See Eightfold Froebel.
Wednesday, January 17, 2018
Saturday, May 4, 2024
What Lies Between
"I perceived . . . cinema is that which is between things,
not things [themselves] but between one and another."
— Jean-Luc Godard, "Introduction à une véritable histoire
du cinéma," Albatros , Paris, 1980, p. 145
|
Log24 on 10 Dec. 2008 —
|
Log24 on 12 Dec. 2008 —
|
Between the two image-dates above . . .
" 'The jury is still out on how long – and whether – people are actually
going to understand this.' It took the world 150 years to realize
the true power of the printing press . . . ." — Cade Metz
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Monday, December 26, 2022
Super-8 Box
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Monday, October 7, 2019
Berlekamp Garden vs. Kinder Garten
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 —
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Tuesday, January 1, 2019
Child’s Play Continues — La Despedida
This post was suggested by the phrase "Froebel Decade" from
the search results below.
This journal a decade ago had a post on the late Donald Westlake,
an author who reportedly died of a heart attack in Mexico on Dec. 31,
2008, while on his way to a New Year's Eve dinner.
One of Westlake's books —
Related material —
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Wednesday, June 6, 2018
Geometry for Goyim
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 .
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Friday, January 5, 2018
Seven Types of Interality*
* 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.
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Tuesday, April 1, 2014
Kindergarten Geometry
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Wednesday, February 5, 2014
Mystery Box II
Continued from previous post and from Sept. 8, 2009.
Examination of the box's contents does not solve
the contents' real mystery. That requires knowledge
of the non-Euclidean geometry of Galois space.
In this case, without that knowledge, prattle (as in
today's online New York Times ) about creativity and
"thinking outside the box" is pointless.
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Friday, June 14, 2013
Object of Beauty
This journal on July 5, 2007 —
“It is not clear why MySpace China will be successful."
— The Chinese magazine Caijing in 2007, quoted in
Asia Sentinel on July 12, 2011
This journal on that same date, July 12, 2011 —
See also the eightfold cube and kindergarten blocks
at finitegeometry.org/sc.
Friedrich Froebel, Froebel's Chief Writings on Education ,
Part II, "The Kindergarten," Ch. III, "The Third Play":
"The little ones, who always long for novelty and change,
love this simple plaything in its unvarying form and in its
constant number, even as they love their fairy tales with
the ever-recurring dwarfs…."
This journal, Group Actions, Nov. 14, 2012:
"Those who insist on vulgarizing their mathematics
may regard linear and affine group actions on the eight
cubes as the dance of Snow White (representing (0,0,0))
and the Seven Dwarfs—
."
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Tuesday, March 26, 2013
Blockheads
"It should be emphasized that block models are physical models, the elements of which can be physically manipulated. Their manipulation differs in obvious and fundamental ways from the manipulation of symbols in formal axiomatic systems and in mathematics. For example the transformations described above, in which two linear arrays are joined together to form one array, or a rectangle of blocks is re-assembled into a linear array, are physical transformations not symbolic transformations. …"
— Storrs McCall, Department of Philosophy, McGill University, "The Consistency of Arithmetic"
"It should be emphasized…."
OK:
Storrs McCall at a 2008 philosophy conference .
His blocks talk was at 2:50 PM July 21, 2008.
See also this journal at noon that same day:
Froebel's Third Gift and the Eightfold Cube
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Wednesday, November 14, 2012
Group Actions
The December 2012 Notices of the American
Mathematical Society has an ad on page 1564
(in a review of two books on vulgarized mathematics)
for three workshops next year on “Low-dimensional
Topology, Geometry, and Dynamics”—
(Only the top part of the ad is shown; for further details
see an ICERM page.)
(ICERM stands for Institute for Computational
and Experimental Research in Mathematics.)
The ICERM logo displays seven subcubes of
a 2x2x2 eight-cube array with one cube missing—
The logo, apparently a stylized image of the architecture
of the Providence building housing ICERM, is not unlike
a picture of Froebel’s Third Gift—
© 2005 The Institute for Figuring
Photo by Norman Brosterman from the Inventing Kindergarten
exhibit at The Institute for Figuring (co-founded by Margaret Wertheim)
The eighth cube, missing in the ICERM logo and detached in the
Froebel Cubes photo, may be regarded as representing the origin
(0,0,0) in a coordinatized version of the 2x2x2 array—
in other words the cube invariant under linear , as opposed to
more general affine , permutations of the cubes in the array.
These cubes are not without relevance to the workshops’ topics—
low-dimensional exotic geometric structures, group theory, and dynamics.
See The Eightfold Cube, A Simple Reflection Group of Order 168, and
The Quaternion Group Acting on an Eightfold Cube.
Those who insist on vulgarizing their mathematics may regard linear
and affine group actions on the eight cubes as the dance of
Snow White (representing (0,0,0)) and the Seven Dwarfs—
.
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Friday, December 30, 2011
Quaternions on a 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…
- The 1985 note from which the above figures were drawn
- Visualizing GL(2,p)
- Quaternions in an Affine Galois Plane
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—
© 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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Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Tuesday September 8, 2009
Froebel's
Magic Box
Continued from Dec. 7, 2008,
and from yesterday.
|
Non-Euclidean
Blocks
Passages from a classic story:
… he took from his pocket a gadget he had found in the box, and began to unfold it. The result resembled a tesseract, strung with beads….  Tesseract
"Your mind has been conditioned to Euclid," Holloway said. "So this– thing– bores us, and seems pointless. But a child knows nothing of Euclid. A different sort of geometry from ours wouldn't impress him as being illogical. He believes what he sees."
"Are you trying to tell me that this gadget's got a fourth dimensional extension?" Paradine demanded. "Hardening of the thought-arteries," Jane interjected. Paradine was not convinced. "Then a baby could work calculus better than Einstein? No, I don't mean that. I can see your point, more or less clearly. Only–" "Well, look. Let's suppose there are two kinds of geometry– we'll limit it, for the sake of the example. Our kind, Euclidean, and another, which we'll call x. X hasn't much relationship to Euclid. It's based on different theorems. Two and two needn't equal four in it; they could equal y, or they might not even equal. A baby's mind is not yet conditioned, except by certain questionable factors of heredity and environment. Start the infant on Euclid–" "Poor kid," Jane said. Holloway shot her a quick glance. "The basis of Euclid. Alphabet blocks. Math, geometry, algebra– they come much later. We're familiar with that development. On the other hand, start the baby with the basic principles of our x logic–" "Blocks? What kind?" Holloway looked at the abacus. "It wouldn't make much sense to us. But we've been conditioned to Euclid." — "Mimsy Were the Borogoves," Lewis Padgett, 1943 |
Padgett (pseudonym of a husband-and-wife writing team) says that alphabet blocks are the intuitive "basis of Euclid." Au contraire; they are the basis of Gutenberg.
For the intuitive basis of one type of non-Euclidean* geometry– finite geometry over the two-element Galois field– see the work of…
Friedrich Froebel
(1782-1852), who
invented kindergarten.
His "third gift" —
© 2005 The Institute for Figuring
Photo by Norman Brosterman
fom the Inventing Kindergarten
exhibit at The Institute for Figuring
fom the Inventing Kindergarten
exhibit at The Institute for Figuring
* i.e., other than Euclidean
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Friday, April 10, 2009
Friday April 10, 2009
Pilate Goes
to Kindergarten
“There is a pleasantly discursive
treatment of Pontius Pilate’s
unanswered question
‘What is truth?’.”
— H. S. M. Coxeter, 1987,
introduction to Trudeau’s
remarks on the “Story Theory“
of truth as opposed to the
“Diamond Theory” of truth in
The Non-Euclidean Revolution
Consider the following question in a paper cited by V. S. Varadarajan:
E. G. Beltrametti, “Can a finite geometry describe physical space-time?” Universita degli studi di Perugia, Atti del convegno di geometria combinatoria e sue applicazioni, Perugia 1971, 57–62.
Simplifying:
“Can a finite geometry describe physical space?”
Simplifying further:
“Yes. Vide ‘The Eightfold Cube.'”
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Thursday, February 5, 2009
Thursday February 5, 2009
Through the
Looking Glass:
A Sort of Eternity
From the new president’s inaugural address:
“… in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things.”
The words of Scripture:
“through a glass”—
[di’ esoptrou].
By means of
a mirror [esoptron].
Childish things:
© 2005 The Institute for Figuring
Photo by Norman Brosterman
fom the Inventing Kindergarten
exhibit at The Institute for Figuring
(co-founded by Margaret Wertheim)
fom the Inventing Kindergarten
exhibit at The Institute for Figuring
(co-founded by Margaret Wertheim)
Not-so-childish:
Three planes through
the center of a cube
that split it into
eight subcubes:
Through a glass, darkly:
A group of 8 transformations is
generated by affine reflections
in the above three planes.
Shown below is a pattern on
the faces of the 2x2x2 cube
that is symmetric under one of
these 8 transformations–
a 180-degree rotation:
(Click on image
for further details.)
But then face to face:
A larger group of 1344,
rather than 8, transformations
of the 2x2x2 cube
is generated by a different
sort of affine reflections– not
in the infinite Euclidean 3-space
over the field of real numbers,
but rather in the finite Galois
3-space over the 2-element field.
Galois age fifteen,
drawn by a classmate.
These transformations
in the Galois space with
finitely many points
produce a set of 168 patterns
like the one above.
For each such pattern,
at least one nontrivial
transformation in the group of 8
described above is a symmetry
in the Euclidean space with
infinitely many points.
For some generalizations,
see Galois Geometry.
Related material:
The central aim of Western religion–
"Each of us has something to offer the Creator... the bridging of masculine and feminine, life and death. It's redemption.... nothing else matters." -- Martha Cooley in The Archivist (1998) The central aim of Western philosophy– Dualities of Pythagoras as reconstructed by Aristotle: Limited Unlimited Odd Even Male Female Light Dark Straight Curved ... and so on .... “Of these dualities, the first is the most important; all the others may be seen as different aspects of this fundamental dichotomy. To establish a rational and consistent relationship between the limited [man, etc.] and the unlimited [the cosmos, etc.] is… the central aim of all Western philosophy.” — Jamie James in The Music of the Spheres (1993) “In the garden of Adding — The Midrash Jazz Quartet in City of God, by E. L. Doctorow (2000) A quotation today at art critic Carol Kino’s website, slightly expanded: “Art inherited from the old religion — Octavio Paz,”Seeing and Using: Art and Craftsmanship,” in Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1987), 52 From Brian O’Doherty’s 1976 Artforum essays– not on museums, but rather on gallery space: “We have now reached
“Space: what you — James Joyce, Ulysses |
Comments Off on Thursday February 5, 2009
Friday, December 19, 2008
Friday December 19, 2008
Inside the
White Cube
White Cube
Part I: The White Cube
Part II: Inside
Part III: Outside
For remarks on religion
related to the above, see
Log24 on the Garden of Eden
and also Mark C. Taylor,
"What Derrida Really Meant"
(New York Times, Oct. 14, 2004).
For some background on Taylor,
see Wikipedia. Taylor, Chairman
of the Department of Religion at
Columbia University, has a
1973 doctorate in religion from
Harvard University. His opinion
of Derrida indicates that his
sympathies lie more with
the serpent than with the angel
in the Tansey picture above.
For some remarks by Taylor on
the art of Tansey relevant to the
structure of the white cube
(Part I above), see Taylor's
The Picture in Question:
Mark Tansey and the
Ends of Representation
(U. of Chicago Press, 1999):
|
From Chapter 3,
"Sutures* of Structures," p. 58: "What, then, is a frame, and what is frame work? This question is deceptive in its simplicity. A frame is, of course, 'a basic skeletal structure designed to give shape or support' (American Heritage Dictionary)…. when the frame is in question, it is difficult to determine what is inside and what is outside. Rather than being on one side or the other, the frame is neither inside nor outside. Where, then, Derrida queries, 'does the frame take place….'" * P. 61:
|
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Friday, December 12, 2008
Friday December 12, 2008
On the Symmetric Group S8
Wikipedia on Rubik's 2×2×2 "Pocket Cube"–
"Any permutation of the 8 corner cubies is possible (8! positions)."
Some pages related to this claim–
Analyzing Rubik's Cube with GAP
Online JavaScript Pocket Cube.
The claim is of course trivially true for the unconnected subcubes of Froebel's Third Gift:
© 2005 The Institute for Figuring
Photo by Norman Brosterman
fom the Inventing Kindergarten
exhibit at The Institute for Figuring
(co-founded by Margaret Wertheim)
fom the Inventing Kindergarten
exhibit at The Institute for Figuring
(co-founded by Margaret Wertheim)
See also:
and
"Ad Reinhardt and Tony Smith:
A Dialogue,"
an exhibition opening today
at Pace Wildenstein.
For a different sort
of dialogue, click on the
artists' names above.
For a different
approach to S8,
see Symmetries.
"With humor, my dear Zilkov.
Always with a little humor."
-- The Manchurian Candidate
Comments Off on Friday December 12, 2008
Sunday, December 7, 2008
Sunday December 7, 2008
Space and
the Soul
the Soul
On a book by Margaret Wertheim:
“She traces the history of space beginning with the cosmology of Dante. Her journey continues through the historical foundations of celestial space, relativistic space, hyperspace, and, finally, cyberspace.” –Joe J. Accardi, Northeastern Illinois Univ. Lib., Chicago, in Library Journal, 1999 (quoted at Amazon.com)
There are also other sorts of space.
© 2005 The Institute for FiguringPhoto by Norman Brosterman
fom the Inventing Kindergarten
exhibit at The Institute for Figuring
(co-founded by Margaret Wertheim)
fom the Inventing Kindergarten
exhibit at The Institute for Figuring
(co-founded by Margaret Wertheim)
This photo may serve as an
introduction to a different
sort of space.
See The Eightfold Cube.
For the religious meaning
of this small space, see
Richard Wilhelm on
the eight I Ching trigrams.
the eight I Ching trigrams.
For a related larger space,
see the entry and links of
St. Augustine’s Day, 2006.
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Monday, July 21, 2008
Monday July 21, 2008
"Hmm, next paper… maybe
'An Unusually Complicated
Theory of Something.'"
Something:
From Friedrich Froebel,
who invented kindergarten:
Click on image for details.
An Unusually
Complicated Theory:
From Christmas 2005:
Click on image for details.
For the eightfold cube
as it relates to Klein's
simple group, see
"A Reflection Group
of Order 168."
For an even more
complicated theory of
Klein's simple group, see
Click on image for details.
Comments Off on Monday July 21, 2008
Saturday, May 10, 2008
Saturday May 10, 2008
MoMA Goes to
Kindergarten
Kindergarten
"… the startling thesis of Mr. Brosterman's new book, 'Inventing Kindergarten' (Harry N. Abrams, $39.95): that everything the giants of modern art and architecture knew about abstraction they learned in kindergarten, thanks to building blocks and other educational toys designed by Friedrich Froebel, a German educator, who coined the term 'kindergarten' in the 1830's."
— "Was Modernism Born
in Toddler Toolboxes?"
by Trip Gabriel, New York Times,
April 10, 1997
RELATED MATERIAL
Figure 1 —
Concept from 1819:
(Footnotes 1 and 2)
Figure 2 —
The Third Gift, 1837:
Froebel, the inventor of
kindergarten, worked as
an assistant to the
crystallographer Weiss
mentioned in Fig. 1.
(Footnote 3)
Figure 3 —
The Third Gift, 1906:
Figure 4 —
Solomon's Cube,
1981 and 1983:
Figure 5 —
Design Cube, 2006:
The above screenshot shows a
moveable JavaScript display
of a space of six dimensions
(over the two-element field).
(To see how the display works,
try the Kaleidoscope Puzzle first.)
For some mathematical background, see
Footnotes:
1. Image said to be after Holden and Morrison, Crystals and Crystal Growing, 1982
2. Curtis Schuh, "The Library: Biobibliography of Mineralogy," article on Mohs
3. Bart Kahr, "Crystal Engineering in Kindergarten" (pdf), Crystal Growth & Design, Vol. 4 No. 1, 2004, 3-9
2. Curtis Schuh, "The Library: Biobibliography of Mineralogy," article on Mohs
3. Bart Kahr, "Crystal Engineering in Kindergarten" (pdf), Crystal Growth & Design, Vol. 4 No. 1, 2004, 3-9
Comments Off on Saturday May 10, 2008
Monday, June 25, 2007
Monday June 25, 2007
Object Lesson
"… the best definition
I have for Satan
is that it is a real
spirit of unreality."
"… the best definition
I have for Satan
is that it is a real
spirit of unreality."
M. Scott Peck,
People of the Lie
|
"Far in the woods they sang their unreal songs, Secure. It was difficult to sing in face Of the object. The singers had to avert themselves Or else avert the object."
— Wallace Stevens, |
Today is June 25,
anniversary of the
birth in 1908 of
Willard Van Orman Quine.
Quine died on
Christmas Day, 2000.
Today, Quine's birthday, is,
as has been noted by
Quine's son, the point of the
calendar opposite Christmas–
i.e., "AntiChristmas."
If the Anti-Christ is,
as M. Scott Peck claims,
a spirit of unreality, it seems
fitting today to invoke
Quine, a student of reality,
and to borrow the title of
Quine's Word and Object…
Word:
An excerpt from
"Credences of Summer"
by Wallace Stevens:
|
"Three times the concentred self takes hold, three times The thrice concentred self, having possessed
The object, grips it
— "Credences of Summer," VII, |
Object:
From Friedrich Froebel,
who invented kindergarten:
From Christmas 2005:
Click on the images
for further details.
For a larger and
more sophisticaled
relative of this object,
see yesterday's entry
At Midsummer Noon.
The object is real,
not as a particular
physical object, but
in the way that a
mathematical object
is real — as a
pure Platonic form.
"It's all in Plato…."
— C. S. Lewis
Comments Off on Monday June 25, 2007
Saturday, April 7, 2007
Saturday April 7, 2007
Today's birthdays:
Francis Ford Coppola
and Russell Crowe
Francis Ford Coppola
and Russell Crowe
Gift of the Third Kind
Background:
Art Wars and
Russell Crowe as
Santa's Helper.
From Friedrich Froebel,
who invented kindergarten:
who invented kindergarten:
From Christmas 2005:
Related material from
Pittsburgh:
… and from Grand Rapids:
Click on pictures for details.
Related material
for Holy Saturday:
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