Exercise: Use the Guitart 7-cycles below to relate the 56 triples
in an 8-set (such as the eightfold cube) to the 56 triangles in
a well-known Klein-quartic hyperbolic-plane tiling. Then use
the correspondence of the triples with the 56 spreads of PG(3,2)
to construct M24.
Click image below to download a Guitart PowerPoint presentation.
See as well earlier posts also tagged Triangles, Spreads, Mathieu.
For PSL(2,7), this is ((49-1)(49-7))/((7-1)(2))=168.
The group GL(3,2), also of order 168, acts naturally
on the set of seven cube-slicings below —
Another way to picture the seven natural slicings —
Application of the above images to picturing the
isomorphism of PSL(2,7) with GL(3,2) —
.gif)
For a more detailed proof, see . . .
Found today in an Internet image search, from the website of
an anonymous amateur mathematics enthusiast —
Forming Gray codes in the eightfold cube with the eight
I Ching trigrams (bagua ) —
This journal on Nov. 7, 2016 —
A different sort of cube, from the makers of the recent
Netflix miniseries "Maniac" —
See also Rubik in this journal.
Click to enlarge:
Above are the 7 frames of an animated gif from a Wikipedia article.
* For the Furey of the title, see a July 20 Quanta Magazine piece —
See also the eightfold cube in this journal.
"Before time began . . . ." — Optimus Prime
From a post of July 25, 2008, "56 Triangles," on the Klein quartic
and the eightfold cube —
"Baez's discussion says that the Klein quartic's 56 triangles
can be partitioned into 7 eight-triangle Egan 'cubes' that
correspond to the 7 points of the Fano plane in such a way
that automorphisms of the Klein quartic correspond to
automorphisms of the Fano plane. Show that the
56 triangles within the eightfold cube can also be partitioned
into 7 eight-triangle sets that correspond to the 7 points of the
Fano plane in such a way that (affine) transformations of the
eightfold cube induce (projective) automorphisms of the Fano plane."
Related material from 1975 —
More recently …
The assignments page for a graduate algebra course at Cornell
last fall had a link to the eightfold cube:
A KUNSTforum.as article online today (translation by Google) —
Update of Sept. 7, 2016: The corrections have been made,
except for the misspelling "Cullinan," which was caused by
Google translation, not by KUNSTforum.
The following page quotes "Raiders of the Lost Crucible,"
a Log24 post from Halloween 2015.
From KUNSTforum.as, a Norwegian art quarterly, issue no. 1 of 2016.
Related posts — See Lyche Eightfold.
An eightfold cube appears in this detail
of a photo by Josefine Lyche of her
installation "4D Ambassador" at the
Norwegian Sculpture Biennial 2015 —
(Detail from private Instagram photo.)
Catalog description of installation —
Google Translate version —
In a small bedroom to Foredragssalen populate
Josefine Lyche exhibition with a group sculptures
that are part of the work group 4D Ambassador
(2014-2015). Together they form an installation
where she uses light to amplify the feeling of
stepping into a new dimension, for which the title
suggests, this "ambassadors" for a dimension we
normally do not have access to. "Ambassadors"
physical forms presents nonphysical phenomena.
Lyches works have in recent years been placed
in something one might call an "esoteric direction"
in contemporary art, and defines itself this
sculpture group humorous as "glam-minimalist."
She has in many of his works returned to basic
geometric shapes, with hints to the occult,
"new space-age", mathematics and where
everything in between.
See also Lyche + "4D Ambassador" in this journal and
her website page with a 2012 version of that title.
A search today (Élie Cartan's birthday) for material related to triality*
yielded references to something that has been called a Bhargava cube .
Two pages from a 2006 paper by Bhargava—
Bhargava's reference [4] above for "the story of the cube" is to…
Higher Composition Laws I:
A New View on Gauss Composition,
and Quadratic Generalizations
Manjul Bhargava
The Annals of Mathematics
Second Series, Vol. 159, No. 1 (Jan., 2004), pp. 217-250
Published by: Annals of Mathematics
Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3597249
A brief account in the context of embedding problems (click to enlarge)—
For more ways of slicing a cube,
see The Eightfold Cube —
* Note (1) some remarks by Tony Smith
related to the above Dynkin diagram
and (2) another colorful variation on the diagram.
A brief summary of the eightfold cube is now at octad.us.
See also Espacement and The Thing and I.
This journal ten years ago today —
Surprise Package
From a talk by a Melbourne mathematician on March 9, 2018 —
The source — Talk II below —
Search Results
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Related material —
The 56 triangles of the eightfold cube . . .
Image from Christmas Day 2005.
Clicking on Zong in the above post leads to a 2005 article
in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society .
See also the eightfold cube and interality .
A New, Improved Version of Quantum Suffering !
Background for group actions on the eightfold cube —
See also other posts now tagged Quantum Suffering
as well as — related to the image above of the Great Wall —
The Java applets at the webpage "Diamonds and Whirls"
that illustrate Cullinane cubes may be difficult to display.
Here instead is an animated GIF that shows the basic unit
for the "design cube" pages at finitegeometry.org.
See Eightfold Froebel.
James Propp in the current Math Horizons on the eightfold cube —
For another puerile approach to the eightfold cube,
see Cube Space, 1984-2003 (Oct. 24, 2008).
From this journal on August 18, 2015, "A Wrinkle in Terms" —
For two misuses by John Baez of the phrase “permutation group”
at the n-Category Café, see “A Wrinkle in the Mathematical Universe”
and “Re: A Wrinkle…” —
“There is such a thing as a permutation group.”
— Adapted from A Wrinkle in Time , by Madeleine L’Engle
* See RIP, Time Cube at gizmodo.com (September 1, 2015).
Foreword by Sir Michael Atiyah —
"Poincaré said that science is no more a collection of facts
than a house is a collection of bricks. The facts have to be
ordered or structured, they have to fit a theory, a construct
(often mathematical) in the human mind. . . .
… Mathematics may be art, but to the general public it is
a black art, more akin to magic and mystery. This presents
a constant challenge to the mathematical community: to
explain how art fits into our subject and what we mean by beauty.
In attempting to bridge this divide I have always found that
architecture is the best of the arts to compare with mathematics.
The analogy between the two subjects is not hard to describe
and enables abstract ideas to be exemplified by bricks and mortar,
in the spirit of the Poincaré quotation I used earlier."
— Sir Michael Atiyah, "The Art of Mathematics"
in the AMS Notices , January 2010
Judy Bass, Los Angeles Times , March 12, 1989 —
"Like Rubik's Cube, The Eight demands to be pondered."
As does a figure from 1984, Cullinane's Cube —
For natural group actions on the Cullinane cube,
see "The Eightfold Cube" and
"A Simple Reflection Group of Order 168."
See also the recent post Cube Bricks 1984 —
Related remark from the literature —
Note that only the static structure is described by Felsner, not the
168 group actions discussed by Cullinane. For remarks on such
group actions in the literature, see "Cube Space, 1984-2003."
(From Anatomy of a Cube, Sept. 18, 2011.)
The Blacklist “Pilot” Review
"There is an element of camp to this series though. Spader is
quite gleefully channeling Anthony Hopkins, complete with being
a well educated, elegant man locked away in a super-cell.
Speaking of that super-cell, it’s kind of ridiculous. They’ve got him
locked up in an abandoned post office warehouse on a little
platform with a chair inside a giant metal cube that looks like
it could have been built by Tony Stark. And as Liz approaches
to talk to him, the entire front of the cube opens and the whole
thing slides back to leave just the platform and chair. Really?
FUCKING REALLY ? "
— Kate Reilly at Geekenstein.com (Sept. 27, 2013)
|
From Don DeLillo's novel Point Omega — I knew what he was, or what he was supposed to be, a defense intellectual, without the usual credentials, and when I used the term it made him tense his jaw with a proud longing for the early weeks and months, before he began to understand that he was occupying an empty seat. "There were times when no map existed to match the reality we were trying to create." "What reality?" "This is something we do with every eyeblink. Human perception is a saga of created reality. But we were devising entities beyond the agreed-upon limits of recognition or interpretation. Lying is necessary. The state has to lie. There is no lie in war or in preparation for war that can't be defended. We went beyond this. We tried to create new realities overnight, careful sets of words that resemble advertising slogans in memorability and repeatability. These were words that would yield pictures eventually and then become three-dimensional. The reality stands, it walks, it squats. Except when it doesn't." He didn't smoke but his voice had a sandlike texture, maybe just raspy with age, sometimes slipping inward, becoming nearly inaudible. We sat for some time. He was slouched in the middle of the sofa, looking off toward some point in a high corner of the room. He had scotch and water in a coffee mug secured to his midsection. Finally he said, "Haiku." I nodded thoughtfully, idiotically, a slow series of gestures meant to indicate that I understood completely. "Haiku means nothing beyond what it is. A pond in summer, a leaf in the wind. It's human consciousness located in nature. It's the answer to everything in a set number of lines, a prescribed syllable count. I wanted a haiku war," he said. "I wanted a war in three lines. This was not a matter of force levels or logistics. What I wanted was a set of ideas linked to transient things. This is the soul of haiku. Bare everything to plain sight. See what's there. Things in war are transient. See what's there and then be prepared to watch it disappear." |
What's there—
This view of a die's faces 3, 6, and 5, in counter-
clockwise order (see previous post) suggests a way
of labeling the eight corners of a die (or cube):
123, 135, 142, 154, 246, 263, 365, 456.
Here opposite faces of the die sum to 7, and the
three faces meeting at each corner are listed
in counter-clockwise order. (This corresponds
to a labeling of one of MacMahon's* 30 colored cubes.)
A similar vertex-labeling may be used in describing
the automorphisms of the order-8 quaternion group.
For a more literary approach to quaternions, see
Pynchon's novel Against the Day .
* From Peter J. Cameron's weblog:
"The big name associated with this is Major MacMahon,
an associate of Hardy, Littlewood and Ramanujan,
of whom Robert Kanigel said,
His expertise lay in combinatorics, a sort of
glorified dice-throwing, and in it he had made
contributions original enough to be named
a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Glorified dice-throwing, indeed…"
The second Logos figure in the previous post
summarized affine group actions on partitions
that generate a group of about 1.3 trillion
permutations of a 4x4x4 cube (shown below)—
Click for further details.
"Examples galore of this feeling must have arisen in the minds of the people who extended the Magic Cube concept to other polyhedra, other dimensions, other ways of slicing. And once you have made or acquired a new 'cube'… you will want to know how to export a known algorithm , broken up into its fundamental operators , from a familiar cube. What is the essence of each operator? One senses a deep invariant lying somehow 'down underneath' it all, something that one can’t quite verbalize but that one recognizes so clearly and unmistakably in each new example, even though that example might violate some feature one had thought necessary up to that very moment. In fact, sometimes that violation is what makes you sure you’re seeing the same thing , because it reveals slippabilities you hadn’t sensed up till that time….
… example: There is clearly only one sensible 4 × 4 × 4 Magic Cube. It is the answer; it simply has the right spirit ."
— Douglas R. Hofstadter, 1985, Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern (Kindle edition, locations 11557-11572)
See also Many Dimensions in this journal and Solomon's Cube.
The following picture provides a new visual approach to
the order-8 quaternion group's automorphisms.
Click the above image for some context.
Here the cube is called "eightfold" because the eight vertices,
like the eight subcubes of a 2×2×2 cube,* are thought of as
independently movable. See The Eightfold Cube.
See also…
Related material: Robin Chapman and Karen E. Smith
on the quaternion group's automorphisms.
* See Margaret Wertheim's Christmas Eve remarks on mathematics
and the following eightfold cube from an institute she co-founded—
Photo by Norman Brosterman
fom the Inventing Kindergarten
exhibit at The Institute for Figuring
(co-founded by Margaret Wertheim)
R.D. Carmichael's seminal 1931 paper on tactical configurations suggests
a search for later material relating such configurations to block designs.
Such a search yields the following—
"… it seems that the relationship between
BIB [balanced incomplete block ] designs
and tactical configurations, and in particular,
the Steiner system, has been overlooked."
— D. A. Sprott, U. of Toronto, 1955
The figure by Cullinane included above shows a way to visualize Sprott's remarks.
For the group actions described by Cullinane, see "The Eightfold Cube" and
"A Simple Reflection Group of Order 168."
Update of 7:42 PM Sept. 18, 2011—
From a Summer 2011 course on discrete structures at a Berlin website—
A different illustration of the eightfold cube as the Steiner system S(3, 4, 8)—
Note that only the static structure is described by Felsner, not the
168 group actions discussed (as above) by Cullinane. For remarks on
such group actions in the literature, see "Cube Space, 1984-2003."
Prequel — (Click to enlarge)
Background —
See also Rubik in this journal.
* For the title, see Groups Acting.
Click the above image for some background.
Related material:
Skateboard legend Andy Kessler,
this morning's The Gleaming,
and But Sometimes I Hit London.
The title refers not to numbers of the form p 3, p prime, but to geometric cubes with p 3 subcubes.
Such cubes are natural models for the finite vector spaces acted upon by general linear groups viewed as permutation groups of degree (not order ) p 3.
For the case p =2, see The Eightfold Cube.
For the case p =3, see the "External links" section of the Nov. 30, 2009, version of Wikipedia article "General Linear Group." (That is the version just prior to the Dec. 14, 2009, revision by anonymous user "Greenfernglade.")
For symmetries of group actions for larger primes, see the related 1985 remark* on two -dimensional linear groups—
"Actions of GL(2,p ) on a p ×p coordinate-array
have the same sorts of symmetries,
where p is any odd prime."
Cubic models of finite geometries
display an interplay between
Euclidean and Galois geometry.
Example 1— The 2×2×2 Cube—
also known as the eightfold cube—
Group actions on the eightfold cube, 1984—
Version by Laszlo Lovasz et al., 2003—
Lovasz et al. go on to describe the same group actions
as in the 1984 note, without attribution.
Example 2— The 3×3×3 Cube
A note from 1985 describing group actions on a 3×3 plane array—
Undated software by Ed Pegg Jr. displays
group actions on a 3×3×3 cube that extend the
3×3 group actions from 1985 described above—
Pegg gives no reference to the 1985 work on group actions.
Example 3— The 4×4×4 Cube
A note from 27 years ago today—
As far as I know, this version of the
group-actions theorem has not yet been ripped off.
Harvard Crimson headline today–
"Deconstructing Design"
Reconstructing Design
The phrase "eightfold way" in today's
previous entry has a certain
graphic resonance…
For instance, an illustration from the
Wikipedia article "Noble Eightfold Path" —
Adapted detail–
See also, from
St. Joseph's Day—
Harvard students who view Christian symbols
with fear and loathing may meditate
on the above as a representation of
the Gankyil rather than of the Trinity.
See the title in this journal.
Such generation occurs both in Euclidean space …
… and in some Galois spaces —
.
In Galois spaces, some care must be taken in defining "reflection."
Freeman Dyson on his staircase at Trinity College
(University of Cambridge) and on Ludwig Wittgenstein:
"I held him in the highest respect and was delighted
to find him living in a room above mine on the same
staircase. I frequently met him walking up or down
the stairs, but I was too shy to start a conversation."
Frank Close on Ron Shaw:
"Shaw arrived there in 1949 and moved into room K9,
overlooking Jesus Lane. There is nothing particularly
special about this room other than the coincidence that
its previous occupant was Freeman Dyson."
— Close, Frank. The Infinity Puzzle (p. 78).
Basic Books. Kindle Edition.
See also other posts now tagged Trinity Staircase.
Illuminati enthusiasts may enjoy the following image:
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Roberta Smith on Donald Judd’s BY ALEX GREENBERGER February 28, 2020 1:04pm If Minimalist artist Donald Judd is known as a writer at all, it’s likely for one important text— his 1965 essay “Specific Objects,” in which he observed the rise of a new kind of art that collapsed divisions between painting, sculpture, and other mediums. But Judd was a prolific critic, penning shrewd reviews for various publications throughout his career—including ARTnews . With a Judd retrospective going on view this Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, ARTnews asked New York Times co-chief art critic Roberta Smith— who, early in her career, worked for Judd as his assistant— to comment on a few of Judd’s ARTnews reviews. How would she describe his critical style? “In a word,” she said, “great.” . . . . |
And then there is Temple Eight, or Ex Fano Apollinis —
Cicero, In Verrem II. 1. 46 —
He reached Delos. There one night he secretly 46 carried off, from the much-revered sanctuary of Apollo, several ancient and beautiful statues, and had them put on board his own transport. Next day, when the inhabitants of Delos saw their sanc- tuary stripped of its treasures, they were much distressed . . . .
Delum venit. Ibi ex fano Apollinis religiosissimo noctu clam sustulit signa pulcherrima atque anti- quissima, eaque in onerariam navem suam conicienda curavit. Postridie cum fanum spoliatum viderent ii qui Delum incolebant, graviter ferebant . . . .
From the author who in 2001 described "God's fingerprint"
(see the previous post) —
From the same publisher —
From other posts tagged Triskele in this journal —
Other geometry for enthusiasts of the esoteric —
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Monday, November 4, 2019
As Above, So Below*
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"Although art is fundamentally everywhere and always the same,
nevertheless two main human inclinations, diametrically opposed
to each other, appear in its many and varied expressions. ….
The first aims at representing reality objectively, the second subjectively."
— Mondrian, 1936 [Links added.]
An image search today (click to enlarge) —
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.
The plane at left is modeled naturally by
seven types of "cuts" in the cube at right.
The Fourfold Square and Eightfold Cube
Related material: A Google image search for "field dream" + log24.
The above image is from
"A Four-Color Theorem:
Function Decomposition Over a Finite Field,"
http://finitegeometry.org/sc/gen/mapsys.html.
These partitions of an 8-set into four 2-sets
occur also in Wednesday night's post
Miracle Octad Generator Structure.
This post was suggested by a Daily News
story from August 8, 2011, and by a Log24
post from that same date, "Organizing the
Mine Workers" —
Stevens's Omega and Alpha (see previous post) suggest a review.
Omega — The Berlekamp Garden. See Misère Play (April 8, 2019).
Alpha — The Kinder Garten. See Eighfold Cube.
Illustrations —
The sculpture above illustrates Klein's order-168 simple group.
So does the sculpture below.
Cube Bricks 1984 —
"The 15 Puzzle and the Magic Cube
are spiritual kin …."
— "Metamagical Themas" column,
Douglas R. Hofstadter, Scientific American ,
Vol. 244, No. 3 (March 1981), pp. 20-39
As are the 15 Schoolgirls and the Eightfold Cube.
Cube Bricks 1984 —
From "Tomorrowland" (2015) —
From John Baez (2018) —
See also this morning's post Perception of Space
and yesterday's Exploring Schoolgirl Space.
From "On the life and scientific work of Gino Fano"
by Alberto Collino, Alberto Conte, and Alessandro Verra,
ICCM Notices , July 2014, Vol. 2 No. 1, pp. 43-57 —
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" Indeed, about the Italian debate on foundations of Geometry, it is not rare to read comments in the same spirit of the following one, due to Jeremy Gray13. He is essentially reporting Hans Freudenthal’s point of view: ' When the distinguished mathematician and historian of mathematics Hans Freudenthal analysed Hilbert’s Grundlagen he argued that the link between reality and geometry appears to be severed for the first time in Hilbert’s work. However, he discovered that Hilbert had been preceded by the Italian mathematician Gino Fano in 1892. . . .' " 13 J. Gray, "The Foundations of Projective Geometry in Italy," Chapter 24 (pp. 269–279) in his book Worlds Out of Nothing , Springer (2010). |
Restoring the severed link —
See also Espacement and The Thing and I.
Related material —
(Continued from the previous post.)
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In-Between "Spacing" and the "Chôra " (Ch. 2 in Henk Oosterling & Ewa Plonowska Ziarek (Eds.), Intermedialities: Philosophy, Arts, Politics , Lexington Books, October 14, 2010) "The term 'spacing' ('espacement ') is absolutely central to Derrida's entire corpus, where it is indissociable from those of différance (characterized, in the text from 1968 bearing this name, as '[at once] spacing [and] temporizing' 1), writing (of which 'spacing' is said to be 'the fundamental property' 2) and deconstruction (with one of Derrida's last major texts, Le Toucher: Jean-Luc Nancy , specifying 'spacing ' to be 'the first word of any deconstruction' 3)." 1 Jacques Derrida, “La Différance,” in Marges – de la philosophie (Paris: Minuit, 1972), p. 14. Henceforth cited as D . 2 Jacques Derrida, “Freud and the Scene of Writing,” trans. A. Bass, in Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), p. 217. Henceforth cited as FSW . 3 Jacques Derrida, Le Toucher, Jean-Luc Nancy (Paris: Galilée, 2000), p. 207. . . . . "… a particularly interesting point is made in this respect by the French philosopher, Michel Haar. After remarking that the force Derrida attributes to différance consists simply of the series of its effects, and is, for this reason, 'an indefinite process of substitutions or permutations,' Haar specifies that, for this process to be something other than a simple 'actualisation' lacking any real power of effectivity, it would need “a soubassement porteur ' – let’s say a 'conducting underlay' or 'conducting medium' which would not, however, be an absolute base, nor an 'origin' or 'cause.' If then, as Haar concludes, différance and spacing show themselves to belong to 'a pure Apollonism' 'haunted by the groundless ground,' which they lack and deprive themselves of,16 we can better understand both the threat posed by the 'figures' of space and the mother in the Timaeus and, as a result, Derrida’s insistent attempts to disqualify them. So great, it would seem, is the menace to différance that Derrida must, in a 'properly' apotropaic gesture, ward off these 'figures' of an archaic, chthonic, spatial matrix in any and all ways possible…." 16 Michel Haar, “Le jeu de Nietzsche dans Derrida,” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’Etranger 2 (1990): 207-227. . . . . … "The conclusion to be drawn from Democritus' conception of rhuthmos , as well as from Plato's conception of the chôra , is not, therefore, as Derrida would have it, that a differential field understood as an originary site of inscription would 'produce' the spatiality of space but, on the contrary, that 'differentiation in general' depends upon a certain 'spatial milieu' – what Haar would name a 'groundless ground' – revealed as such to be an 'in-between' more 'originary' than the play of differences it in-forms. As such, this conclusion obviously extends beyond Derrida's conception of 'spacing,' encompassing contemporary philosophy's continual privileging of temporization in its elaboration of a pre-ontological 'opening' – or, shall we say, 'in-between.' |
For permutations and a possible "groundless ground," see
the eightfold cube and group actions both on a set of eight
building blocks arranged in a cube (a "conducting base") and
on the set of seven natural interstices (espacements ) between
the blocks. Such group actions provide an elementary picture of
the isomorphism between the groups PSL(2,7) (acting on the
eight blocks) and GL(3,2) (acting on the seven interstices).
Espacements
For the Church of Synchronology —
See also, from the reported publication date of the above book
Intermedialities , the Log24 post Synchronicity.
* For another such tale, see Eightfold Cube in this journal.
Einstein, "Geometry and Experience," lecture before the
Prussian Academy of Sciences, January 27, 1921–
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… This view of axioms, advocated by modern axiomatics, purges mathematics of all extraneous elements, and thus dispels the mystic obscurity, which formerly surrounded the basis of mathematics. But such an expurgated exposition of mathematics makes it also evident that mathematics as such cannot predicate anything about objects of our intuition or real objects. In axiomatic geometry the words "point," "straight line," etc., stand only for empty conceptual schemata. That which gives them content is not relevant to mathematics. Yet on the other hand it is certain that mathematics generally, and particularly geometry, owes its existence to the need which was felt of learning something about the behavior of real objects. The very word geometry, which, of course, means earth-measuring, proves this. For earth-measuring has to do with the possibilities of the disposition of certain natural objects with respect to one another, namely, with parts of the earth, measuring-lines, measuring-wands, etc. It is clear that the system of concepts of axiomatic geometry alone cannot make any assertions as to the behavior of real objects of this kind, which we will call practically-rigid bodies. To be able to make such assertions, geometry must be stripped of its merely logical-formal character by the coordination of real objects of experience with the empty conceptual schemata of axiomatic geometry. To accomplish this, we need only add the proposition: solid bodies are related, with respect to their possible dispositions, as are bodies in Euclidean geometry of three dimensions. Then the propositions of Euclid contain affirmations as to the behavior of practically-rigid bodies. Geometry thus completed is evidently a natural science; we may in fact regard it as the most ancient branch of physics. Its affirmations rest essentially on induction from experience, but not on logical inferences only. We will call this completed geometry "practical geometry," and shall distinguish it in what follows from "purely axiomatic geometry." The question whether the practical geometry of the universe is Euclidean or not has a clear meaning, and its answer can only be furnished by experience. …. |
Later in the same lecture, Einstein discusses "the theory of a finite
universe." Of course he is not using "finite" in the sense of the field
of mathematics known as "finite geometry " — geometry with only finitely
many points.
Nevertheless, his remarks seem relevant to the Fano plane , an
axiomatically defined entity from finite geometry, and the eightfold cube ,
a physical object embodying the properties of the Fano plane.
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I want to show that without any extraordinary difficulty we can illustrate the theory of a finite universe by means of a mental picture to which, with some practice, we shall soon grow accustomed. First of all, an observation of epistemological nature. A geometrical-physical theory as such is incapable of being directly pictured, being merely a system of concepts. But these concepts serve the purpose of bringing a multiplicity of real or imaginary sensory experiences into connection in the mind. To "visualize" a theory therefore means to bring to mind that abundance of sensible experiences for which the theory supplies the schematic arrangement. In the present case we have to ask ourselves how we can represent that behavior of solid bodies with respect to their mutual disposition (contact) that corresponds to the theory of a finite universe. |
From https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/…
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A Few of My Favorite Spaces:
The intuition-challenging Fano plane may be By Evelyn Lamb on October 24, 2015
"…finite projective planes seem like |
For Fano's axiomatic approach, see the Nov. 3 Log24 post
"Foundations of Geometry."
For the Fano plane's basis in reality , see the eightfold cube
at finitegeometry.org/sc/ and in this journal.
See as well "Two Views of Finite Space" (in this journal on the date
of Lamb's remarks — Oct. 24, 2015).
Some context: Gödel's Platonic realism vs. Hilbert's axiomatics
in remarks by Manuel Alfonseca on June 7, 2018. (See too remarks
in this journal on that date, in posts tagged "Road to Hell.")
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"Husserl is not the greatest philosopher of all times. — Kurt Gödel as quoted by Gian-Carlo Rota Some results from a Google search — Eidetic reduction | philosophy | Britannica.com Eidetic reduction, in phenomenology, a method by which the philosopher moves from the consciousness of individual and concrete objects to the transempirical realm of pure essences and thus achieves an intuition of the eidos (Greek: “shape”) of a thing—i.e., of what it is in its invariable and essential structure, apart … Phenomenology Online » Eidetic Reduction
The eidetic reduction: eidos. Method: Bracket all incidental meaning and ask: what are some of the possible invariate aspects of this experience? The research Eidetic reduction – New World Encyclopedia Sep 19, 2017 – Eidetic reduction is a technique in Husserlian phenomenology, used to identify the essential components of the given phenomenon or experience. |
For example —
The reduction of two-colorings and four-colorings of a square or cubic
array of subsquares or subcubes to lines, sets of lines, cuts, or sets of
cuts between* the subsquares or subcubes.
See the diamond theorem and the eightfold cube.
* Cf. posts tagged Interality and Interstice.
Review of yesterday's post Perception of Space —
From Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (1997),
republished as "… and the Sorcerer's Stone ," Kindle edition:
In a print edition from Bloomsbury (2004), and perhaps in the
earliest editions, the above word "movements" is the first word
on page 168:
Click the above ellipse for some Log24 posts on the eightfold cube,
the source of the 168 automorphisms ("movements") of the Fano plane.
"Refined interpretation requires that you know that
someone once said the offspring of reality and illusion
is only a staggering confusion."
— Poem, "The Game of Roles," by Mary Jo Bang
Related material on reality and illusion —
an ad on the back cover of the current New Yorker —
"Hey, the stars might lie, but the numbers never do." — Song lyric
* A footnote in memory of a dancer who reportedly died
yesterday, August 29 — See posts tagged Paradigm Shift.
"Birthday, death-day — what day is not both?" — John Updike
Suggested by a review of Curl on Modernism —
Related material —
Waugh + Orwell in this journal and …
McCarthy's "materialization of plot and character" does not,
for me, constitute a proof that "there is being, after all,
beyond the arbitrary flux of existence."
Neither does the above materialization of 281 as the page
number of her philosophical remark.
See also the materialization of 281 as a page number in
the book Witchcraft by Charles Williams —
The materialization of 168 as a page number in a
Stephen King novel is somewhat more convincing,
but less convincing than the materialization of Klein's
simple group of of 168 elements in the eightfold cube.
(A sequel to yesterday's Geometry for Jews)
From this journal on the above UCI posting date — April 6, 2018 —
From this journal on the above lecture date — April 26, 2018 —
illustrations in a post titled Defining Form —
For the relevance of the above material to building blocks,
see Eightfold Cube in this journal.
The title is from a phrase spoken, notably, by Yul Brynner
to Christopher Plummer in the 1966 film "Triple Cross."
Related structures —
Greg Egan's animated image of the Klein quartic —
For a smaller tetrahedral arrangement, within the Steiner quadruple
system of order 8 modeled by the eightfold cube, see a book chapter
by Michael Huber of Tübingen —
For further details, see the June 29 post Triangles in the Eightfold Cube.
See also, from an April 2013 philosophical conference:
|
Abstract for a talk at the City University of New York:
The Experience of Meaning Once the question of truth is settled, and often prior to it, what we value in a mathematical proof or conjecture is what we value in a work of lyric art: potency of meaning. An absence of clutter is a feature of such artifacts: they possess a resonant clarity that allows their meaning to break on our inner eye like light. But this absence of clutter is not tantamount to 'being simple': consider Eliot's Four Quartets or Mozart's late symphonies. Some truths are complex, and they are simplified at the cost of distortion, at the cost of ceasing to be truths. Nonetheless, it's often possible to express a complex truth in a way that precipitates a powerful experience of meaning. It is that experience we seek — not simplicity per se , but the flash of insight, the sense we've seen into the heart of things. I'll first try to say something about what is involved in such recognitions; and then something about why an absence of clutter matters to them. |
For the talk itself, see a YouTube video.
The conference talks also appear in a book.
The book begins with an epigraph by Hilbert —
The previous post was suggested by some April 17, 2016, remarks
by James Propp on the eightfold cube.
Propp's remarks included the following:
"Here’s a caveat about my glib earlier remark that
'There are only finitely many numbers ' in a finite field.
It’s a bit of a stretch to call the elements of finite fields
'numbers'. Elements of GF(q ) can be thought of as
the integers mod q when q is prime, and they can be
represented by 0, 1, 2, …, q–1; but when q is a prime
raised to the 2nd power or higher, describing the
elements of GF(q ) is more complicated, and the word
'number' isn’t apt."
Related material —
See also this journal on the date of Propp's remarks — April 17, 2016.
Mystery box merchandise from the 2011 J. J. Abrams film Super 8 —
A mystery box that I prefer —
Click image for some background.
See also Nicht Spielerei .
"Unsheathe your dagger definitions." — James Joyce, Ulysses
The "triple cross" link in the previous post referenced the eightfold cube
as a structure that might be called the trinity stone .
The title reverses a phrase of Fano —
“costruire (o, dirò meglio immaginare).”
Illustrations of imagining (the Fano plane) and of constructing (the eightfold cube) —
Related material on automorphism groups —
The "Eightfold Cube" structure shown above with Weyl
competes rather directly with the "Eightfold Way" sculpture
shown above with Bryant. The structure and the sculpture
each illustrate Klein's order-168 simple group.
Perhaps in part because of this competition, fans of the Mathematical
Sciences Research Institute (MSRI, pronounced "Misery') are less likely
to enjoy, and discuss, the eight-cube mathematical structure above
than they are an eight-cube mechanical puzzle like the one below.
Note also the earlier (2006) "Design Cube 2x2x2" webpage
illustrating graphic designs on the eightfold cube. This is visually,
if not mathematically, related to the (2010) "Expert's Cube."
Related material —
The seven points of the Fano plane within
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"Before time began . . . ."
— Optimus Prime
Tom Wolfe in The Painted Word (1975):
"It is important to repeat that Greenberg and Rosenberg
did not create their theories in a vacuum or simply turn up
with them one day like tablets brought down from atop
Green Mountain or Red Mountain (as B. H. Friedman once
called the two men). As tout le monde understood, they
were not only theories but … hot news,
straight from the studios, from the scene."
Harold Rosenberg in The New Yorker (click to enlarge)—
See also Interality and the Eightfold Cube .
* See the term interality in this journal.
For many synonyms, see
"The Human Seriousness of Interality,"
by Peter Zhang, Grand Valley State University,
China Media Research 11(2), 2015, 93-103.
David E. Wellbery on Goethe
From an interview published on 2 November 2017 at
http://literaturwissenschaft-berlin.de/interview-with-david-wellbery/
as later republished in
The logo at left above is that of The Point .
The menu icon at right above is perhaps better
suited to illustrate Verwandlungslehre .
Logo from the above webpage —
See also the similar structure of the eightfold cube, and …
Related dialogue from the new film "Unlocked" —
1057
01:31:59,926 –> 01:32:01,301
Nice to have you back, Alice.
1058
01:32:04,009 –> 01:32:05,467
Don't be a stranger.
Typographical: »
Eightfold Cube:
The previous two posts dealt, rather indirectly, with
the notion of "cube bricks" (Cullinane, 1984) —
Group actions on partitions —
Cube Bricks 1984 —
Another mathematical remark from 1984 —
For further details, see Triangles Are Square.
"The field of geometric group theory emerged from Gromov’s insight
that even mathematical objects such as groups, which are defined
completely in algebraic terms, can be profitably viewed as geometric
objects and studied with geometric techniques."
— Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, 2016:
See also some writings of Gromov from 2015-16:
For a simpler example than those discussed at MSRI
of both algebraic and geometric techniques applied to
the same group, see a post of May 19, 2017,
"From Algebra to Geometry." That post reviews
an earlier illustration —
For greater depth, see "Eightfold Cube" in this journal.
Continuing the previous post's theme …
Group actions on partitions —
Cube Bricks 1984 —
Related material — Posts now tagged Device Narratives.
Pinterest boards uploaded to the new m759.net/piwigo —
Update of May 2 —
Update of May 3 —
Update of May 8 —
Art Space board created at Pinterest
The contraction of the title is from group actions on
the ninefold square (with the center subsquare fixed)
to group actions on the eightfold cube.
From a post of June 4, 2014 …
At math.stackexchange.com on March 1-12, 2013:
“Is there a geometric realization of the Quaternion group?” —
The above illustration, though neatly drawn, appeared under the
cloak of anonymity. No source was given for the illustrated group actions.
Possibly they stem from my Log24 posts or notes such as the Jan. 4, 2012,
note on quaternion actions at finitegeometry.org/sc (hence ultimately
from my note “GL(2,3) actions on a cube” of April 5, 1985).
From Wikipedia's Iceberg Theory —
Related material:
The Eightfold Cube and The Quantum Identity —
See also the previous post.
Click to enlarge the following (from Cornell U. Press in 1962) —
For a more recent analogical extension at Cornell, see the
Epiphany 2017 post on the eightfold cube and yesterday
evening's post "A Theory of Everything."
The title refers to the Chinese book the I Ching ,
the Classic of Changes .
The 64 hexagrams of the I Ching may be arranged
naturally in a 4x4x4 cube. The natural form of transformations
("changes") of this cube is given by the diamond theorem.
A related post —
"Clearly, there is a spirit of openhandedness in post-conceptual art
uses of the term 'Conceptualism.' We can now endow it with a
capital letter because it has grown in scale from its initial designation
of an avant-garde grouping, or various groups in various places, and
has evolved in two further phases. It became something like a movement,
on par with and evolving at the same time as Minimalism. Thus the sense
it has in a book such as Tony Godfrey’s Conceptual Art. … Beyond that,
it has in recent years spread to become a tendency, a resonance within
art practice that is nearly ubiquitous." — Terry Smith, 2011
See also the eightfold cube —
Or: Notes for the Metaphysical Club
Northrop Frye on Wallace Stevens:
"He… stands in contrast to the the dualistic
approach of Eliot, who so often speaks of poetry
as though it were an emotional and sensational
soul looking for a 'correlative' skeleton of
thought to be provided by a philosopher, a
Cartesian ghost trying to find a machine that
will fit."
Ralph Waldo Emerson on "vacant and vain" knowledge:
"The new position of the advancing man has all
the powers of the old, yet has them all new. It
carries in its bosom all the energies of the past,
yet is itself an exhalation of the morning. I cast
away in this new moment all my once hoarded
knowledge, as vacant and vain."
Harold Bloom on Emerson:
"Emerson may not have invented the American
Sublime, yet he took eternal possession of it."
Wallace Stevens on the American Sublime:
"And the sublime comes down
To the spirit itself,
The spirit and space,
The empty spirit
In vacant space."
A founding member of the Metaphysical Club:
See also the eightfold cube.
(Continued … See the title in this journal, as well as Cube Bricks.)
Cube Bricks 1984 —
Related material —
Dirac and Geometry in this journal,
Kummer's Quartic Surface in this journal,
Nanavira Thera in this journal, and
The Razor's Edge and Nanavira Thera.
See as well Bill Murray's 1984 film "The Razor's Edge" …
Movie poster from 1984 —
"A thin line separates
love from hate,
success from failure,
life from death."
Three other dualities, from Nanavira Thera in 1959 —
"I find that there are, in every situation,
three independent dualities…."
(Click to enlarge.)
“The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church
is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare to-morrow
at breakfast.”
— G. K. Chesterton
Or Sunday dinner.
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Platonic |
Shakespearean |
| Not to mention Euclid and Picasso. | |
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In the above pictures, Euclid is represented by |
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For the director of "Interstellar" and "Inception" —
At the core of the 4x4x4 cube is …
Cover modified.
Click the above image for remarks on
"deep structure" and binary opposition.
See also the eightfold cube.
Recommended reading —
"When Analogies Fail," by Alexander Stern,
a doctoral candidate in philosophy at Notre Dame, in
The Chronicle of Higher Education online September 11, 2016.
Related material —
That same Alexander Stern in this journal on April 17, 2016:
See also the eightfold cube in the previous post,
Metaphysics at Scientific American:
Yesterday's post The Eightfold Cube in Oslo suggests a review of
posts that mention The Lost Crucible.
(The crucible in question is from a book by Katherine Neville,
The Eight . Any connection with Arthur Miller's play "The Crucible"
is purely coincidental.)
See a search for the title in this journal.
Related material:
The incarnation of three permutations,
named A, B, and C,
on the 7-set of digits {1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7}
as permutations on the eightfold cube.
See Minimal ABC Art, a post of August 22, 2016.
Compare and contrast Peirce's seven systems of metaphysics with
the seven projective points in a post of March 1, 2010 —
From my commentary on Carter's question —
The reference in the previous post to the work of Guitart and
The Road to Universal Logic suggests a fiction involving
the symmetric generation of the simple group of order 168.
See The Diamond Archetype and a fictional account of the road to Hell …
The cover illustration below has been adapted to
replace the flames of PyrE with the eightfold cube.
For related symmetric generation of a much larger group, see Solomon's Cube.
A recent post about the eightfold cube suggests a review of two
April 8, 2015, posts on what Northrop Frye called the ogdoad :
As noted on April 8, each 2×4 "brick" in the 1974 Miracle Octad Generator
of R. T. Curtis may be constructed by folding a 1×8 array from Turyn's
1967 construction of the Golay code.
Folding a 2×4 Curtis array yet again yields the 2x2x2 eightfold cube .
Those who prefer an entertainment approach to concepts of space
may enjoy a video (embedded yesterday in a story on theverge.com) —
"Ghost in the Shell: Identity in Space."
The New York Times philosophy column yesterday —
The Times's philosophy column "The Stone" is named after the legendary
"philosophers' stone." The column's name, and the title of its essay yesterday
"Is that even a thing?" suggest a review of the eightfold cube as "The object
most closely resembling a 'philosophers' stone' that I know of" (Page 51 of
the current issue of a Norwegian art quarterly, KUNSTforum.as).
The eightfold cube —
|
Definition of Epiphany
From James Joyce’s Stephen Hero , first published posthumously in 1944. The excerpt below is from a version edited by John J. Slocum and Herbert Cahoon (New York: New Directions Press, 1959). Three Times: … By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments. He told Cranly that the clock of the Ballast Office was capable of an epiphany. Cranly questioned the inscrutable dial of the Ballast Office with his no less inscrutable countenance: — Yes, said Stephen. I will pass it time after time, allude to it, refer to it, catch a glimpse of it. It is only an item in the catalogue of Dublin’s street furniture. Then all at once I see it and I know at once what it is: epiphany. — What? — Imagine my glimpses at that clock as the gropings of a spiritual eye which seeks to adjust its vision to an exact focus. The moment the focus is reached the object is epiphanised. It is just in this epiphany that I find the third, the supreme quality of beauty. — Yes? said Cranly absently. — No esthetic theory, pursued Stephen relentlessly, is of any value which investigates with the aid of the lantern of tradition. What we symbolise in black the Chinaman may symbolise in yellow: each has his own tradition. Greek beauty laughs at Coptic beauty and the American Indian derides them both. It is almost impossible to reconcile all tradition whereas it is by no means impossible to find the justification of every form of beauty which has ever been adored on the earth by an examination into the mechanism of esthetic apprehension whether it be dressed in red, white, yellow or black. We have no reason for thinking that the Chinaman has a different system of digestion from that which we have though our diets are quite dissimilar. The apprehensive faculty must be scrutinised in action. — Yes … — You know what Aquinas says: The three things requisite for beauty are, integrity, a wholeness, symmetry and radiance. Some day I will expand that sentence into a treatise. Consider the performance of your own mind when confronted with any object, hypothetically beautiful. Your mind to apprehend that object divides the entire universe into two parts, the object, and the void which is not the object. To apprehend it you must lift it away from everything else: and then you perceive that it is one integral thing, that is a thing. You recognise its integrity. Isn’t that so? — And then? — That is the first quality of beauty: it is declared in a simple sudden synthesis of the faculty which apprehends. What then? Analysis then. The mind considers the object in whole and in part, in relation to itself and to other objects, examines the balance of its parts, contemplates the form of the object, traverses every cranny of the structure. So the mind receives the impression of the symmetry of the object. The mind recognises that the object is in the strict sense of the word, a thing , a definitely constituted entity. You see? — Let us turn back, said Cranly. They had reached the corner of Grafton St and as the footpath was overcrowded they turned back northwards. Cranly had an inclination to watch the antics of a drunkard who had been ejected from a bar in Suffolk St but Stephen took his arm summarily and led him away. — Now for the third quality. For a long time I couldn’t make out what Aquinas meant. He uses a figurative word (a very unusual thing for him) but I have solved it. Claritas is quidditas . After the analysis which discovers the second quality the mind makes the only logically possible synthesis and discovers the third quality. This is the moment which I call epiphany. First we recognise that the object is one integral thing, then we recognise that it is an organised composite structure, a thing in fact: finally, when the relation of the parts is exquisite, when the parts are adjusted to the special point, we recognise that it is that thing which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany. Having finished his argument Stephen walked on in silence. He felt Cranly’s hostility and he accused himself of having cheapened the eternal images of beauty. For the first time, too, he felt slightly awkward in his friend’s company and to restore a mood of flippant familiarity he glanced up at the clock of the Ballast Office and smiled: — It has not epiphanised yet, he said. |
A March 10, 2016, Facebook post from KUNSTforum.as,
a Norwegian art quarterly —
Click image above for a view of pages 50-51 of a new KUNSTforum
article showing two photos relevant to my own work — those labeled
"after S. H. Cullinane."
(The phrase "den pensjonerte Oxford-professoren Stephen H. Cullinane"
on page 51 is almost completely wrong. I have never been a professor,
I was never at Oxford, and my first name is Steven, not Stephen.)
For some background on the 15 projective points at the lower left of
the above March 10 Facebook post, see "The Smallest Projective Space."
From an article* in Proceedings of Bridges 2014 —
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As artists, we are particularly interested in the symmetries of real world physical objects. Three natural questions arise: 1. Which groups can be represented as the group of symmetries of some real-world physical object? 2. Which groups have actually been represented as the group of symmetries of some real-world physical object? 3. Are there any glaring gaps – small, beautiful groups that should have a physical representation in a symmetric object but up until now have not? |
The article was cited by Evelyn Lamb in her Scientific American
weblog on May 19, 2014.
The above three questions from the article are relevant to a more
recent (Oct. 24, 2015) remark by Lamb:
"… finite projective planes [in particular, the 7-point Fano plane,
about which Lamb is writing] seem like a triumph of purely
axiomatic thinking over any hint of reality…."
For related hints of reality, see Eightfold Cube in this journal.
* "The Quaternion Group as a Symmetry Group," by Vi Hart and Henry Segerman
"… if your requirement for success is to be like Steve Jobs,
good luck to you."
— "Transformation at Yahoo Foiled by Marissa Mayer’s
Inability to Bet the Farm," New York Times online yesterday
"Design is how it works." — Steve Jobs
Related material: Posts tagged Ambassadors.
"… the A B C of being…." — Wallace Stevens
Scholia —
Compare to my own later note, from March 4, 2010 —
"It seems that Guitart discovered these 'A, B, C' generators first,
though he did not display them in their natural setting,
the eightfold cube." — Borromean Generators (Log24, Oct. 19)
See also Raiders of the Lost Crucible (Halloween 2015)
and "Guitar Solo" from the 2015 CMA Awards on ABC.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
on the date Friday, April 5, 2013 —
"First published Tue Sep 24, 1996;
substantive revision Fri Apr 5, 2013"
This journal on the date Friday, April 5, 2013 —
The object most closely resembling a "philosophers' stone"
that I know of is the eightfold cube .
For some related philosophical remarks that may appeal
to a general Internet audience, see (for instance) a website
by I Ching enthusiast Andreas Schöter that displays a labeled
eightfold cube in the form of a lattice diagram —
Related material by Schöter —
A 20-page PDF, "Boolean Algebra and the Yi Jing."
(First published in The Oracle: The Journal of Yijing Studies ,
Vol 2, No 7, Summer 1998, pp. 19–34.)
I differ with Schöter's emphasis on Boolean algebra.
The appropriate mathematics for I Ching studies is,
I maintain, not Boolean algebra but rather Galois geometry.
See last Saturday's post Two Views of Finite Space.
Unfortunately, that post is, unlike Schöter's work, not
suitable for a general Internet audience.
This post continues recent thoughts on the work of René Guitart.
A 2014 article by Guitart gives a great deal of detail on his
approach to symmetric generation of the simple group of order 168 —
"Hexagonal Logic of the Field F8 as a Boolean Logic
with Three Involutive Modalities," pp. 191-220 in
The Road to Universal Logic:
Festschrift for 50th Birthday of
Jean-Yves Béziau, Volume I,
Editors: Arnold Koslow, Arthur Buchsbaum,
Birkhäuser Studies in Universal Logic, dated 2015
by publisher but Oct. 11, 2014, by Amazon.com.
See also the eightfold cube in this journal.
From slides dated June 28, 2008 —
Compare to my own later note, from March 4, 2010 —
It seems that Guitart discovered these "A, B, C" generators first,
though he did not display them in their natural setting,
the eightfold cube.
Some context: The epigraph to my webpage
"A Simple Reflection Group of Order 168" —
"Let G be a finite, primitive subgroup of GL(V) = GL(n,D) ,
where V is an n-dimensional vector space over the
division ring D . Assume that G is generated by 'nice'
transformations. The problem is then to try to determine
(up to GL(V) -conjugacy) all possibilities for G . Of course,
this problem is very vague. But it is a classical one,
going back 150 years, and yet very much alive today."
— William M. Kantor, "Generation of Linear Groups,"
pp. 497-509 in The Geometric Vein: The Coxeter Festschrift ,
published by Springer, 1981
Norwegian Sculpture Biennial 2015 catalog, p. 70 —
" 'Ambassadørene' er fysiske former som presenterer
ikk-fysiske fenomener. "
Translation by Google —
" 'Ambassadors' physical forms presents
nonphysical phenomena. "
Related definition —
Are the "line diagrams" of the diamond theorem and
the analogous "plane diagrams" of the eightfold cube
nonphysical entities? Discuss.
The Fano Plane —
"A balanced incomplete block design , or BIBD
with parameters b , v , r , k , and λ is an arrangement
of b blocks, taken from a set of v objects (known
for historical reasons as varieties ), such that every
variety appears in exactly r blocks, every block
contains exactly k varieties, and every pair of
varieties appears together in exactly λ blocks.
Such an arrangement is also called a
(b , v , r , k , λ ) design. Thus, (7, 3, 1) [the Fano plane]
is a (7, 7, 3, 3, 1) design."
— Ezra Brown, "The Many Names of (7, 3, 1),"
Mathematics Magazine , Vol. 75, No. 2, April 2002
W. Cherowitzo uses the notation (v, b, r, k, λ) instead of
Brown's (b , v , r , k , λ ). Cherowitzo has described,
without mentioning its close connection with the
Fano-plane design, the following —
"the (8,14,7,4,3)-design on the set
X = {1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8} with blocks:
{1,3,7,8} {1,2,4,8} {2,3,5,8} {3,4,6,8} {4,5,7,8}
{1,5,6,8} {2,6,7,8} {1,2,3,6} {1,2,5,7} {1,3,4,5}
{1,4,6,7} {2,3,4,7} {2,4,5,6} {3,5,6,7}."
We can arrange these 14 blocks in complementary pairs:
{1,2,3,6} {4,5,7,8}
{1,2,4,8} {3,5,6,7}
{1,2,5,7} {3,4,6,8}
{1,3,4,5} {2,6,7,8}
{1,3,7,8} {2,4,5,6}
{1,4,6,7} {2,3,5,8}
{1,5,6,8} {2,3,4,7}.
These pairs correspond to the seven natural slicings
of the following eightfold cube —
Another representation of these seven natural slicings —
These seven slicings represent the seven
planes through the origin in the vector
3-space over the two-element field GF(2).
In a standard construction, these seven
planes provide one way of defining the
seven projective lines of the Fano plane.
A more colorful illustration —
"It is as if one were to condense
all trends of present day mathematics
onto a single finite structure…."
— Gian-Carlo Rota, foreword to
A Source Book in Matroid Theory ,
Joseph P.S. Kung, Birkhäuser, 1986
"There is such a thing as a matroid."
— Saying adapted from a novel by Madeleine L'Engle
Related remarks from Mathematics Magazine in 2009 —
See also the eightfold cube —
.
Omega is a Greek letter, Ω , used in mathematics to denote
a set on which a group acts.
For instance, the affine group AGL(3,2) is a group of 1,344
actions on the eight elements of the vector 3-space over the
two-element Galois field GF(2), or, if you prefer, on the Galois
field Ω = GF(8).
Related fiction: The Eight , by Katherine Neville.
Related non-fiction: A remark by Werner Heisenberg
in this journal on Saturday, June 6, 2015, the eightfold cube ,
and the illustrations below —
|
Mathematics
The Fano plane block design |
Magic
The Deathly Hallows symbol— |
… industrial designer Kenji Ekuan —
The adjective "eightfold," intrinsic to Buddhist
thought, was hijacked by Gell-Mann and later
by the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute
(MSRI, pronounced "misery"). The adjective's
application to a 2x2x2 cube consisting of eight
subcubes, "the eightfold cube," is not intended to
have either Buddhist or Semitic overtones.
It is pure mathematics.
The seven symmetry axes of the regular tetrahedron
are of two types: vertex-to-face and edge-to-edge.
Take these axes as the "points" of a Fano plane.
Each of the tetrahedron's six reflection planes contains
two vertex-to-face axes and one edge-to-edge axis.
Take these six planes as six of the "lines" of a Fano
plane. Then the seventh line is the set of three
edge-to-edge axes.
(The Fano tetrahedron is not original with me.
See Polster's 1998 A Geometrical Picture Book , pp. 16-17.)
There are three reflection planes parallel to faces
of the cube. Take the seven nonempty subsets of
the set of these three planes as the "points" of a
Fano plane. Define the Fano "lines" as those triples
of these seven subsets in which each member of
the triple is the symmetric-difference sum of the
other two members.
(This is the eightfold cube discussed at finitegeometry.org.)
Tom Hanks as Indiana Langdon in Raiders of the Lost Articulation :
An unarticulated (but colored) cube:
A 2x2x2 articulated cube:
A 4x4x4 articulated cube built from subcubes like
the one viewed by Tom Hanks above:
An image related to the recent posts Sense and Sensibility:
A quote from yesterday's post The Eight:
A possible source for the above phrase about phenomena "carved at their joints":
See also the carving at the joints of Plato's diamond from the Meno :
Related material: Phaedrus on Kant as a diamond cutter
in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance .
"Die Unendlichkeit ist die uranfängliche Tatsache: es wäre nur
zu erklären, woher das Endliche stamme…."
— Friedrich Nietzsche, Das Philosophenbuch/Le livre du philosophe
(Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1969), fragment 120, p. 118
Cited as above, and translated as "Infinity is the original fact;
what has to be explained is the source of the finite…." in
The Production of Space , by Henri Lefebvre. (Oxford: Blackwell,
1991 (1974)), p. 181.
This quotation was suggested by the Bauhaus-related phrase
"the laws of cubical space" (see yesterday's Schau der Gestalt )
and by the laws of cubical space discussed in the webpage
Cube Space, 1984-2003.
For a less rigorous approach to space at the Harvard Graduate
School of Design, see earlier references to Lefebvre in this journal.
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