Log24

Saturday, January 24, 2026

Eightfold Cube AI Overview

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:41 pm

From the current New Yorker,
a link for Katherine Neville —

https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a25783 .

Sunday, September 4, 2022

Dice and the Eightfold Cube

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , , — m759 @ 4:47 pm

At Hiroshima on March 9, 2018, Aitchison discussed another
"hexagonal array" with two added points… not at the center, as
in the Gell-Mann picture above, but rather at the ends  of one of
a cube's four diagonal axes of symmetry.

See some related illustrations below. 

Fans of the fictional "Transfiguration College" in the play
"Heroes of the Fourth Turning" may recall that August 6,
another Hiroshima date, was the Feast of the Transfiguration.

Iain Aitchison's 'dice-labelled' cuboctahedron at Hiroshima, March 2018

The exceptional role of  0 and  in Aitchison's diagram is echoed
by the occurence of these symbols in the "knight" labeling of a 
Miracle Octad Generator octad —

Transposition of  0 and  in the knight coordinatization 
induces the symplectic polarity of PG(3,2) discussed by 
(for instance) Anne Duncan in 1968.

Sunday, December 22, 2019

M24 from the Eightfold Cube

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.

Tuesday, March 5, 2019

The Eightfold Cube and PSL(2,7)

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 10:45 pm

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) —

Why PSL(2,7) is isomorphic to GL(3.2)

For a more detailed proof, see . . .

Sunday, September 30, 2018

Iconology of the Eightfold Cube

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:13 am

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 ) —

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.

Monday, July 23, 2018

Eightfold Cube for Furey*

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 10:31 pm

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

Friday, June 29, 2018

Triangles in the Eightfold Cube

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

Friday, January 6, 2017

Eightfold Cube at Cornell

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 7:35 pm

The assignments page for a graduate algebra course at Cornell
last fall had a link to the eightfold cube:

Tuesday, August 30, 2016

The Eightfold Cube in Oslo

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 8:04 pm

A KUNSTforum.as article online today (translation by Google) —

The eightfold cube at the Vigeland Museum in Oslo

Update of Sept. 7, 2016: The corrections have been made,
except for the misspelling "Cullinan," which was caused by 
Google translation, not by KUNSTforum.

Thursday, March 17, 2016

On the Eightfold Cube

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

The following page quotes "Raiders of the Lost Crucible,"
a Log24 post from Halloween 2015.

Discussion of Cullinane's eightfold cube as exhibited by Josefine Lyche at the Vigeland Museum in Oslo

From KUNSTforum.as, a Norwegian art quarterly, issue no. 1 of 2016.

Related posts — See Lyche Eightfold.

Friday, October 9, 2015

Eightfold Cube in Oslo

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 2:00 pm

An eightfold cube appears in this detail 
of a photo by Josefine Lyche of her
installation "4D Ambassador" at the 
Norwegian Sculpture Biennial 2015

Sculpture by Josefine Lyche of Cullinane's eightfold cube at Vigeland Museum in Oslo

(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.

Monday, April 9, 2012

Eightfold Cube Revisited

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

A search today (Élie Cartan's birthday) for material related to triality*

Dynkin diagram D4 for 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.

Monday, December 29, 2025

Octad Art — Bricks, Cubes, Flowers

For the bricks of the title, see other posts tagged Brick Space
For some cubes* and flowers, see below.

Combining features of the above two images, one might picture the 24
cells of the 4×6 array underlying the Curtis Miracle Octad Generator
(MOG) as each containing an eightfold cube, pictured as above with seven
of its subcubes showing and an eighth subcube hidden behind them.

The seven visible subcubes may be colored, as in the Curtis image of
the Klein map, with seven distinct colors… corresponding to the seven
edge-colors used in the Curtis-Klein map. Each of the seven visible
subcubes in a cell may also be labeled, on its visible faces, with a symbol
denoting one of the 24 points of the projective line over GF(23), just as the
faces in the Curtis-Klein map are labeled.  The hidden subcube in each cell
may be regarded as also so labeled, by the MOG label of the cell's position.

There is then enough information in the array's eightfold cubes' colors and
labels to construct the seven generating permutations of M24 described by
Curtis, and the 24 array cells may be regarded as now containing 24 distinct
entities — which perhaps might be called "octoids."

Those desiring a more decorative approach may replace the 24 labeled cubes
with 24 labeled "flowers." Each flower — like the map's symmetric seven
"petals" and the central "infinity heptagon" they surround — forms an octad.

Related Illustrations . . .

* See as well posts tagged Mathieu Cube . . .

Related material — 

The 56 triangles of  the eightfold cube . . .

The Eightfold Cube: The Beauty of Klein's Simple Group

   Image from Christmas Day 2005.

Post last revised:  December 30, 2025 @ 21:30 E.S.T.

Wednesday, August 6, 2025

Cubes

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:33 am

From a post on the Feast of St. Nicholas, 2018, 
"The Mathieu Cube of Iain Aitchison" —

The Eightfold Cube: The Beauty of Klein's Simple Group

Compare and contrast . . .

The Supercube  of Solomon Golomb.

Thursday, April 24, 2025

Uniting the Three Cubes

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:36 am

Note that the number 8, a cube, may be represented as
either a literal "eightfold cube" — a 2x2x2 array — or as,
in the manner of R. T. Curtis, a 4-row 2-column "brick."

Related art . . .

Some will prefer a more dramatic approach to uniting three cubes . . .

Saturday, November 12, 2022

Inside a White Cube

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:09 pm

For the late Brian O'Doherty, from posts now tagged "Pless Birthday 2022" —

A Mathieu Puzzle: 24 Diamond Facets of the Eightfold Cube

This post was suggested by an obituary of O'Doherty and by
"The Life and Work of Vera Stepen Pless" in
Notices of the American Mathematical Society , December 2022.

Wednesday, March 9, 2022

Supercube Space

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:31 am

The new URL supercube.space forwards to http://box759.wordpress.com/.

The term supercube  is from a 1982 article by Solomon W. Golomb.

The related new URL supercube.group forwards to a page that
describes how the 2x2x2 (or eightfold, or "super") cube's natural
underlying automorphism group is Klein's simple group of order 168.

For further context, see the new URL supercube.art.

For some background, see the phrase Cube Space in this journal. 

Monday, March 7, 2022

Saturday, February 5, 2022

Mathieu Cube Labeling

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , , — m759 @ 2:08 pm

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

Exercise:  Using the above numerals 1 through 24
(with 23 as 0 and 24 as ∞) to represent the points 
, 0, 1, 2, 3 … 22  of the projective line over GF(23),
reposition the labels 1 through 24 in the above illustration
so that they appropriately* illustrate the cube-parts discussed
by Iain Aitchison in his March 2018 Hiroshima slides on 
cube-part permutations by the Mathieu group M24

A note for Northrop Frye —

Interpenetration in the eightfold cube — the three midplanes —

IMAGE- The Trinity Cube (three interpenetrating planes that split the eightfold cube into its eight subcubes)

A deeper example of interpenetration:

Aitchison has shown that the Mathieu group M24 has a natural
action on the 24 center points of the subsquares on the eightfold
cube's six faces (four such points on each of the six faces). Thus
the 759 octads of the Steiner system S(5, 8, 24) interpenetrate
on the surface of the cube.

* "Appropriately" — I.e. , so that the Aitchison cube octads correspond
exactly, via the projective-point labels, to the Curtis MOG octads.

Saturday, May 23, 2020

Eightfold Geometry: A Surface Code “Unit Cell”

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 1:50 am

A unit cell in 'a lattice geometry for a surface code'

The resemblance to the eightfold cube  is, of course,
completely coincidental.

Some background from the literature —

Sunday, March 22, 2020

Eightfold Site

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:00 am

A brief summary of the eightfold cube is now at octad.us.

Saturday, May 4, 2019

Inside the White Cube

Structure of the eightfold cube

See also Espacement  and The Thing and I.

Thursday, December 6, 2018

The Mathieu Cube of Iain Aitchison

This journal ten years ago today —

Surprise Package

Santa and a cube
From a talk by a Melbourne mathematician on March 9, 2018 —

The Mathieu group cube of Iain Aitchison (2018, Hiroshima)

The source — Talk II below —

Search Results

pdf of talk I  (March 8, 2018)

www.math.sci.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/branched/…/Aitchison-Hiroshima-2018-Talk1-2.pdf

Iain Aitchison. Hiroshima  University March 2018 … Immediate: Talk given last year at Hiroshima  (originally Caltech 2010).

pdf of talk II  (March 9, 2018)  (with model for M24)

www.math.sci.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/branched/files/…/Aitchison-Hiroshima-2-2018.pdf

Iain Aitchison. Hiroshima  University March 2018. (IRA: Hiroshima  03-2018). Highly symmetric objects II.

Abstract

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

Iain AITCHISON  Title: Construction of highly symmetric Riemann surfaces , related manifolds, and some exceptional objects, I, II Abstract: Since antiquity, some …

Related material — 

The 56 triangles of  the eightfold cube . . .

The Eightfold Cube: The Beauty of Klein's Simple Group

   Image from Christmas Day 2005.

Thursday, November 29, 2018

The White Cube

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — m759 @ 9:57 am

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 .

Thursday, May 31, 2018

Eightfold Suffering:

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 9:23 pm

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

Myspace China.

Wednesday, January 17, 2018

“Before Time Began, There Was the Cube”

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

See Eightfold Froebel.

The Paradise of Childhood'-- Froebel's Third Gift

Saturday, November 18, 2017

Cube Space Continued

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 4:44 am

James Propp in the current Math Horizons  on the eightfold cube

James Propp on the eightfold cube

For another puerile approach to the eightfold cube,
see Cube Space, 1984-2003 (Oct. 24, 2008).

Tuesday, August 8, 2017

Cube Quaternions

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 9:36 am

See posts now tagged with the above title.

IMAGE- Quaternion group acting on an eightfold cube

Monday, April 4, 2016

Cube for Berlin

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 —

The Eightfold 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

An Approach to Symmetric Generation of the Simple Group of Order 168

Related remark from the literature —

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/110918-Felsner.jpg

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.)

Friday, December 30, 2011

Quaternions on a Cube

The following picture provides a new visual approach to
the order-8 quaternion  group's automorphisms.

IMAGE- Quaternion group acting on an eightfold cube

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—

Froebel's third gift, the eightfold cube
© 2005 The Institute for Figuring

Photo by Norman Brosterman
fom the Inventing Kindergarten
exhibit at The Institute for Figuring
(co-founded by Margaret Wertheim)

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