporadic simple
groups, Steiner systems, Sylvester, symmetric,
symmetry, symplectic, synthemes, synthematic,
Theosophical Society tesseract, Tessla, transvections,
Venn diagrams, Vril society, Walsh
functions, Witt designs.

(See also the original catalog page.)

Clearly most of this (the non-highlighted parts) was taken
from my webpage Diamond Theory. I suppose I should be
flattered, but I am not thrilled to be associated with the
(apparently fictional) Vril Society.

For some background, see (for instance)
Conspiracy Theories and Secret Societies for Dummies .

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Sunday, April 28, 2013

The Octad Generator

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Dots, Geometry, Octad, Octad Generator, Six-Set — m759 @ 11:00 pm

… And the history of geometry —
Desargues, Pascal, Brianchon and Galois
in the light of complete n-points in space.

(Rewritten for clarity at about 10 AM ET April 29, with quote from Dowling added.
Updated with a reference to a Veblen and Young exercise (on p. 53) on April 30.)

Veblen and Young, Projective Geometry, Vol. I ,
Ginn and Company, 1910, page 39:

"The Desargues configuration. A very important configuration
is obtained by taking the plane section of a complete space five-point."

Each of figures 14 and 15 above has 15 points and 20 lines.
The Desargues configuration within each figure is denoted by
10 white points and 10 solid lines, with 3 points on each line and
3 lines on each point. Black points and dashed lines indicate the
complete space five-point and lines connecting it to the plane section
containing the Desargues configuration.

In a 1915 University of Chicago doctoral thesis, Archibald Henderson
used a complete space six -point to construct a configuration of
15 points and 20 lines in the context not of Desargues ' theorem, but
rather of Brianchon 's theorem and of the Pascal hexagram.
Henderson's 1915 configuration is, it turns out, isomorphic to that of
the 15 points and 20 lines in the configuration constructed via a
complete space five -point five years earlier by Veblen and Young.
(See, in Veblen and Young's 1910 Vol. I, exercise 11, page 53:
"A plane section of a 6-point in space can be considered as
3 triangles perspective in pairs from 3 collinear points with
corresponding sides meeting in 3 collinear points." This is the
large Desargues configuration. See Classical Geometry in Light of
Galois Geometry.)

For this large Desargues configuration see April 19.
For Henderson's complete six –point, see The Six-Set (April 23).
That post ends with figures relating the large Desargues configuration
to the Galois geometry PG(3,2) that underlies the Curtis
Miracle Octad Generator and the large Mathieu group M₂₄ —

See also Note on the MOG Correspondence from April 25, 2013.

That correspondence was also discussed in a note 28 years ago, on this date in 1985.

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Thursday, April 25, 2013

Rosenhain and Göpel Revisited

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Geometry, Octad, Octad Generator, Rosenhain and Göpel — m759 @ 5:24 pm

Some historical background for today's note on the geometry
underlying the Curtis Miracle Octad Generator (MOG):

The above incidence diagram recalls those in today's previous post
on the MOG, which is used to construct the large Mathieu group M₂₄.

For some related material that is more up-to-date, search the Web
for Mathieu + Kummer .

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Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Form:

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Geometry, Octad, Octad Generator, Penrose diamond — m759 @ 9:29 pm

Story, Structure, and the Galois Tesseract

Recent Log24 posts have referred to the
"Penrose diamond" and Minkowski space.

The Penrose diamond has nothing whatever
to do with my 1976 monograph "Diamond Theory,"
except for the diamond shape and the connection
of the Penrose diamond to the Klein quadric—

IMAGE- The Penrose diamond and the Klein quadric

The Klein quadric occurs in the five-dimensional projective space
over a field. If the field is the two-element Galois field GF(2), the
quadric helps explain certain remarkable symmetry properties
of the R. T. Curtis Miracle Octad Generator (MOG), hence of
the large Mathieu group M₂₄. These properties are also
relevant to the 1976 "Diamond Theory" monograph.

For some background on the quadric, see (for instance)…

IMAGE- Stroppel on the Klein quadric, 2008

Related material:

"… one might crudely distinguish between philosophical
and mathematical motivation. In the first case one tries
to convince with a telling conceptual story; in the second
one relies more on the elegance of some emergent
mathematical structure. If there is a tradition in logic
it favours the former, but I have a sneaking affection for
the latter. Of course the distinction is not so clear cut.
Elegant mathematics will of itself tell a tale, and one with
the merit of simplicity. This may carry philosophical
weight. But that cannot be guaranteed: in the end one
cannot escape the need to form a judgement of significance."

– J. M. E. Hyland. "Proof Theory in the Abstract." (pdf)
Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 114, 2002, 43-78.

Those who prefer story to structure may consult

today's previous post on the Penrose diamond
the remarks of Scott Aaronson on August 17, 2012
the remarks in this journal on that same date
the geometry of the 4×4 array in the context of M₂₄.

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Monday, November 19, 2012

Poetry and Truth

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Bard Rock, Geometry, Octad, Octad Generator, Poetry, Stevens Rock, The Poet's Pineapple — m759 @ 7:59 pm

From today's noon post—

"In all his poems with all their enchantments
for the poet himself, there is the final enchantment
that they are true. The significance of the poetic act
then is that it is evidence. It is instance and illustration.
It is an illumination of a surface,
the movement of a self in the rock.
Above all it is a new engagement with life.
It is that miracle to which the true faith of the poet
attaches itself."

— Wallace Stevens at Bard College, March 30, 1951

Stevens also said at Bard that

"When Joan of Arc said:

Have no fear: what I do, I do by command.
My brothers of Paradise tell me what I have to do.

these words were the words of an hallucination.
No matter what her brothers of Paradise drove her to do,
what she did was never a poetic act of faith in reality
because it could not be."

There are those who would dispute this.

Some related material:

"Ageometretos me eisito."—
"Let no one ignorant of geometry enter."—
Said to be a saying of Plato, part of the
seal of the American Mathematical Society—

A poetic approach to geometry—

"A surface" and "the rock," from All Saints' Day, 2012—

— and from 1981—

Some mathematical background for poets in Purgatory—

"… the Klein correspondence underlies Conwell's discussion
of eight heptads. These play an important role in another
correspondence, illustrated in the Miracle Octad Generator
of R. T. Curtis, that may be used to picture actions
of the large Mathieu group M₂₄."

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Saturday, September 3, 2011

The Galois Tesseract (continued)

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Fields, Galois's Space, Geometry, Natural Diagram, Octad, Octad Generator, Priority — m759 @ 1:00 pm

A post of September 1, The Galois Tesseract, noted that the interplay
of algebraic and geometric properties within the 4×4 array that forms
two-thirds of the Curtis Miracle Octad Generator (MOG) may first have
been described by Cullinane (AMS abstract 79T-A37, Notices , Feb. 1979).

Here is some supporting material—

The passage from Carmichael above emphasizes the importance of
the 4×4 square within the MOG.

The passage from Conway and Sloane, in a book whose first edition
was published in 1988, makes explicit the structure of the MOG's
4×4 square as the affine 4-space over the 2-element Galois field.

The passage from Curtis (1974, published in 1976) describes 35 sets
of four "special tetrads" within the 4×4 square of the MOG. These
correspond to the 35 sets of four parallel 4-point affine planes within
the square. Curtis, however, in 1976 makes no mention of the affine
structure, characterizing his 140 "special tetrads" rather by the parity
of their intersections with the square's rows and columns.

The affine structure appears in the 1979 abstract mentioned above—

IMAGE- An AMS abstract from 1979 showing how the affine group AGL(4,2) of 322,560 transformations acts on a 4x4 square

The "35 structures" of the abstract were listed, with an application to
Latin-square orthogonality, in a note from December 1978—

See also a 1987 article by R. T. Curtis—

Further elementary techniques using the miracle octad generator, by R. T. Curtis. Abstract:

“In this paper we describe various techniques, some of which are already used by devotees of the art, which relate certain maximal subgroups of the Mathieu group M₂₄, as seen in the MOG, to matrix groups over finite fields. We hope to bring out the wealth of algebraic structure* underlying the device and to enable the reader to move freely between these matrices and permutations. Perhaps the MOG was mis-named as simply an ‘octad generator’; in this paper we intend to show that it is in reality a natural diagram of the binary Golay code.”

(Received July 20 1987)

– Proceedings of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society (Series 2) (1989), 32: 345-353

* For instance:

Update of Sept. 4— This post is now a page at finitegeometry.org.

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Thursday, August 25, 2011

Design

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Geometry — m759 @ 11:07 pm

"Design is how it works." — Steven Jobs (See yesterday's Symmetry.)

Today's American Mathematical Society home page—

Some related material—

The above Rowley paragraph in context (click to enlarge)—

"We employ Curtis's MOG …
both as our main descriptive device and
also as an essential tool in our calculations."
— Peter Rowley in the 2009 paper above, p. 122

And the MOG incorporates the
Geometry of the 4×4 Square.

For this geometry's relation to "design"
in the graphic-arts sense, see
Block Designs in Art and Mathematics.

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Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Nordstrom-Robinson Automorphisms

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Coding Theory, Fields, Geometry, Octad, Octad Generator, Springer — m759 @ 1:01 am

A 2008 statement on the order of the automorphism group of the Nordstrom-Robinson code—

"The Nordstrom-Robinson code has an unusually large group of automorphisms (of order 8! = 40,320) and is optimal in many respects. It can be found inside the binary Golay code."

— Jürgen Bierbrauer and Jessica Fridrich, preprint of "Constructing Good Covering Codes for Applications in Steganography," Transactions on Data Hiding and Multimedia Security III, Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2008, Volume 4920/2008, 1-22

A statement by Bierbrauer from 2004 has an error that doubles the above figure—

The automorphism group of the binary Golay code G is the simple Mathieu group M24 of order |M24| = 24 × 23 × 22 × 21 × 20 × 48 in its 5-transitive action on the 24 coordinates. As M24 is transitive on octads, the stabilizer of an octad has order |M24|/759 [=322,560]. The stabilizer of NR has index 8 in this group. It follows that NR admits an automorphism group of order |M24| / (759 × 8 ) = [?] 16 × 7! [=80,640]. This is a huge symmetry group. Its structure can be inferred from the embedding in G as well. The automorphism group of NR is a semidirect product of an elementary abelian group of order 16 and the alternating group A₇.

— Jürgen Bierbrauer, "Nordstrom-Robinson Code and A₇-Geometry," preprint dated April 14, 2004, published in Finite Fields and Their Applications , Volume 13, Issue 1, January 2007, Pages 158-170

The error is corrected (though not detected) later in the same 2004 paper—

In fact the symmetry group of the octacode is a semidirect product of an elementary abelian group of order 16 and the simple group GL(3, 2) of order 168. This constitutes a large automorphism group (of order 2688), but the automorphism group of NR is larger yet as we saw earlier (order 40,320).

For some background, see a well-known construction of the code from the Miracle Octad Generator of R.T. Curtis—

Click to enlarge:

For some context, see the group of order 322,560 in Geometry of the 4×4 Square.

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Sunday, June 19, 2011

Abracadabra (continued)

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Octad, Octad Generator — m759 @ 12:00 am

Yesterday's post Ad Meld featured Harry Potter (succeeding in business),
a 4×6 array from a video of the song "Abracadabra," and a link to a post
with some background on the 4×6 Miracle Octad Generator of R.T. Curtis.

A search tonight for related material on the Web yielded…

(Click to enlarge.)

   Weblog post by Steve Richards titled "The Search for Invariants:
   The Diamond Theory of Truth, the Miracle Octad Generator
   and Metalibrarianship." The artwork is by Steven H. Cullinane.
   Richards has omitted Cullinane's name and retitled the artwork.

The author of the post is an artist who seems to be interested in the occult.

His post continues with photos of pages, some from my own work (as above), some not.

My own work does not deal with the occult, but some enthusiasts of "sacred geometry" may imagine otherwise.

The artist's post concludes with the following (note also the beginning of the preceding post)—

"The Struggle of the Magicians" is a 1914 ballet by Gurdjieff. Perhaps it would interest Harry.

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Sunday, June 5, 2011

Edifice Complex

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Geometry, Kummerhenge, Octad, Octad Generator — m759 @ 7:00 pm

"Total grandeur of a total edifice,
Chosen by an inquisitor of structures
For himself. He stops upon this threshold,
As if the design of all his words takes form
And frame from thinking and is realized."

— Wallace Stevens, "To an Old Philosopher in Rome"

The following edifice may be lacking in grandeur,
and its properties as a configuration were known long
before I stumbled across a description of it… still…

"What we do may be small, but it has
a certain character of permanence…."
— G.H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology

The Kummer 16₆ Configuration
as seen by Kantor in 1969— (pdf, 2.5 MB)

IMAGE-- 16_6 configuration from '2-Transitive Symmetric Designs,' by William M. Kantor (AMS Transactions, 1969)

For some background, see Configurations and Squares.

For some quite different geometry of the 4×4 square that is
original with me, see a page with that title. (The geometry's
importance depends in part on its connection with the
Miracle Octad Generator (MOG) of R.T. Curtis. I of course
had nothing to do with the MOG's discovery, but I do claim credit
for discovering some geometric properties of the 4×4 square
that constitutes two-thirds of the MOG as originally defined .)

Related material— The Schwartz Notes of June 1.

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Wednesday, June 1, 2011

The Schwartz Notes

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Geometry, Octad, Octad Generator, Priority, The Omega Matrix — m759 @ 2:00 pm

A Google search today for material on the Web that puts the diamond theorem
in context yielded a satisfyingly complete list. (See the first 21 results.)
(Customization based on signed-out search activity was disabled.)

The same search limited to results from only the past month yielded,
in addition, the following—

This turns out to be a document by one Richard Evan Schwartz,
Chancellor’s Professor of Mathematics at Brown University.

Pages 12-14 of the document, which is untitled, undated, and
unsigned, discuss the finite-geometry background of the R.T.
Curtis Miracle Octad Generator (MOG) . As today’s earlier search indicates,
this is closely related to the diamond theorem. The section relating
the geometry to the MOG is titled “The MOG and Projective Space.”
It does not mention my own work.

See Schwartz’s page 12, page 13, and page 14.

Compare to the web pages from today’s earlier search.

There are no references at the end of the Schwartz document,
but there is this at the beginning—

These are some notes on error correcting codes. Two good sources for
this material are
• From Error Correcting Codes through Sphere Packings to Simple Groups ,
by Thomas Thompson.
• Sphere Packings, Lattices, and Simple Groups by J. H. Conway and N.
Sloane
Planet Math (on the internet) also some information.

It seems clear that these inadequate remarks by Schwartz on his sources
can and should be expanded.

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Saturday, July 24, 2010

Playing with Blocks

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Geometry, Lexicon Omega, Octad, Octad Generator, Springer, SymOmega, The Building-Block Metaphor — m759 @ 12:00 pm

"Many of the finite simple groups can be described as symmetries of finite geometries, and it remains a hot topic in group theory to expand our knowledge of the Classification of Finite Simple Groups using finite geometry."

— Finite geometry page at the Centre for the Mathematics of
Symmetry and Computation at the University of Western Australia
(Alice Devillers, John Bamberg, Gordon Royle)

For such symmetries, see Robert A. WIlson's recent book The Finite Simple Groups.

The finite simple groups are often described as the "building blocks" of finite group theory.

At least some of these building blocks have their own building blocks. See Non-Euclidean Blocks.

For instance, a set of 24 such blocks (or, more simply, 24 unit squares) appears in the Miracle Octad Generator (MOG) of R.T. Curtis, used in the study of the finite simple group M₂₄.

(The octads of the MOG illustrate yet another sort of mathematical blocks— those of a block design.)

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Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Eightfold Geometry

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Folklore, four-set, Geometry, Natural Diagram, Octad, Octad Generator — m759 @ 11:07 am

Image-- Analysis of structure of the 35 partitions of an 8-set into two 4-sets

Image-- Miracle Octad Generator of R.T. Curtis

Related web pages:

Miracle Octad Generator,
Generating the Octad Generator,
Geometry of the 4×4 Square

Related folklore:

"It is commonly known that there is a bijection between the 35 unordered triples of a 7-set [i.e., the 35 partitions of an 8-set into two 4-sets] and the 35 lines of PG(3,2) such that lines intersect if and only if the corresponding triples have exactly one element in common." –"Generalized Polygons and Semipartial Geometries," by F. De Clerck, J. A. Thas, and H. Van Maldeghem, April 1996 minicourse, example 5 on page 6

The Miracle Octad Generator may be regarded as illustrating the folklore.

Update of August 20, 2010–

For facts rather than folklore about the above bijection, see The Moore Correspondence.

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Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Wednesday October 14, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Geometry, Natural Diagram — m759 @ 9:29 am

Singer 7-Cycles

Click on images for details.

The 1985 Cullinane version gives some algebraic background for the 1987 Curtis version.

The Singer referred to above is James Singer. See his "A Theorem in Finite Projective Geometry and Some Applications to Number Theory," Transactions of the American Mathematical Society 43 (1938), 377-385.For other singers, see Art Wars and today's obituaries.

Some background: the Log24 entry of this date seven years ago, and the entries preceding it on Las Vegas and painted ponies.

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Thursday, August 6, 2009

Thursday August 6, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Octad, Octad Generator, on090806 — m759 @ 1:44 pm

A Fisher of Men

Cover, Schulberg's novelization of 'Waterfront,' Bantam paperback

Update: The above image was added
at about 11 AM ET Aug. 8, 2009.

From a webpage of the First United Methodist Church of Bloomington, Indiana–

Dr. Joe Emerson, April 24, 2005–

"The Ultimate Test"

— Text: I Peter 2:1-9

Dr. Emerson falsely claims that the film "On the Waterfront" was based on a book by the late Budd Schulberg (who died yesterday). (Instead, the film's screenplay, written by Schulberg– similar to an earlier screenplay by Arthur Miller, "The Hook"– was based on a series of newspaper articles by Malcolm Johnson.)

"The movie 'On the Waterfront' is once more in rerun. (That’s when Marlon Brando looked like Marlon Brando. That’s the scary part of growing old when you see what he looked like then and when he grew old.) It is based on a book by Budd Schulberg."

Emerson goes on to discuss the book, Waterfront, that Schulberg wrote based on his screenplay–

"In it, you may remember a scene where Runty Nolan, a little guy, runs afoul of the mob and is brutally killed and tossed into the North River. A priest is called to give last rites after they drag him out."

New York Times today

Dr. Emerson flunks the test.

Dr. Emerson's sermon is, as noted above (Text: I Peter 2:1-9), not mainly about waterfronts, but rather about the "living stones" metaphor of the Big Fisherman.

My own remarks on the date of Dr. Emerson's sermon—

The 4x6 array used in the Miracle Octad Generator of R. T. Curtis

Those who like to mix mathematics with religion may regard the above 4×6 array as a context for the "living stones" metaphor. See, too, the five entries in this journal ending at 12:25 AM ET on November 12 (Grace Kelly's birthday), 2006, and today's previous entry.

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Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Wednesday May 20, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Geometry, Octad, Octad Generator — m759 @ 4:00 pm

From Quilt Blocks to the
Mathieu Group M₂₄

_{Diamonds
(a traditional

quilt block):

_Octads:}

Click on illustrations for details.

The connection:

The four-diamond figure is related to the finite geometry PG(3,2). (See "Symmetry Invariance in a Diamond Ring," AMS Notices, February 1979, A193-194.) PG(3,2) is in turn related to the 759 octads of the Steiner system S(5,8,24). (See "Generating the Octad Generator," expository note, 1985.)

The relationship of S(5,8,24) to the finite geometry PG(3,2) has also been discussed in–

"A Geometric Construction of the Steiner System S(4,7,23)," by Alphonse Baartmans, Walter Wallis, and Joseph Yucas, Discrete Mathematics 102 (1992) 177-186.

Abstract: "The Steiner system S(4,7,23) is constructed from the geometry of PG(3,2)."

"A Geometric Construction of the Steiner System S(5,8,24)," by R. Mandrell and J. Yucas, Journal of Statistical Planning and Inference 56 (1996), 223-228.

Abstract: "The Steiner system S(5,8,24) is constructed from the geometry of PG(3,2)."

For the connection of S(5,8,24) with the Mathieu group M₂₄, see the references in The Miracle Octad Generator.

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Tuesday, May 19, 2009

Tuesday May 19, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Geometry, May 19 Gestalt, Octad, Octad Generator — m759 @ 7:20 pm

Exquisite Geometries

"By far the most important structure in design theory is the Steiner system S(5, 8, 24)."

— "Block Designs," 1995, by Andries E. Brouwer

"The Steiner system S(5, 8, 24) is a set S of 759 eight-element subsets ('octads') of a twenty-four-element set T such that any five-element subset of T is contained in exactly one of the 759 octads. Its automorphism group is the large Mathieu group M₂₄."

— The Miracle Octad Generator (MOG) of R.T. Curtis (webpage)

"… in 1861 Mathieu… discovered five multiply transitive permutation groups…. In a little-known 1931 paper of Carmichael… they were first observed to be automorphism groups of exquisite finite geometries."

— William M. Kantor, 1981

The 1931 paper of Carmichael is now available online from the publisher for $10.

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Saturday, April 4, 2009

Saturday April 4, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Autist Artist, Geometry — m759 @ 7:01 pm

Steiner Systems

"Music, mathematics, and chess are in vital respects dynamic acts of location. Symbolic counters are arranged in significant rows. Solutions, be they of a discord, of an algebraic equation, or of a positional impasse, are achieved by a regrouping, by a sequential reordering of individual units and unit-clusters (notes, integers, rooks or pawns). The child-master, like his adult counterpart, is able to visualize in an instantaneous yet preternaturally confident way how the thing should look several moves hence. He sees the logical, the necessary harmonic and melodic argument as it arises out of an initial key relation or the preliminary fragments of a theme. He knows the order, the appropriate dimension, of the sum or geometric figure before he has performed the intervening steps. He announces mate in six because the victorious end position, the maximally efficient configuration of his pieces on the board, lies somehow 'out there' in graphic, inexplicably clear sight of his mind…."

"… in some autistic enchantment, pure as one of Bach's inverted canons or Euler's formula for polyhedra."

— George Steiner, "A Death of Kings," in The New Yorker, issue dated Sept. 7, 1968

Related material:

A correspondence underlying
the Steiner system S(5,8,24)–

The Steiner here is
Jakob, not George.

See "Pope to Pray on
Autism Sunday 2009."
See also Log24 on that
Sunday– February 8:

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Tuesday, January 6, 2009

Tuesday January 6, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Aion Art, Eightfold Cube, Octad, Octad Generator — m759 @ 12:00 am

Archetypes, Synchronicity,
and Dyson on Jung

The current (Feb. 2009) Notices of the American Mathematical Society has a written version of Freeman Dyson's 2008 Einstein Lecture, which was to have been given in October but had to be canceled. Dyson paraphrases a mathematician on Carl Jung's theory of archetypes:

"… we do not need to accept Jung’s theory as true in order to find it illuminating."

The same is true of Jung's remarks on synchronicity.

For example —

Yesterday's entry, "A Wealth of Algebraic Structure," lists two articles– each, as it happens, related to Jung's four-diamond figure from Aion as well as to my own Notes on Finite Geometry. The articles were placed online recently by Cambridge University Press on the following dates:

R. T. Curtis's 1974 article defining his Miracle Octad Generator (MOG) was published online on Oct. 24, 2008.

Curtis's 1987 article on geometry and algebraic structure in the MOG was published online on Dec. 19, 2008.

On these dates, the entries in this journal discussed…

Oct. 24:
Cube Space, 1984-2003

Material related to that entry:

Dec. 19:
Art and Religion: Inside the White Cube

That entry discusses a book by Mark C. Taylor:

The Picture in Question: Mark Tansey and the Ends of Representation (U. of Chicago Press, 1999).

In Chapter 3, "Sutures of Structures," Taylor asks —

"What, then, is a frame, and what is frame work?"

One possible answer —

Hermann Weyl on the relativity problem in the context of the 4×4 "frame of reference" found in the above Cambridge University Press articles.

"Examples are the stained-glass
windows of knowledge."
— Vladimir Nabokov

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Monday, January 5, 2009

Monday January 5, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Fields, Geometry, Natural Diagram, Octad, Octad Generator — m759 @ 9:00 pm

A Wealth of
Algebraic Structure

A 4x4 array (part of chessboard)

A 1987 article by R. T. Curtis on the geometry of his Miracle Octad Generator (MOG) as it relates to the geometry of the 4×4 square is now available online ($20):

Further elementary techniques using the miracle octad generator, by R. T. Curtis. Abstract:

(Received July 20 1987)

— Proceedings of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society (Series 2) (1989), 32: 345-353, doi:10.1017/S0013091500004600.

(Published online by Cambridge University Press 19 Dec 2008.)

In the above article, Curtis explains how two-thirds of his 4×6 MOG array may be viewed as the 4×4 model of the four-dimensional affine space over GF(2). (His earlier 1974 paper (below) defining the MOG discussed the 4×4 structure in a purely combinatorial, not geometric, way.)

For further details, see The Miracle Octad Generator as well as Geometry of the 4×4 Square and Curtis’s original 1974 article, which is now also available online ($20):

A new combinatorial approach to M₂₄, by R. T. Curtis. Abstract:

“In this paper, we define M₂₄ from scratch as the subgroup of S₂₄ preserving a Steiner system S(5, 8, 24). The Steiner system is produced and proved to be unique and the group emerges naturally with many of its properties apparent.”

(Received June 15 1974)

— Mathematical Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society (1976), 79: 25-42, doi:10.1017/S0305004100052075.

(Published online by Cambridge University Press 24 Oct 2008.)

* For instance:

Click for details.

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Monday, November 24, 2008

Monday November 24, 2008

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Geometric Theology, Octad, Octad Generator — m759 @ 12:00 pm

Frame Tale

Click on image for details.

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Thursday, July 31, 2008

Thursday July 31, 2008

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Four Color, Octad, Octad Generator — m759 @ 12:00 pm

Symmetry in Review

“Put bluntly, who is kidding whom?”

— Anthony Judge, draft of
“Potential Psychosocial Significance
of Monstrous Moonshine:
An Exceptional Form of Symmetry
as a Rosetta Stone for
Cognitive Frameworks,”
dated September 6, 2007.

Good question.

Also from
September 6, 2007 —
the date of
Madeleine L’Engle‘s death —

Related material:

1. The performance of a work by
Richard Strauss,
“Death and Transfiguration,”
(Tod und Verklärung, Opus 24)
by the Chautauqua Symphony
at Chautauqua Institution on
July 24, 2008

2. Headline of a music review
in today’s New York Times:

Welcoming a Fresh Season of
Transformation and Death

3. The picture of the R. T. Curtis
Miracle Octad Generator
on the cover of the book
Twelve Sporadic Groups:

Cover of 'Twelve Sporadic Groups'

4. Freeman Dyson’s hope, quoted by
Gorenstein in 1986, Ronan in 2006,
and Judge in 2007, that the Monster
group is “built in some way into
the structure of the universe.”

5. Symmetry from Plato to
the Four-Color Conjecture

6. Geometry of the 4×4 Square

7. Yesterday’s entry,
“Theories of Everything“

Coda:

“There is such a thing

as a tesseract.“

— Madeleine L’Engle

For a profile of
L’Engle, click on
the Easter eggs.

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Monday, May 28, 2007

Monday May 28, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Beadgame Space, Geometry, Glasperlenspiel, Octad, Octad Generator — m759 @ 5:00 pm

Space-Time

and a Finite Model

Notes by Steven H. Cullinane
May 28, 2007

Part I: A Model of Space-Time

The following paper includes a figure illustrating Penrose’s model of “complexified, compactified Minkowski space-time as the Klein quadric in complex projective 5-space.”

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070528-Twistor.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Click on picture to enlarge.

For some background on the Klein quadric and space-time, see Roger Penrose, “On the Origins of Twistor Theory,” from Gravitation and Geometry: A Volume in Honor of Ivor Robinson, Bibliopolis, 1987.

Part II: A Corresponding Finite Model

The Klein quadric also occurs in a finite model of projective 5-space. See a 1910 paper:

G. M. Conwell, The 3-space PG(3,2) and its group, Ann. of Math. 11, 60-76.

Conwell discusses the quadric, and the related Klein correspondence, in detail. This is noted in a more recent paper by Philippe Cara:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070528-Quadric.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

As Cara goes on to explain, the Klein correspondence underlies Conwell’s discussion of eight heptads. These play an important role in another correspondence, illustrated in the Miracle Octad Generator of R. T. Curtis, that may be used to picture actions of the large Mathieu group M₂₄.

Related material:

The projective space PG(5,2), home of the Klein quadric in the finite model, may be viewed as the set of 64 points of the affine space AG(6,2), minus the origin.

The 64 points of this affine space may in turn be viewed as the 64 hexagrams of the Classic of Transformation, China’s I Ching.

There is a natural correspondence between the 64 hexagrams and the 64 subcubes of a 4x4x4 cube. This correspondence leads to a natural way to generate the affine group AGL(6,2). This may in turn be viewed as a group of over a trillion natural transformations of the 64 hexagrams.

See

Finite Geometry of
the Square and Cube

A 4x4x4 cube

and

Geometry of the I Ching.

“Once Knecht confessed to his teacher that he wished to learn enough to be able to incorporate the system of the I Ching into the Glass Bead Game. Elder Brother laughed. ‘Go ahead and try,’ he exclaimed. ‘You’ll see how it turns out. Anyone can create a pretty little bamboo garden in the world. But I doubt that the gardener would succeed in incorporating the world in his bamboo grove.'”

— Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game,

translated by Richard and Clara Winston

Comments (2)

Thursday, May 24, 2007

Thursday May 24, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 4:00 am

Day 24

“The miraculous enters….“

Discuss.

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Wednesday, February 28, 2007

Wednesday February 28, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Geometry, Natural Diagram, Octad, Octad Generator — m759 @ 7:59 am

Elements
of Geometry

The title of Euclid’s Elements is, in Greek, Stoicheia.

From Lectures on the Science of Language,
by Max Muller, fellow of All Souls College, Oxford.
New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1890, pp. 88-90 –

Stoicheia

“The question is, why were the elements, or the component primary parts of things, called stoicheia by the Greeks? It is a word which has had a long history, and has passed from Greece to almost every part of the civilized world, and deserves, therefore, some attention at the hand of the etymological genealogist.

Stoichos, from which stoicheion, means a row or file, like stix and stiches in Homer. The suffix eios is the same as the Latin eius, and expresses what belongs to or has the quality of something. Therefore, as stoichos means a row, stoicheion would be what belongs to or constitutes a row….

Hence stoichos presupposes a root stich, and this root would account in Greek for the following derivations:–

stix, gen. stichos, a row, a line of soldiers
stichos, a row, a line; distich, a couplet
steicho, estichon, to march in order, step by step; to mount
stoichos, a row, a file; stoichein, to march in a line

In German, the same root yields steigen, to step, to mount, and in Sanskrit we find stigh, to mount….

Stoicheia are the degrees or steps from one end to the other, the constituent parts of a whole, forming a complete series, whether as hours, or letters, or numbers, or parts of speech, or physical elements, provided always that such elements are held together by a systematic order.”

Example:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070228-MOG.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

The Miracle Octad Generator of R. T. Curtis

For the geometry of these stoicheia, see
The Smallest Perfect Universe and
Finite Geometry of the Square and Cube.

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Saturday, July 29, 2006

Saturday July 29, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Big Rock, Geometry, Natural Diagram, Octad, Octad Generator — m759 @ 2:02 pm

Big Rock

Thanks to Ars Mathematica, a link to everything2.com:

“In mathematics, a big rock is a result which is vastly more powerful than is needed to solve the problem being considered. Often it has a difficult, technical proof whose methods are not related to those of the field in which it is applied. You say ‘I’m going to hit this problem with a big rock.’ Sard’s theorem is a good example of a big rock.”

Another example:

Properties of the Monster Group of R. L. Griess, Jr., may be investigated with the aid of the Miracle Octad Generator, or MOG, of R. T. Curtis. See the MOG on the cover of a book by Griess about some of the 20 sporadic groups involved in the Monster:

The image “http://www.log24.com/theory/images/TwelveSG.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

The MOG, in turn, illustrates (via Abstract 79T-A37, Notices of the American Mathematical Society, February 1979) the fact that the group of automorphisms of the affine space of four dimensions over the two-element field is also the natural group of automorphisms of an arbitrary 4×4 array.

This affine group, of order 322,560, is also the natural group of automorphisms of a family of graphic designs similar to those on traditional American quilts. (See the diamond theorem.)

This top-down approach to the diamond theorem may serve as an illustration of the “big rock” in mathematics.

For a somewhat simpler, bottom-up, approach to the theorem, see Theme and Variations.

For related literary material, see Mathematics and Narrative and The Diamond as Big as the Monster.

“The rock cannot be broken.
It is the truth.”

— Wallace Stevens,
“Credences of Summer”

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Sunday, May 7, 2006

Sunday May 7, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Natural Diagram, Octad, Octad Generator — m759 @ 3:00 am

Bagombo Snuff Box

(in memory of
Burt Kerr Todd)

“Well, it may be the devil
or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to
serve somebody.”

— “Bob Dylan”
(pseudonym of Robert Zimmerman),
quoted by “Bob Stewart”
on July 18, 2005

“Bob Stewart” may or may not be the same person as “crankbuster,” author of the “Rectangular Array Theorem” or “RAT.” This “theorem” is intended as a parody of the “Miracle Octad Generator,” or “MOG,” of R. T. Curtis. (See the Usenet group sci.math, “Steven Cullinane is a Crank,” July 2005, messages 51-60.)

“Crankbuster” has registered at Math Forum as a teacher in Sri Lanka (formerly Ceylon). For a tall tale involving Ceylon, see the short story “Bagombo Snuff Box” in the book of the same title by Kurt Vonnegut, who has at times embodied– like Martin Gardner and “crankbuster“– “der Geist, der stets verneint.”

Here is my own version (given the alleged Ceylon background of “crankbuster”) of a Bagombo snuff box:

Related material:

Log24 entries of
April 16-30, 2005,

and the 5 Log24 entries
ending on Friday,
April 28, 2006.

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Wednesday, November 30, 2005

Wednesday November 30, 2005

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Octad, Octad Generator — m759 @ 1:00 am

For St. Andrew’s Day

“The miraculous enters…. When we investigate these problems, some fantastic things happen….”

— John H. Conway and N. J. A. Sloane, Sphere Packings, Lattices and Groups, preface to first edition (1988)

The remarkable Mathieu group M₂₄, a group of permutations on 24 elements, may be studied by picturing its action on three interchangeable 8-element “octads,” as in the “Miracle Octad Generator” of R. T. Curtis.

A picture of the Miracle Octad Generator, with my comments, is available online.

Cartoon by S.Harris

Related material:
Mathematics and Narrative.

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Saturday, July 20, 2002

Saturday July 20, 2002

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Change Logos, Eightfold Cube, four-set, Map Systems, Octad, Octad Generator, Strange Change — m759 @ 10:13 pm

ABSTRACT: Finite projective geometry explains the surprising symmetry properties of some simple graphic designs– found, for instance, in quilts. Links are provided for applications to sporadic simple groups (via the "Miracle Octad Generator" of R. T. Curtis), to the connection between orthogonal Latin squares and projective spreads, and to symmetry of Walsh functions.

We regard the four-diamond figure D above as a 4×4 array of two-color diagonally-divided square tiles.

Let G be the group of 322,560 permutations of these 16 tiles generated by arbitrarily mixing random permutations of rows and of columns with random permutations of the four 2×2 quadrants.

THEOREM: Every G-image of D (as at right, below) has some ordinary or color-interchange symmetry.

Example:

For an animated version, click here.

Remarks:

Some of the patterns resulting from the action of G on D have been known for thousands of years. (See Jablan, Symmetry and Ornament, Ch. 2.6.) It is perhaps surprising that the patterns' interrelationships and symmetries can be explained fully only by using mathematics discovered just recently (relative to the patterns' age)– in particular, the theory of automorphism groups of finite geometries.

Using this theory, we can summarize the patterns' properties by saying that G is isomorphic to the affine group A on the linear 4-space over GF(2) and that the 35 structures of the 840 = 35 x 24 G-images of D are isomorphic to the 35 lines in the 3-dimensional projective space over GF(2).

This can be seen by viewing the 35 structures as three-sets of line diagrams, based on the three partitions of the four-set of square two-color tiles into two two-sets, and indicating the locations of these two-sets of tiles within the 4×4 patterns. The lines of the line diagrams may be added in a binary fashion (i.e., 1+1=0). Each three-set of line diagrams sums to zero– i.e., each diagram in a three-set is the binary sum of the other two diagrams in the set. Thus, the 35 three-sets of line diagrams correspond to the 35 three-point lines of the finite projective 3-space PG(3,2).

For example, here are the line diagrams for the figures above:

Shown below are the 15 possible line diagrams resulting from row/column/quadrant permutations. These 15 diagrams may, as noted above, be regarded as the 15 points of the projective 3-space PG(3,2).

The symmetry of the line diagrams accounts for the symmetry of the two-color patterns. (A proof shows that a 2nx2n two-color triangular half-squares pattern with such line diagrams must have a 2×2 center with a symmetry, and that this symmetry must be shared by the entire pattern.)

Among the 35 structures of the 840 4×4 arrays of tiles, orthogonality (in the sense of Latin-square orthogonality) corresponds to skewness of lines in the finite projective space PG(3,2). This was stated by the author in a 1978 note. (The note apparently had little effect. A quarter-century later, P. Govaerts, D. Jungnickel, L. Storme, and J. A. Thas wrote that skew (i.e., nonintersecting) lines in a projective space seem "at first sight not at all related" to orthogonal Latin squares.)

We can define sums and products so that the G-images of D generate an ideal (1024 patterns characterized by all horizontal or vertical "cuts" being uninterrupted) of a ring of 4096 symmetric patterns. There is an infinite family of such "diamond" rings, isomorphic to rings of matrices over GF(4).

The proof uses a decomposition technique for functions into a finite field that might be of more general use.

The underlying geometry of the 4×4 patterns is closely related to the Miracle Octad Generator of R. T. Curtis– used in the construction of the Steiner system S(5,8,24)– and hence is also related to the Leech lattice, which, as Walter Feit has remarked, "is a blown up version of S(5,8,24)."

For a movable JavaScript version of these 4×4 patterns, see The Diamond 16 Puzzle.

The above is an expanded version of Abstract 79T-A37, "Symmetry invariance in a diamond ring," by Steven H. Cullinane, Notices of the American Mathematical Society, February 1979, pages A-193, 194.

For a discussion of other cases of the theorem, click here.

Related pages:

The Diamond 16 Puzzle

Diamond Theory in 1937:
A Brief Historical Note

Notes on Finite Geometry

Geometry of the 4×4 Square

Binary Coordinate Systems

The 35 Lines of PG(3,2)

Map Systems:
Function Decomposition over a Finite Field

The Diamond Theorem–
The 2×2, the 2x2x2, the 4×4, and the 4x4x4 Cases

Diamond Theory

Latin-Square Geometry