Log24

Tuesday, June 11, 2024

A Smooth Process . . . Indiscrete Rota

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:02 am

See the title  in this journal.

https://www.google.com/search?q="in+terms+of+combinational+delight"

Friday, August 14, 2015

Discrete Space

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 7:24 am

(A review)

Galois space:

Image-- examples from Galois affine geometry

Counting symmetries of  Galois space:
IMAGE - The Diamond Theorem

The reason for these graphic symmetries in affine Galois space —

symmetries of the underlying projective Galois space:

Monday, April 10, 2023

Space

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 3:09 am

(Perspective Not  as Symbolic Form)

From a post of June 8, 2014

Some background on the large Desargues configuration

See August 6, 2013 — Desargues via Galois.

Sunday, January 22, 2023

The Stillwell Dichotomies

Number Space
Arithmetic  Geometry
Discrete  Continuous

Related literature —

IMAGE- History of Mathematics in a Nutshell

Bourbaki on arithmetic and geometry

From a "Finite Fields in 1956" post —

The Nutshell:

    Related Narrative:

Tuesday, September 13, 2022

A Helpful Survey of the Literature

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:39 pm

Some background for the exercise of 9/11

Vera Pless, "More on the uniqueness of the Golay codes,"
Discrete Mathematics 106/107 (1992) 391-398 —

"Several people [1-2,6] have shown that
any set of 212 binary vectors of length 24,
distance ≥ 8, containing 0, must be the
unique (up to equivalence) [24,12,8] Golay code." 

[1] P. Delsarte and J.M. Goethals, "Unrestricted codes
with the Golay parameters are unique
,"
Discrete Math. 12 (1975) 211-224.

[2] A. Neumeier, private communication, 1990.

[6] S.L. Snover, "The uniqueness of the
Nordstrom-Robinson and the Golay binary codes
,"
Ph.D. Thesis, Dept. of Mathematics, 
Michigan State Univ., 1973.

Related images —

"Before time began, there was the Cube."

              — Optimus Prime in 2007

      

"Remember, remember the fifth of November"

  — Hugo Weaving in 2005

Sunday, May 21, 2017

Rota on Beauty

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 8:00 pm

Tiptoe through the tulips with Rota and Erickson:

Attempts have been made to string together beautiful mathematical results and to present them in books bearing such attractive titles as The One Hundred Most Beautiful Theorems of Mathematics. Such anthologies are seldom found on a mathematician’s bookshelf.

The beauty of a theorem is best observed when the theorem is presented as the crown jewel within the context of a theory.

— Gian-Carlo Rota in Indiscrete Thoughts

See also Martin Erickson in this journal . . . 

Wednesday, April 12, 2017

Expanding the Spielraum

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:48 am

Cézanne's Greetings.

"Cézanne ignores the laws of classical perspective . . . ."

— Voorhies, James. “Paul Cézanne (1839–1906).”
In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History .  New York:
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. (October 2004)

Some others do not.

This is what I called "the large Desargues configuration
in posts of April 2013 and later.

Thursday, August 11, 2016

The Large Desargues Configuration

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 10:30 pm

(Continued from April 2013 and later)

This is what I called "the large Desargues configuration
in posts of April 2013 and later.

Friday, November 27, 2015

Einstein and Geometry

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:01 pm

(A Prequel to Dirac and Geometry)

"So Einstein went back to the blackboard.
And on Nov. 25, 1915, he set down
the equation that rules the universe.
As compact and mysterious as a Viking rune,
it describes space-time as a kind of sagging mattress…."

— Dennis Overbye in The New York Times  online,
     November 24, 2015

Some pure  mathematics I prefer to the sagging Viking mattress —

Readings closely related to the above passage —

Thomas Hawkins, "From General Relativity to Group Representations:
the Background to Weyl's Papers of 1925-26
," in Matériaux pour
l'histoire des mathématiques au XXe siècle:
Actes du colloque
à la mémoire de Jean Dieudonné
, Nice, 1996  (Soc. Math.
de France, Paris, 1998), pp. 69-100.

The 19th-century algebraic theory of invariants is discussed
as what Weitzenböck called a guide "through the thicket
of formulas of general relativity."

Wallace Givens, "Tensor Coordinates of Linear Spaces," in
Annals of Mathematics  Second Series, Vol. 38, No. 2, April 1937, 
pp. 355-385.

Tensors (also used by Einstein in 1915) are related to 
the theory of line complexes in three-dimensional
projective space and to the matrices used by Dirac
in his 1928 work on quantum mechanics.

For those who prefer metaphors to mathematics —

"We acknowledge a theorem's beauty
when we see how the theorem 'fits' in its place,
how it sheds light around itself, like a Lichtung ,
a clearing in the woods." 
— Gian-Carlo Rota, Indiscrete Thoughts ,
Birkhäuser Boston, 1997, page 132

Rota fails to cite the source of his metaphor.
It is Heidegger's 1964 essay, "The End of Philosophy
and the Task of Thinking" —

"The forest clearing [ Lichtung ] is experienced
in contrast to dense forest, called Dickung  
in our older language." 
— Heidegger's Basic Writings 
edited by David Farrell Krell, 
Harper Collins paperback, 1993, page 441

Saturday, May 26, 2012

Harriot’s Cubes

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:28 pm

See also Finite Geometry and Physical Space.

Related material from MacTutor

Harriot and binary numbers

The paper by J. W. Shirley, Binary numeration before Leibniz, Amer. J. Physics 19 (8) (1951), 452-454, contains an interesting look at some mathematics which appears in the hand written papers of Thomas Harriot [1560-1621]. Using the photographs of the two original Harriot manuscript pages reproduced in Shirley’s paper, we explain how Harriot was doing arithmetic with binary numbers.

Leibniz [1646-1716] is credited with the invention [1679-1703] of binary arithmetic, that is arithmetic using base 2. Laplace wrote:-

Leibniz saw in his binary arithmetic the image of Creation. … He imagined the Unity represented God, and Zero the void; that the Supreme Being drew all beings from the void, just as unity and zero express all numbers in his system of numeration. This conception was so pleasing to Leibniz that he communicated it to the Jesuit, Grimaldi, president of the Chinese tribunal for mathematics, in the hope that this emblem of creation would convert the Emperor of China, who was very fond of the sciences …

However, Leibniz was certainly not the first person to think of doing arithmetic using numbers to base 2. Many years earlier Harriot had experimented with the idea of different number bases….

For a discussion of Harriot on the discrete-vs.-continuous question,
see Katherine Neal, From Discrete to Continuous: The Broadening
of Number Concepts in Early Modern England  (Springer, 2002),
pages 69-71.

Saturday, April 28, 2012

Sprechen Sie Deutsch?

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 10:48 am

A Log24 post, "Bridal Birthday," one year ago today linked to
"The Discrete and the Continuous," a brief essay by David Deutsch.

From that essay—

"The idea of quantization—
the discreteness of physical quantities
turned out to be immensely fruitful."

Deutsch's "idea of quantization" also appears in
the April 12 Log24 post Mythopoetic

"Is Space Digital?" 

— Cover storyScientific American 
     magazine, February 2012

"The idea that space may be digital
  is a fringe idea of a fringe idea
  of a speculative subfield of a subfield."

— Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder 
     at her weblog on Feb. 5, 2012

"A quantization of space/time
 is a holy grail for many theorists…."

— Peter Woit in a comment 
      at his weblog on April 12, 2012

It seems some clarification is in order.

Hossenfelder's "The idea that space may be digital"
and Woit's "a quantization of space/time" may not
refer to the same thing.

Scientific American  on the concept of digital space—

"Space may not be smooth and continuous.
Instead it may be digital, composed of tiny bits."

Wikipedia on the concept of quantization—

Causal setsloop quantum gravitystring theory,
and 
black hole thermodynamics all predict
quantized spacetime….

For a purely mathematical  approach to the
continuous-vs.-discrete issue, see
Finite Geometry and Physical Space.

The physics there is somewhat tongue-in-cheek,
but the geometry is serious.The issue there is not
continuous-vs.-discrete physics , but rather
Euclidean-vs.-Galois geometry .

Both sorts of geometry are of course valid.
Euclidean geometry has long been applied to 
physics; Galois geometry has not. The cited
webpage describes the interplay of both  sorts
of geometry— Euclidean and Galois, continuous
and discrete— within physical space— if not
within the space of physics.

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Digital Theology

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 7:20 am

See also remarks on Digital Space and Digital Time in this journal.

Such remarks can, of course, easily verge on crackpot territory.

For some related  pure  mathematics, see Symmetry of Walsh Functions.

Thursday, April 28, 2011

Bridal Birthday

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:02 pm

The Telegraph , April 29th

Catherine Elizabeth "Kate" Middleton, born 9 January 1982,
will marry Prince William of Wales on April 29th, 2011.

This suggests, by a very illogical and roundabout process
of verbal association, a search in this journal.

A quote from that search—

“‘Memory is non-narrative and non-linear.’
— Maya Lin in The Harvard Crimson , Friday, Dec. 2, 2005

A non-narrative image from the same
general time span as the bride's birthday—

IMAGE- 'Solid Symmetry' by Steven H. Cullinane, Dec. 24, 1981

For some context, see Stevens + "The Rock" + "point A".
A post in that search, April 4th's Rock Notes, links to an essay
on physics and philosophy, "The Discrete and the Continuous," by David Deutsch.

See also the article on Deutsch, "Dream Machine," in the current New Yorker 
(May 2, 2011), and the article's author, "Rivka Galchen," in this journal.

Galchen writes very well. For example —

Galchen on quantum theory

"Our intuition, going back forever, is that to move, say, a rock, one has to touch that rock, or touch a stick that touches the rock, or give an order that travels via vibrations through the air to the ear of a man with a stick that can then push the rock—or some such sequence. This intuition, more generally, is that things can only directly affect other things that are right next to them. If A affects B without  being right next to it, then the effect in question must be in direct—the effect in question must be something that gets transmitted by means of a chain of events in which each event brings about the next one directly, in a manner that smoothly spans the distance from A to B. Every time we think we can come up with an exception to this intuition—say, flipping a switch that turns on city street lights (but then we realize that this happens through wires) or listening to a BBC radio broadcast (but then we realize that radio waves propagate through the air)—it turns out that we have not, in fact, thought of an exception. Not, that is, in our everyday experience of the world.

We term this intuition 'locality.'

Quantum mechanics has upended many an intuition, but none deeper than this one."

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Art Object

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

There is more than one way
to look at a cube.

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101123-plain_cube_200x227.gif

 From Cambridge U. Press on Feb. 20, 2006 —

IMAGE- 'Cambridge Tracts in Mathematics 168: The Cube'

and from this journal on June 30, 2010 —

In memory of Wu Guanzhong, Chinese artist
who died in Beijing on June 25, 2010

Image-- The Dream of the Expanded Field

See also this journal on Feb. 20, 2006
(the day The Cube  was published).

Sunday, September 2, 2007

Sunday September 2, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 5:11 pm

Comment at the
n-Category Cafe

Re: This Week’s Finds in Mathematical Physics (Week 251)

On Spekkens’ toy system and finite geometry

Background–

  • In “Week 251” (May 5, 2007), John wrote:
    “Since Spekkens’ toy system resembles a qubit, he calls it a “toy bit”. He goes on to study systems of several toy bits – and the charming combinatorial geometry I just described gets even more interesting. Alas, I don’t really understand it well: I feel there must be some mathematically elegant way to describe it all, but I don’t know what it is…. All this is fascinating. It would be nice to find the mathematical structure that underlies this toy theory, much as the category of Hilbert spaces underlies honest quantum mechanics.”
  • In the n-Category Cafe ( May 12, 2007, 12:26 AM, ) Matt Leifer wrote:
    “It’s crucial to Spekkens’ constructions, and particularly to the analog of superposition, that the state-space is discrete. Finding a good mathematical formalism for his theory (I suspect finite fields may be the way to go) and placing it within a comprehensive framework for generalized theories would be very interesting.”
  • In the n-category Cafe ( May 12, 2007, 6:25 AM) John Baez wrote:
    “Spekkens and I spent an afternoon trying to think about his theory as quantum mechanics over some finite field, but failed — we almost came close to proving it couldnt’ work.”

On finite geometry:

The actions of permutations on a 4 × 4 square in Spekkens’ paper (quant-ph/0401052), and Leifer’s suggestion of the need for a “generalized framework,” suggest that finite geometry might supply such a framework. The geometry in the webpage John cited is that of the affine 4-space over the two-element field.

Related material:

Update of
Sept. 5, 2007

See also arXiv:0707.0074v1 [quant-ph], June 30, 2007:

A fully epistemic model for a local hidden variable emulation of quantum dynamics,

by Michael Skotiniotis, Aidan Roy, and Barry C. Sanders, Institute for Quantum Information Science, University of Calgary. Abstract: "In this article we consider an augmentation of Spekkens’ toy model for the epistemic view of quantum states [1]…."
 

Skotiniotis et al. note that the group actions on the 4×4 square described in Spekkens' paper [1] may be viewed (as in Geometry of the 4×4 Square and Geometry of Logic) in the context of a hypercube, or tesseract, a structure in which adjacency is isomorphic to adjacency in the 4 × 4 square (on a torus).

Hypercube from the Skotiniotis paper:

Hypercube

Reference:

[1] Robert W. Spekkens, Phys. Rev. A 75, 032110 (2007),

Evidence for the epistemic view of quantum states: A toy theory
,

Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, 31 Caroline Street North, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 2Y5 (Received 11 October 2005; revised 2 November 2006; published 19 March 2007.)

"There is such a thing
as a tesseract."
A Wrinkle in Time  
 

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Tuesday February 20, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 7:09 am
Symmetry

Today is the 21st birthday of my note “The Relativity Problem in Finite Geometry.”

Some relevant quotations:

“This is the relativity problem: to fix objectively a class of equivalent coordinatizations and to ascertain the group of transformations S mediating between them.”

— Hermann Weyl, The Classical Groups, Princeton University Press, 1946, p. 16

Describing the branch of mathematics known as Galois theory, Weyl says that it

“… is nothing else but the relativity theory for the set Sigma, a set which, by its discrete and finite character, is conceptually so much simpler than the infinite set of points in space or space-time dealt with by ordinary relativity theory.”

— Weyl, Symmetry, Princeton University Press, 1952, p. 138

Weyl’s set Sigma is a finite set of complex numbers.   Some other sets with “discrete and finite character” are those of 4, 8, 16, or 64 points, arranged in squares and cubes.  For illustrations, see Finite Geometry of the Square and Cube.  What Weyl calls “the relativity problem” for these sets involves fixing “objectively” a class of equivalent coordinatizations.  For what Weyl’s “objectively” means, see the article “Symmetry and Symmetry  Breaking,” by Katherine Brading and Elena Castellani, in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

“The old and natural idea that what is objective should not depend upon the particular perspective under which it is taken into consideration is thus reformulated in the following group-theoretical terms: what is objective is what is invariant with respect to the transformation group of reference frames, or, quoting Hermann Weyl (1952, p. 132), ‘objectivity means invariance with respect to the group of automorphisms [of space-time].‘[22]

22. The significance of the notion of invariance and its group-theoretic treatment for the issue of objectivity is explored in Born (1953), for example. For more recent discussions see Kosso (2003) and Earman (2002, Sections 6 and 7).

References:

Born, M., 1953, “Physical Reality,” Philosophical Quarterly, 3, 139-149. Reprinted in E. Castellani (ed.), Interpreting Bodies: Classical and Quantum Objects in Modern Physics, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998, pp. 155-167.

Earman, J., 2002, “Laws, Symmetry, and Symmetry Breaking; Invariance, Conservation Principles, and Objectivity,’ PSA 2002, Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 2002, forthcoming [Abstract/Preprint available online]

Kosso, P., 2003, “Symmetry, objectivity, and design,” in K. Brading and E. Castellani (eds.), Symmetries in Physics: Philosophical Reflections, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 410-421.

Weyl, H., 1952, Symmetry, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

See also

Archives Henri Poincaré (research unit UMR 7117, at Université Nancy 2, of the CNRS)–

Minkowski, Mathematicians, and the Mathematical Theory of Relativity,” by Scott Walter, in The Expanding Worlds of General Relativity (Einstein Studies, volume 7), H. Goenner, J. Renn, J. Ritter and T. Sauer, editors, Boston/Basel: Birkhäuser, 1999, pp. 45-86–

“Developing his ideas before Göttingen mathematicians in April 1909, Klein pointed out that the new theory based on the Lorentz group (which he preferred to call ‘Invariantentheorie’) could have come from pure mathematics (1910: 19). He felt that the new theory was anticipated by the ideas on geometry and groups that he had introduced in 1872, otherwise known as the Erlangen program (see Gray 1989: 229).”

References:

Gray, Jeremy J. (1989). Ideas of Space. 2d ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Klein, Felix. (1910). “Über die geometrischen Grundlagen der Lorentzgruppe.” Jahresbericht der deutschen Mathematiker-Vereinigung 19: 281-300. [Reprinted: Physikalische Zeitschrift 12 (1911): 17-27].

Related material: A pathetically garbled version of the above concepts was published in 2001 by Harvard University Press.  See Invariances: The Structure of the Objective World, by Robert Nozick.

Friday, October 20, 2006

Friday October 20, 2006

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm
High Concept

(Continued from 8/23/05)
“At present, such relationships can
at best be heuristically described
in terms that invoke some notion
of an ‘intelligent user standing
outside the system.'”

Gian-Carlo Rota in
Indiscrete Thoughts, p. 152

Related Material

The Devil’s Bible and
Nothing Nothings (Again).

The Context

One context for the Rota quote
is Paul Halmos’s remark, quoted
  in today’s New York Times,
that mathematics is
“almost like being
in touch with God.”

Another context is
Log24 on Aug. 29, 2005.

Here is the original context:

The image “http://www.log24.com/theory/images/Rota152.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Monday, August 29, 2005

Monday August 29, 2005

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 4:00 pm
VALE

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05B/050829-GeorgeAndEsther2.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

George and Esther Szekeres

From the weblog of
David Michael Brown, Jr.:
 

Date:     Sun, 28 Aug 2005
             12:30:40 -0400
From:    Alf van der Poorten AM
           
Subject: Vale George Szekeres and
             Esther Klein Szekeres

Members of the Number Theory List will be sad to learn that George and Esther Szekeres both died this morning.  George, 94, had been quite ill for the last 2-3 days, barely conscious, and died first at 06:30.  Esther, 95, died a half hour later.

Both George Szekeres and Esther Klein will be recalled by number theorists as members of the group of young Hungarian mathematicians of the 1930s including Turan and Erdos.  George and Esther's coming to Australia in the late 40s played an important role in the invigoration of Australian Mathematics.  George was also an expert in group theory and relativity; he was my PhD supervisor.

Emeritus Professor
Alf van der Poorten AM
Centre for Number Theory Research
1 Bimbil Place, Killara NSW

 

Related material:

AVE

3:09 PM EDT Thursday, Aug. 25, 2005:
 

  "Hello! Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one." 

 

  "A very short space of time through very short times of space….
   Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand?"

   — James Joyce, Ulysses, Proteus chapter

A very short space of time through very short times of space….

   "It is demonstrated that space-time should possess a discrete structure on Planck scales."

   — Peter Szekeres, abstract of Discrete Space-Time

Peter Szekeres is the son of George and Esther Szekeres.
 

ATQUE

"At present, such relationships can at best be heuristically described in terms that invoke some notion of an 'intelligent user standing outside the system.'"

Gian-Carlo Rota in Indiscrete Thoughts, p. 152
 

Related material:
High Concept and
Nothing Nothings (Again).

Thursday, August 25, 2005

Thursday August 25, 2005

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 3:09 pm
Analogical
Train of Thought

Part I: The 24-Cell

From S. H. Cullinane,
 Visualizing GL(2,p),
 March 26, 1985–

Visualizing the
binary tetrahedral group
(the 24-cell):

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

Another representation of
the 24-cell
:

The image “http://www.log24.com/theory/images/24-cell.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

 From John Baez,
This Week’s Finds in
Mathematical Physics (Week 198)
,”
September 6, 2003: 

Noam Elkies writes to John Baez:

Hello again,

You write:

[…]

“I’d like to wrap up with a few small comments about last Week.  There I said a bit about a 24-element group called the ‘binary tetrahedral group’, a 24-element group called SL(2,Z/3), and the vertices of a regular polytope in 4 dimensions called the ’24-cell’.  The most important fact is that these are all the same thing! And I’ve learned a bit more about this thing from here:”

[…]

Here’s yet another way to see this: the 24-cell is the subgroup of the unit quaternions (a.k.a. SU(2)) consisting of the elements of norm 1 in the Hurwitz quaternions – the ring of quaternions obtained from the Z-span of {1,i,j,k} by plugging up the holes at (1+i+j+k)/2 and its <1,i,j,k> translates. Call this ring A. Then this group maps injectively to A/3A, because for any g,g’ in the group |g-g’| is at most 2 so g-g’ is not in 3A unless g=g’. But for any odd prime p the (Z/pZ)-algebra A/pA is isomorphic with the algebra of 2*2 matrices with entries in Z/pZ, with the quaternion norm identified with the determinant. So our 24-element group injects into SL2(Z/3Z) – which is barely large enough to accommodate it. So the injection must be an isomorphism.

Continuing a bit longer in this vein: this 24-element group then injects into SL2(Z/pZ) for any odd prime p, but this injection is not an isomorphism once p>3. For instance, when p=5 the image has index 5 – which, however, does give us a map from SL2(Z/5Z) to the symmetric group of order 5, using the action of SL2(Z/5Z) by conjugation on the 5 conjugates of the 24-element group. This turns out to be one way to see the isomorphism of PSL2(Z/5Z) with the alternating group A5.

Likewise the octahedral and icosahedral groups S4 and A5 can be found in PSL2(Z/7Z) and PSL2(Z/11Z), which gives the permutation representations of those two groups on 7 and 11 letters respectively; and A5 is also an index-6 subgroup of PSL2(F9), which yields the identification of that group with A6.

NDE


The enrapturing discoveries of our field systematically conceal, like footprints erased in the sand, the analogical train of thought that is the authentic life of mathematics – Gian-Carlo Rota

Like footprints erased in the sand….

Part II: Discrete Space

The James Joyce School
 of Theoretical Physics
:


Log24, May 27, 2004

  “Hello! Kinch here. Put me on to Edenville. Aleph, alpha: nought, nought, one.” 

  “A very short space of time through very short times of space….
   Am I walking into eternity along Sandymount strand?”

   — James Joyce, Ulysses, Proteus chapter

A very short space of time through very short times of space….

   “It is demonstrated that space-time should possess a discrete structure on Planck scales.”

   — Peter Szekeres, abstract of Discrete Space-Time

   “A theory…. predicts that space and time are indeed made of discrete pieces.”

   — Lee Smolin in Atoms of Space and Time (pdf), Scientific American, Jan. 2004

   “… a fundamental discreteness of spacetime seems to be a prediction of the theory….”

   — Thomas Thiemann, abstract of Introduction to Modern Canonical Quantum General Relativity

   “Theories of discrete space-time structure are being studied from a variety of perspectives.”

   — Quantum Gravity and the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics at Imperial College, London

Disclaimer:

The above speculations by physicists
are offered as curiosities.
I have no idea whether
 any of them are correct.

Related material:

Stephen Wolfram offers a brief
History of Discrete Space.

For a discussion of space as discrete
by a non-physicist, see John Bigelow‘s
Space and Timaeus.

Part III: Quaternions
in a Discrete Space

Apart from any considerations of
physics, there are of course many
purely mathematical discrete spaces.
See Visible Mathematics, continued
 (Aug. 4, 2005):

The image “http://www.log24.com/theory/images/Quaternions2.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Saturday, June 4, 2005

Saturday June 4, 2005

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 7:00 pm
  Drama of the Diagonal
  
   The 4×4 Square:
  French Perspectives

Earendil_Silmarils:
The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05A/050604-Fuite1.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
  
   Les Anamorphoses:
 
   The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05A/050604-DesertSquare.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
 
  "Pour construire un dessin en perspective,
   le peintre trace sur sa toile des repères:
   la ligne d'horizon (1),
   le point de fuite principal (2)
   où se rencontre les lignes de fuite (3)
   et le point de fuite des diagonales (4)."
   _______________________________
  
  Serge Mehl,
   Perspective &
  Géométrie Projective:
  
   "… la géométrie projective était souvent
   synonyme de géométrie supérieure.
   Elle s'opposait à la géométrie
   euclidienne: élémentaire
  
  La géométrie projective, certes supérieure
   car assez ardue, permet d'établir
   de façon élégante des résultats de
   la géométrie élémentaire."
  
  Similarly…
  
  Finite projective geometry
  (in particular, Galois geometry)
   is certainly superior to
   the elementary geometry of
  quilt-pattern symmetry
  and allows us to establish
   de façon élégante
   some results of that
   elementary geometry.
  
  Other Related Material…
  
   from algebra rather than
   geometry, and from a German
   rather than from the French:  

"This is the relativity problem:
to fix objectively a class of
equivalent coordinatizations
and to ascertain
the group of transformations S
mediating between them."
— Hermann Weyl,
The Classical Groups,
Princeton U. Press, 1946

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05/050124-galois12s.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Evariste Galois

 Weyl also says that the profound branch
of mathematics known as Galois theory

   "… is nothing else but the
   relativity theory for the set Sigma,
   a set which, by its discrete and
    finite character, is conceptually
   so much simpler than the
   infinite set of points in space
   or space-time dealt with
   by ordinary relativity theory."
  — Weyl, Symmetry,
   Princeton U. Press, 1952
  
   Metaphor and Algebra…  

"Perhaps every science must
start with metaphor
and end with algebra;
and perhaps without metaphor
there would never have been
any algebra." 

   — attributed, in varying forms, to
   Max Black, Models and Metaphors, 1962

For metaphor and
algebra combined, see  

  "Symmetry invariance
  in a diamond ring,"

  A.M.S. abstract 79T-A37,
Notices of the
American Mathematical Society,
February 1979, pages A-193, 194 —
the original version of the 4×4 case
of the diamond theorem.

  
More on Max Black…

"When approaching unfamiliar territory, we often, as observed earlier, try to describe or frame the novel situation using metaphors based on relations perceived in a familiar domain, and by using our powers of association, and our ability to exploit the structural similarity, we go on to conjecture new features for consideration, often not noticed at the outset. The metaphor works, according to Max Black, by transferring the associated ideas and implications of the secondary to the primary system, and by selecting, emphasising and suppressing features of the primary in such a way that new slants on it are illuminated."

— Paul Thompson, University College, Oxford,
    The Nature and Role of Intuition
     in Mathematical Epistemology

  A New Slant…  

That intuition, metaphor (i.e., analogy), and association may lead us astray is well known.  The examples of French perspective above show what might happen if someone ignorant of finite geometry were to associate the phrase "4×4 square" with the phrase "projective geometry."  The results are ridiculously inappropriate, but at least the second example does, literally, illuminate "new slants"– i.e., diagonals– within the perspective drawing of the 4×4 square.

Similarly, analogy led the ancient Greeks to believe that the diagonal of a square is commensurate with the side… until someone gave them a new slant on the subject.

Friday, February 20, 2004

Friday February 20, 2004

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 3:24 pm

Finite Relativity

Today is the 18th birthday of my note

The Relativity Problem in Finite Geometry.”

That note begins with a quotation from Weyl:

“This is the relativity problem: to fix objectively a class of equivalent coordinatizations and to ascertain the group of transformations S mediating between them.”

— Hermann Weyl, The Classical Groups, Princeton University Press, 1946, p. 16

Here is another quotation from Weyl, on the profound branch of mathematics known as Galois theory, which he says

“… is nothing else but the relativity theory for the set Sigma, a set which, by its discrete and finite character, is conceptually so much simpler than the infinite set of points in space or space-time dealt with by ordinary relativity theory.”

— Weyl, Symmetry, Princeton University Press, 1952, p. 138

This second quotation applies equally well to the much less profound, but more accessible, part of mathematics described in Diamond Theory and in my note of Feb. 20, 1986.

Saturday, November 1, 2003

Saturday November 1, 2003

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 1:05 pm

Symmetry in Diamond Theory:
Robbing Peter to Pay Paul

"Groups arise in most areas of pure and applied mathematics, usually as a set of operators or transformations of some structure. The appearance of a group generally reflects some kind of symmetry in the object under study, and such symmetry may be considered one of the fundamental notions of mathematics."

Peter Webb

"Counter-change is sometimes known as Robbing Peter to Pay Paul."

Helen Kelley Patchwork

Paul Robeson in
King Solomon's
Mines

Counterchange
symmetry

For a look at the Soviet approach
to counterchange symmetry, see

The Kishinev School of Discrete Geometry.

The larger cultural context:

See War of Ideas (Oct. 24),
The Hunt for Red October (Oct. 25),
On the Left (Oct. 25), and
ART WARS for Trotsky's Birthday (Oct. 26).
 

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