Related searches —

Enigmatic:

http://m759.net/wordpress/?s=170618

Circuitous:

http://m759.net/wordpress/?s="+271"

(Continued)

A Math Enigma —

Grothendieck reportedly died on Thursday, November 13, 2014.
From this  journal a year earlier:

A German Enigma —

After clicking on the link “a grave intellectual whole” from the Nov. 13, 2013, post
see also Benedict Cumberbatch’s less serious approach to Bletchley Park:

“I want to see this film; this film’s been up my ass for the last five years.”

Yesterday evening's Telegraph—

Didi Nearne was inspired by her strong Catholic faith
to believe that she would be well received, and the priest,
appalled at the state of the women, hid them in the bell tower.

In 1944 Nearne, an agent of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) who had
parachuted into France, was captured, interrogated and tortured by the Gestapo,
sent to a concentration camp, and later escaped.

She died at 89 on September 2, 2010. See this journal on that date.

See also Geheimnis des Glockenturms.

"… JoAnna Novak becomes obsessed with the enigmatic
abstract expressionist painter Agnes Martin. She is drawn to
the contradictions in Martin’s life as well as her art—the soft
and exacting brushstrokes she employs for grid-like compositions
that are both rigid and dreamy." 

See as well Agnes Martin in this  journal.

Data:

"The rockers said via their record label:

'It is with the deepest sadness that we must
announce the passing of the lyricist Keith Reid,
who died suddenly on 23 March 2023,
in hospital in London. He had been receiving
cancer treatment for the past couple of years.

Keith was the co-founder and lyricist for the band
Procol Harum, notably penning their biggest hit
A Whiter Shade of Pale, which contains some of
the most enigmatic lyrics of all time.' " 

— https://www.mirror.co.uk/3am/celebrity-news/
breaking-procol-harums-keith-reid-29586101

Metadata:

A note from Log24 on the above March 23 date —

The above Del Shannon upload date
was November 1, 2021 — All Saints' Day.

Synchronicity check —

Publisher's description of a book about everything —

"When the whole is greater than the sum of the parts—
indeed, so great that the sum far transcends the parts
and represents something utterly new and different—
we call that phenomenon emergence."

— Oxford University Press

Titles for Harlan Kane, from the date that
the above book's author reportedly died —

• The Toronto Problem
• The Barth Spielfeld
• The Zero Obit
• The Green Night.

The above title is intended to contrast with the title
of this evening's previous post,
Focus and Clarity in the New Year.

For the Blur and Murk, click on the screenshot below.

Alternate title: Enigma Variations …

Ode  magazine, June 2007, on Ivan Illich—

When Ivan was 12, Hitler invaded Austria, prompting his decision never to bring children into this world. At the age of 16, before fleeing Vienna, he bribed the secretary of Nazi leader Hermann Goering – who had claimed Illich's family home – to free his grandfather. Ultimately, Illich did do well in school, studying philosophy and theology at the elite Pontifical Gregorian University in the Vatican, later earning a Ph.D. at the University of Salzburg. He travelled to India and soaked up Eastern philosophy during long discussions with the Indian Hindu and Catholic priest Ramon Panikkar in Varanasi (Benares), along the Ganges river. He was later ordained as a Roman Catholic priest in New York City. He became a professor at the Catholic University of Puerto Rico and moved to Mexico, where he founded an educational centre that challenged the Church’s embrace of modern development. He resigned from priesthood in the late 1960s because he no longer felt at home with the dogmas of the Catholic Church – "I have enough Jewish blood to be able to get angry with God" – and began his life as a philosopher and author.

Illich greeted us at his home in Bremen….

Panikkar died on August 26, 2010. See this journal on that date ("Home from Home continued"), with its link to math16.com and the reference there to Stevens's "The Owl in the Sarcophagus."

Related material—

A Mystery Wrapped in an Enigma (letters to The Guardian  on Stephen Hawking's new book)
and Panikkar's book (published in Paris in 2002 and in Minneapolis, by a Lutheran press, in 2006)
The Experience of God: Icons of the Mystery.

Enigma Variations

The intercept control room in Hut 6 at Bletchley Park, 1943—

Photo: GETTY

The above photo is from today's London Telegraph  obituary of Keith Batey, a Bletchley Park codebreaker who died at 91 on St. Augustine's Day, 2010. Also from that obituary—

Batey himself was responsible for some important breakthroughs in decrypting the Abwehr Enigma system, helping MI5 to control the entire German espionage network in Britain. The intelligence was crucial to the Double Cross system – under which MI5 turned German agents sent to Britain and used them to feed the Abwehr false information – as it showed that the information was being accepted as genuine; it further revealed what the Germans did and did not know about the D-Day invasion plans.

William Lubtchansky, a cinematographer, was born on October 26, 1937, and died on May 4, 2010.

Yesterday's post included an illustration from this journal on the date of his death.

Here is a Log24 entry from last year on the date of his birth—

Clicking on the Shift Lock key leads to the following page—

—The Philosopher's Gaze,
by David Michael Levin,
University of California Press, 1999

Related images—

Detail from May 4 image:

Holocaust Museum, Washington, DC:

(http://www.scrapbookpages.com/USHMM/Exterior.html)

See also Lubtchansky's Duelle and
Art Wars for Trotsky's Birthday, 2003.

Quantum of Solace

Lottery Numbers
for November 11, 2008:

PA midday 007, evening 628
NY midday 153, evening 069

Experienced readers of this journal will have little difficulty interpreting these results, except for 153. For that enigmatic number, see Object Lesson.

“The Transfiguration of Christ is the culminating point of His public life…. Jesus took with him Peter and James and John and led them to a high mountain apart, where He was transfigured before their ravished eyes.  St. Matthew and St. Mark express this phenomenon by the word metemorphothe, which the Vulgate renders transfiguratus est.   The Synoptics explain the true meaning of the word by adding ‘his face did shine as the sun: and his garments became white as snow,’ according to the Vulgate, or ‘as light,’  according to the Greek text.  This dazzling brightness which emanated from His whole Body was produced by an interior shining of His Divinity.”

— The Catholic Encyclopedia of 1912

From Broken Symmetries, 1983, Chapter 16:

“He’d toyed with ‘psi’ himself…. The reason he and so many other theoretical physicists were suckers for the stuff was easy to understand– for two-thirds of a century an enigma had rested at the heart of theoretical physics, a contradiction, a hard kernel of paradox….   

Peter [Slater] had never thirsted after ‘hidden variables’ to explain what could not be pictured.  Mathematical relationships were enough to satisfy him, mere formal relationships which existed at all times, everywhere, at once.  It was a thin nectar, but he was convinced it was the nectar of the gods….

Those so-called crazy psychics were too sane, that was their problem– they were too stubborn to admit that the universe was already more bizarre than anything they could imagine in their wildest dreams of wizardry.”

Shape Note

A variation on the theme of the previous entry, Quartet.

As in the previous entry, the illustration on the left is from a Log24 entry on the date of death of the person on the right.

Relevant quotations:

“It was rather like solving a crossword puzzle.”

— Derek Taunt, on breaking the Enigma Code

Four Quartets:

“… history is a pattern
Of timeless moments.”

Cambridge News obituary:

“He [Dr. Taunt] and Angela [his wife] founded the Friends of Kettle’s Yard when the Arts Council cut its grant in 1984 and together organised countless fundraising activities for the museum and gallery.”

“How do we relate to the past? How are our memories affected by the cultural context that shapes our present? How many, and what kind of narratives compete in the representation of a historical moment? Rear View Mirror sets out to explore these questions and examine the devices we use to reconstruct events and people through different lenses….”

— On a future Kettle’s Yard exhibition

Time past and time future
What might have been
      and what has been
Point to one end,
      which is always present.

— Four Quartets

 “The diamonds will be shining,
no longer in the rough.”

See the Log24 remarks on Jesus College— Taunt’s college– in a web page for June Carter Cash, The Circle is Unbroken.

Mental Health Month, Day 23:

The Prime Cut Gospel

On Christmas Day, 1949,
Mary Elizabeth Spacek was born in Texas.

Lee Marvin, Sissy Spacek in “Prime Cut”

Exercises for Mental Health Month:

Read this discussion of the phrase, suggested by Spacek’s date of birth, “God’s gift to men.”

Read this discussion of the phrase “the same yesterday, today, and forever,” suggested by the previous reading.

Read the more interesting of these discussions of the phrase “the eternal in the temporal.”

Read this discussion of eternal, or “necessary,” truths versus other sorts of alleged “truths.”

Read this discussion of unimportant mathematical properties of the prime number 23.

Read these discussions of important properties of 23:

• R. D. Carmichael’s 1937 discussion of the linear fractional group modulo 23 in 

Introduction to the Theory of Groups of Finite Order, Ginn, Boston, 1937 (reprinted by Dover in 1956), final chapter, “Tactical Configurations,” and

• Conway’s 1969 discussion of the same group in    

J. H. Conway, “Three Lectures on Exceptional Groups,” pp. 215-247 in Finite Simple Groups (Oxford, 1969), edited by M. B. Powell and G. Higman, Academic Press, London, 1971….. Reprinted as Ch. 10 in Sphere Packings, Lattices, and Groups 

Read this discussion of what might be called “contingent,” or “literary,” properties of the number 23. 

Read also the more interesting of  these discussions of the phrase “the 23 enigma.”

Having thus acquired some familiarity with both contingent and necessary properties of 23…

Read this discussion of Aquinas’s third proof of the existence of God.

Note that the classic Spacek film “Prime Cut” was released in 1972, the year that Spacek turned 23:

The Artist’s Signature

This title is taken from the final chapter of Carl Sagan’s novel Contact.

“There might be a game in which paper figures were put together to form a story, or at any rate were somehow assembled. The materials might be collected and stored in a scrap-book, full of pictures and anecdotes. The child might then take various bits from the scrap-book to put into the construction; and he might take a considerable picture because it had something in it which he wanted and he might just include the rest because it was there.”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief

“Not games. Puzzles. Big difference. That’s a whole other matter. All art — symphonies, architecture, novels — it’s all puzzles. The fitting together of notes, the fitting together of words have by their very nature a puzzle aspect. It’s the creation of form out of chaos. And I believe in form.”

— Stephen Sondheim, in Stephen Schiff, Deconstructing Sondheim,” The New Yorker, March 8, 1993, p. 76

This passage from Weil is quoted in
Gateway to God,
p. 42, paperback, fourth impression,
printed in Glasgow in 1982 by
Fontana Books

“He would leave enigmatic messages on blackboards,
signed Ya Ya Fontana.”

— Brian Hayes on John Nash,
The Sciences magazine, Sept.-Oct., 1998

“I have a friend who is a Chief of the Aniunkwia (Cherokee) people and I asked him the name of the Creator in which
he replied… Ya Ho Wah. This is also how it is spoken in Hebrew. In my native language it is spoken
Ya Ya*,
which is also what Moses was told
at the ‘Burning Bush’ incident.”

— “Tank” (of Taino ancestry), Bronx, NY, Wednesday, April 17, 2002

From a website reviewing books published by
 Fontana:

1/17/02: NEW YORK (Variety) – Russell Crowe is negotiating to star in 20th Century Fox’s “Master and Commander,” the Peter Weir-directed adaptation of the Patrick O’Brian book series.

Hmmm.

*For another religious interpretation of this phrase, see my note of October 4, 2002, “The Agony and the Ya-Ya.”

The Shining of Lucero

From my journal note, “Shining Forth“:

The Spanish for “Bright Star” is “Lucero.”

The Eye of the Beholder:

When you stand in the dark and look at a star a hundred light years away, not only have the retarded light waves from the star been travelling for a hundred years toward your eyes, but also advanced waves from your eyes have reached a hundred years into the past to encourage the star to shine in your direction.

— John Cramer, “The Quantum Handshake“

From Broken Symmetries, by Paul Preuss, 1983:

He’d toyed with “psi” himself…. The reason he and so many other theoretical physicists were suckers for the stuff was easy to understand — for two-thirds of a century an enigma had rested at the heart of theoretical physics, a contradiction, a hard kernel of paradox….   

Peter [Slater] had never thirsted after “hidden variables” to explain what could not be pictured.  Mathematical relationships were enough to satisfy him, mere formal relationships which existed at all times, everywhere, at once.  It was a thin nectar, but he was convinced it was the nectar of the gods.

………………

Those so-called crazy psychics were too sane, that was their problem — they were too stubborn to admit that the universe was already more bizarre than anything they could imagine in their wildest dreams of wizardry. (Ch. 16)

From Secret Passages, by Paul Preuss, 1997:

Minakis caught up and walked beside him in silence, moving with easy strides over the bare ground, listening as Peter [Slater] spoke. “Delos One was ten years ago — quantum theory seemed as natural as water to me then; I could play in it without a care. If I’d had any sense of history, I would have recognized that I’d swallowed the Copenhagen interpretation whole.”

“Back then, you insisted that the quantum world is not a world at all,” Minakis prompted him. “No microworld, only mathematical descriptions.”

“Yes, I was adamant. Those who protested were naive — one has to be willing to tolerate ambiguity, even to be crazy.”

“Bohr’s words?”

“The party line. Of course Bohr did say, ‘It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about nature.’ Meaning that when we start to talk what sounds like philosophy, our colleagues should rip us to pieces.” Peter smiled. “They smell my blood already.”

………………  Peter glanced at Minakis. “Let’s say there are indications — I have personal indications — not convincing, perhaps, but suggestive, that the quantum world penetrates the classical world deeply.” He was silent for a moment, then waved his hand at the ruins. “The world of classical physics, I mean. I suppose I’ve come to realize that the world is more than a laboratory.”

“We are standing where Apollo was born,” Minakis said. “Leto squatted just there, holding fast to a palm tree, and after nine days of labor gave birth to the god of light and music….”

To Lucero, in memory of
1962 in Cuernavaca

From On Beauty, by Elaine Scarry,
Princeton University Press, 1999 —

“Homer sings of the beauty of particular things. Odysseus, washed up on shore, covered with brine, having nearly drowned, comes upon a human community and one person in particular, Nausicaa, whose beauty simply astonishes him. He has never anywhere seen a face so lovely; he has never anywhere seen any thing so lovely….

I have never laid eyes on anyone like you,
neither man nor woman…
I look at you and a sense of wonder takes me.

Wait, once I saw the like —
in Delos, beside Apollo’s altar —
the young slip of a palm-tree
springing into the light.”

From Secret Passages, by Paul Preuss, 1997:

“When we try to look inside atoms,” Peter said, “not only can we not see what’s going on, we cannot even construct a coherent picture of what’s going on.”

“If you will forgive me, Peter,” Minakis said, turning to the others. “He means that we can construct several pictures — that light and matter are waves, for example, or that light and matter are particles — but that all these pictures are inadequate. What’s left to us is the bare mathematics of quantum theory.”

…. “Whatever the really real world is like, my friend, it is not what you might imagine.”

………………

 

Talking physics, Peter tended to bluntness. “Tell me more about this real world you imagine but can’t describe.”

Minakis turned away from the view of the sunset. “Are you familiar with John Cramer’s transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics?”

“No I’m not.”

………………

“Read Cramer. I’ll give you his papers. Then we can talk.” 

 From John Cramer, “The Quantum Handshake“:

Advanced waves could perhaps, under the right circumstances, lead to “ansible-type” FTL communication favored by Le Guin and Card…. 

For more on Le Guin and Card, see my journal notes below.

For more on the meaning of “lucero,” see the Wallace Stevens poem “Martial Cadenza.”