Galois Space « Search Results

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Wednesday October 22, 2008

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Eightfold Cube — m759 @ 9:26 am

Euclid vs. Galois

On May 4, 2005, I wrote a note about how to visualize the 7-point Fano plane within a cube.

Last month, John Baez showed slides that touched on the same topic. This note is to clear up possible confusion between our two approaches.

From Baez’s Rankin Lectures at the University of Glasgow:

(Click to enlarge)

John Baez, drawing of seven vertices of a cube corresponding to Fano-plane points

Note that Baez’s statement (pdf) “Lines in the Fano plane correspond to planes through the origin [the vertex labeled ‘1’] in this cube” is, if taken (wrongly) as a statement about a cube in Euclidean 3-space, false.

The statement is, however, true of the eightfold cube, whose eight subcubes correspond to points of the linear 3-space over the two-element field, if “planes through the origin” is interpreted as planes within that linear 3-space, as in Galois geometry, rather than within the Euclidean cube that Baez’s slides seem to picture.

This Galois-geometry interpretation is, as an article of his from 2001 shows, actually what Baez was driving at. His remarks, however, both in 2001 and 2008, on the plane-cube relationship are both somewhat trivial– since “planes through the origin” is a standard definition of lines in projective geometry– and also unrelated– apart from the possibility of confusion– to my own efforts in this area. For further details, see The Eightfold Cube.

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Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Tuesday April 29, 2008

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Four Color, Innermost Kernel, Kernel of Eternity, Klee, Penrose diamond, Sacerdotal Jargon — m759 @ 11:09 am

Sacerdotal Jargon
at Harvard:

Thomas Wolfe

Thomas Wolfe
(Harvard M.A., 1922)

versus

Rosalind Krauss

Rosalind Krauss
(Harvard M.A., 1964,
Ph.D., 1969)

The Kernel of Eternity

"No culture has a pact with eternity."
— George Steiner, interview in
The Guardian of April 19

"At that instant he saw,
in one blaze of light, an image
of unutterable conviction….
the core of life, the essential
pattern whence all other things
proceed, the kernel of eternity."

— Thomas Wolfe, Of Time
and the River, quoted in
Log24 on June 9, 2005

From today's online Harvard Crimson:

"… under the leadership of Faust,
Harvard students should look forward
to an ever-growing opportunity for
international experience
and artistic endeavor."

Wolfgang Pauli as Mephistopheles

Pauli as Mephistopheles
in a 1932 parody of
Goethe's Faust at Niels Bohr's
institute in Copenhagen

From a recent book
on Wolfgang Pauli,
The Innermost Kernel:

Pauli's Dream Square (square plus the two diagonals)

A belated happy birthday
to the late
Felix Christian Klein
(born on April 25) —

The Klein Group: The four elements in four colors, with black points representing the identity

Another Harvard figure quoted here on Dec. 5, 2002:

"The theory of poetry, that is to say, the total of the theories of poetry, often seems to become in time a mystical theology or, more simply, a mystique. The reason for this must by now be clear. The reason is the same reason why the pictures in a museum of modern art often seem to become in time a mystical aesthetic, a prodigious search of appearance, as if to find a way of saying and of establishing that all things, whether below or above appearance, are one and that it is only through reality, in which they are reflected or, it may be, joined together, that we can reach them. Under such stress, reality changes from substance to subtlety, a subtlety in which it was natural for Cézanne to say: 'I see planes bestriding each other and sometimes straight lines seem to me to fall' or 'Planes in color…. The colored area where shimmer the souls of the planes, in the blaze of the kindled prism, the meeting of planes in the sunlight.' The conversion of our Lumpenwelt went far beyond this. It was from the point of view of another subtlety that Klee could write: 'But he is one chosen that today comes near to the secret places where original law fosters all evolution. And what artist would not establish himself there where the organic center of all movement in time and space– which he calls the mind or heart of creation– determines every function.' Conceding that this sounds a bit like sacerdotal jargon, that is not too much to allow to those that have helped to create a new reality, a modern reality, since what has been created is nothing less."

— Wallace Stevens, Harvard College Class of 1901, "The Relations between Poetry and Painting" in The Necessary Angel (Knopf, 1951)

From a review of Rosalind Krauss's The Optical Unconscious (MIT Press hardcover, 1993):

Krauss is concerned to present Modernism less in terms of its history than its structure, which she seeks to represent by means of a kind of diagram: "It is more interesting to think of modernism as a graph or table than a history." The "table" is a square with diagonally connected corners, of the kind most likely to be familiar to readers as the Square of Opposition, found in elementary logic texts since the mid-19th century. The square, as Krauss sees it, defines a kind of idealized space "within which to work out unbearable contradictions produced within the real field of history." This she calls, using the inevitable gallicism, "the site of Jameson's Political Unconscious" and then, in art, the optical unconscious, which consists of what Utopian Modernism had to kick downstairs, to repress, to "evacuate… from its field."

— Arthur C. Danto in ArtForum, Summer 1993

Rosalind Kraus in The Optical Unconscious (MIT Press paperback, 1994):

For a presentation of the Klein Group, see Marc Barbut, "On the Meaning of the Word 'Structure' in Mathematics," in Introduction to Structuralism, ed. Michael Lane (New York: Basic Books, 1970). Claude Lévi-Strauss uses the Klein group in his analysis of the relation between Kwakiutl and Salish masks in The Way of the Masks, trans. Sylvia Modelski (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982), p. 125; and in relation to the Oedipus myth in "The Structural Analysis of Myth," Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jackobson [sic] and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963). In a transformation of the Klein Group, A. J. Greimas has developed the semiotic square, which he describes as giving "a slightly different formulation to the same structure," in "The Interaction of Semiotic Constraints," On Meaning (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 50. Jameson uses the semiotic square in The Political Unconscious (see pp. 167, 254, 256, 277) [Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981)], as does Louis Marin in "Disneyland: A Degenerate Utopia," Glyph, no. 1 (1977), p. 64.

For related non-sacerdotal jargon, see…

Wikipedia on the Klein group (denoted V, for Vierergruppe):

In this representation, V is a normal subgroup of the alternating group A₄ (and also the symmetric group S₄) on 4 letters. In fact, it is the kernel of a surjective map from S₄ to S₃. According to Galois theory, the existence of the Klein four-group (and in particular, this representation of it) explains the existence of the formula for calculating the roots of quartic equations in terms of radicals.

For radicals of another sort, see A Logocentric Meditation, A Mass for Lucero, and [update of 7 PM] Steven Erlanger in today's New York Times— "France Still Divided Over Lessons of 1968 Unrest."

For material related to Klee's phrase mentioned above by Stevens, "the organic center of all movement in time and space," see the following Google search:

April 29, 2008, Google search on 'penrose space time'

Click on the above
image for details.

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Tuesday February 20, 2007

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

Symmetry

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

Some relevant quotations:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References:

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

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

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

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

Friday, November 24, 2006

Friday November 24, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Eightfold Cube — m759 @ 1:06 pm

Galois’s Window:

Geometry
from Point
to Hyperspace

by Steven H. Cullinane

Euclid is “the most famous
geometer ever known
and for good reason:
for millennia it has been
his window
that people first look through
when they view geometry.”

— Euclid’s Window:
The Story of Geometry
from Parallel Lines
to Hyperspace,
by Leonard Mlodinow

“…the source of
all great mathematics
is the special case,
the concrete example.
It is frequent in mathematics
that every instance of a
concept of seemingly
great generality is
in essence the same as
a small and concrete
special case.”

— Paul Halmos in
I Want To Be a Mathematician

Euclid’s geometry deals with affine
spaces of 1, 2, and 3 dimensions
definable over the field
of real numbers.

Each of these spaces
has infinitely many points.

Some simpler spaces are those
defined over a finite field–
i.e., a “Galois” field–
for instance, the field
which has only two
elements, 0 and 1, with
addition and multiplication
as follows:

+	0	1
0	0	1
1	1	0

*	0	1
0	0	0
1	0	1

We may picture the smallest
affine spaces over this simplest
field by using square or cubic
cells as “points”:

From these five finite spaces,
we may, in accordance with
Halmos’s advice,
select as “a small and
concrete special case”
the 4-point affine plane,
which we may call

Galois's Window

Galois’s Window.

The interior lines of the picture
are by no means irrelevant to
the space’s structure, as may be
seen by examining the cases of
the above Galois affine 3-space
and Galois affine hyperplane
in greater detail.

For more on these cases, see

The Eightfold Cube,
Finite Relativity,
The Smallest Projective Space,
Latin-Square Geometry, and
Geometry of the 4×4 Square.

(These documents assume that
the reader is familar with the
distinction between affine and
projective geometry.)

These 8- and 16-point spaces
may be used to
illustrate the action of Klein’s
simple group of order 168
and the action of
a subgroup of 322,560 elements
within the large Mathieu group.

The view from Galois’s window
also includes aspects of
quantum information theory.
For links to some papers
in this area, see
Elements of Finite Geometry.

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Tuesday, October 3, 2006

Tuesday October 3, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Fields, Octad, Octad Generator, Sundown Ending — m759 @ 9:26 am

Serious

"I don't think the 'diamond theorem' is anything serious, so I started with blitzing that."

— Charles Matthews at Wikipedia, Oct. 2, 2006

"The 'seriousness' of a mathematical theorem lies, not in its practical consequences, which are usually negligible, but in the significance of the mathematical ideas which it connects. We may say, roughly, that a mathematical idea is 'significant' if it can be connected, in a natural and illuminating way, with a large complex of other mathematical ideas."

— G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology

Matthews yesterday deleted references to the diamond theorem and related material in the following Wikipedia articles:

Affine group‎
Reflection group‎
Symmetry in mathematics‎
Incidence structure‎
Invariant (mathematics)‎
Symmetry‎
Finite geometry‎
Group action‎
History of geometry‎

This would appear to be a fairly large complex of mathematical ideas.

See also the following "large complex" cited, following the above words of Hardy, in Diamond Theory:

Affine geometry, affine planes, affine spaces, automorphisms, binary codes, block designs, classical groups, codes, coding theory, collineations, combinatorial, combinatorics, conjugacy classes, the Conwell correspondence, correlations, design theory, duads, duality, error correcting codes, exceptional groups, finite fields, finite geometry, finite groups, finite rings, Galois fields, generalized quadrangles, generators, geometry, GF(2), GF(4), the (24,12) Golay code, group actions, group theory, Hadamard matrices, hypercube, hyperplanes, hyperspace, incidence structures, invariance, Karnaugh maps, Kirkman's schoolgirl problem, Latin squares, Leech lattice, linear groups, linear spaces, linear transformations, Mathieu groups, matrix theory, Meno, Miracle Octad Generator, MOG, multiply transitive groups, octads, the octahedral group, orthogonal arrays, outer automorphisms, parallelisms, partial geometries, permutation groups, PG(3,2), polarities, Polya-Burnside theorem, projective geometry, projective planes, projective spaces, projectivities, Reed-Muller codes, the relativity problem, Singer cycle, skew lines, sporadic simple groups, Steiner systems, symmetric, symmetry, symplectic, synthemes, synthematic, tesseract, transvections, Walsh functions, Witt designs.

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Monday, August 28, 2006

Monday August 28, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: I Ching Wheel — m759 @ 1:00 am

Today's Sinner:

Augustine of Hippo, who is said to
have died on this date in 430 A.D.

"He is, after all, not merely taking over a Neoplatonic ontology, but he is attempting to combine it with a scriptural tradition of a rather different sort, one wherein the divine attributes most prized in the Greek tradition (e.g. necessity, immutability, and atemporal eternity) must somehow be combined with the personal attributes (e.g. will, justice, and historical purpose) of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob."

— Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Augustine

Here is a rather different attempt
to combine the eternal with the temporal:

The Eternal

Symbol of necessity,
immutability, and
atemporal eternity:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060828-Cube.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

For details, see
finite geometry of
the square and cube.

The Temporal

Symbol of the
God of Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060828-Cloud.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

For details, see
Under God
(Aug. 11, 2006)

The eternal
combined with
the temporal:

Singer 63-cycle in the Galois field GF(64) used to order the I Ching hexagrams

Related material:

Hitler's Still Point and
the previous entry.

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Friday, June 23, 2006

Friday June 23, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Boole vs. Galois, Fields — m759 @ 2:56 pm

Binary Geometry

There is currently no area of mathematics named “binary geometry.” This is, therefore, a possible name for the geometry of sets with 2ⁿ elements (i.e., a sub-topic of Galois geometry and of algebraic geometry over finite fields– part of Weil’s “Rosetta stone” (pdf)).

Examples:

Charles Sanders Peirce, “The Simplest Mathematics.”
Donald E. Knuth’s discussion of binary hypercubes in “Boolean Basics,” a draft of section 7.1.1 in The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 4: Combinatorial Algorithms
My own discussion of a binary hypercube in Geometry of the 4x4x4 Cube
A more sophisticated example: the geometry of elliptic curves over a binary Galois field. For an excellent introduction, see the Certicom online elliptic curve tutorial. This has an applet illustrating elliptic curves in a space of 256 points (256=16×16, with the x and y variables of a curve each having 16 possible values).
In summary, apart from the fact that the native language of computers has characteristic 2, “binary” mathematics, i.e. mathematics in characteristic 2, is of special interest both in the study of finite geometry (Finite Geometry of the Square and Cube) and in algebraic geometry (see, for instance, the work of Brian Conrad).

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Thursday, August 4, 2005

Thursday August 4, 2005

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Alperin, Lo Shu — m759 @ 1:00 pm

Visible Mathematics, continued

Today's mathematical birthdays:
Saunders Mac Lane, John Venn,
and Sir William Rowan Hamilton.

It is well known that the quaternion group is a subgroup of GL(2,3), the general linear group on the 2-space over GF(3), the 3-element Galois field.

The figures below illustrate this fact.

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

Related material: Visualizing GL(2,p)

"The typical example of a finite group is GL(n,q), the general linear group of n dimensions over the field with q elements. The student who is introduced to the subject with other examples is being completely misled."

— J. L. Alperin, book review,
Bulletin (New Series) of the American
Mathematical Society 10 (1984), 121

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Saturday, June 4, 2005

Saturday June 4, 2005

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 7:00 pm

Drama of the Diagonal

The 4×4 Square:
French Perspectives

Earendil_Silmarils:
The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05A/050604-Fuite1.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

   Les Anamorphoses:



“Pour construire un dessin en perspective,
   le peintre trace sur sa toile des repères:
   la ligne d’horizon (1),
   le point de fuite principal (2)
   où se rencontre les lignes de fuite (3)
   et le point de fuite des diagonales (4).”
   _______________________________

Serge Mehl,
   Perspective &
Géométrie Projective:

   “… la géométrie projective était souvent
   synonyme de géométrie supérieure.
   Elle s’opposait à la géométrie
   euclidienne: élémentaire…

La géométrie projective, certes supérieure
   car assez ardue, permet d’établir
   de façon élégante des résultats de
   la géométrie élémentaire.”

Similarly…

Finite projective geometry
(in particular, Galois geometry)
   is certainly superior to
   the elementary geometry of
quilt-pattern symmetry
and allows us to establish
   de façon élégante
   some results of that
   elementary geometry.

Other Related Material…

   from algebra rather than
   geometry, and from a German
   rather than from the French:

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

Evariste Galois

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

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

   Metaphor and Algebra…

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

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

For metaphor and
algebra combined, see

“Symmetry invariance
in a diamond ring,”

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

More on Max Black…

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

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

A New Slant…

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

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

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Wednesday, May 4, 2005

Wednesday May 4, 2005

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Alperin, Eightfold Cube, May 6 2005 — m759 @ 1:00 pm

The Fano Plane
Revisualized:

or, The Eightfold Cube

Here is the usual model of the seven points and seven lines (including the circle) of the smallest finite projective plane (the Fano plane):

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

Every permutation of the plane's points that preserves collinearity is a symmetry of the plane. The group of symmetries of the Fano plane is of order 168 and is isomorphic to the group PSL(2,7) = PSL(3,2) = GL(3,2). (See Cameron on linear groups (pdf).)

The above model indicates with great clarity six symmetries of the plane– those it shares with the equilateral triangle. It does not, however, indicate where the other 162 symmetries come from.

Shown below is a new model of this same projective plane, using partitions of cubes to represent points:

The cubes' partitioning planes are added in binary (1+1=0) fashion. Three partitioned cubes are collinear if and only if their partitioning planes' binary sum equals zero.

The second model is useful because it lets us generate naturally all 168 symmetries of the Fano plane by splitting a cube into a set of four parallel 1x1x2 slices in the three ways possible, then arbitrarily permuting the slices in each of the three sets of four. See examples below.

Fano plane group - generating permutations

For a proof that such permutations generate the 168 symmetries, see Binary Coordinate Systems.

(Note that this procedure, if regarded as acting on the set of eight individual subcubes of each cube in the diagram, actually generates a group of 168*8 = 1,344 permutations. But the group's action on the diagram's seven partitions of the subcubes yields only 168 distinct results. This illustrates the difference between affine and projective spaces over the binary field GF(2). In a related 2x2x2 cubic model of the affine 3-space over GF(2) whose "points" are individual subcubes, the group of eight translations is generated by interchanges of parallel 2x2x1 cube-slices. This is clearly a subgroup of the group generated by permuting 1x1x2 cube-slices. Such translations in the affine 3-space have no effect on the projective plane, since they leave each of the plane model's seven partitions– the "points" of the plane– invariant.)

To view the cubes model in a wider context, see Galois Geometry, Block Designs, and Finite-Geometry Models.

For another application of the points-as-partitions technique, see Latin-Square Geometry: Orthogonal Latin Squares as Skew Lines.

For more on the plane's symmetry group in another guise, see John Baez on Klein's Quartic Curve and the online book The Eightfold Way. For more on the mathematics of cubic models, see Solomon's Cube.

For a large downloadable folder with many other related web pages, see Notes on Finite Geometry.

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Monday, January 24, 2005

Friday, February 20, 2004

Friday February 20, 2004

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

Finite Relativity

Today is the 18th birthday of my note

“The Relativity Problem in Finite Geometry.”

That note begins with a quotation from Weyl:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Comments (1)

Tuesday, January 6, 2004

Tuesday January 6, 2004

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: Octad, Octad Generator, Sacerdotal Jargon — m759 @ 10:10 pm

720 in the Book

Searching for an epiphany on this January 6 (the Feast of the Epiphany), I started with Harvard Magazine, the current issue of January-February 2004.

An article titled On Mathematical Imagination concludes by looking forward to

“a New Instauration that will bring mathematics, at last, into its rightful place in our lives: a source of elation….”

Seeking the source of the phrase “new instauration,” I found it was due to Francis Bacon, who “conceived his New Instauration as the fulfilment of a Biblical prophecy and a rediscovery of ‘the seal of God on things,’ ” according to a web page by Nieves Mathews.

Hmm.

The Mathews essay leads to Peter Pesic, who, it turns out, has written a book that brings us back to the subject of mathematics:

Abel’s Proof: An Essay
on the Sources and Meaning
of Mathematical Unsolvability

by Peter Pesic,
MIT Press, 2003

From a review:

“… the book is about the idea that polynomial equations in general cannot be solved exactly in radicals….

Pesic concludes his account after Abel and Galois… and notes briefly (p. 146) that following Abel, Jacobi, Hermite, Kronecker, and Brioschi, in 1870 Jordan proved that elliptic modular functions suffice to solve all polynomial equations. The reader is left with little clarity on this sequel to the story….”

— Roger B. Eggleton, corrected version of a review in Gazette Aust. Math. Soc., Vol. 30, No. 4, pp. 242-244

Here, it seems, is my epiphany:

“Elliptic modular functions suffice to solve all polynomial equations.”

Incidental Remarks
on Synchronicity,
Part I

Those who seek a star
on this Feast of the Epiphany
may click here.

Most mathematicians are (or should be) familiar with the work of Abel and Galois on the insolvability by radicals of quintic and higher-degree equations.

Just how such equations can be solved is a less familiar story. I knew that elliptic functions were involved in the general solution of a quintic (fifth degree) equation, but I was not aware that similar functions suffice to solve all polynomial equations.

The topic is of interest to me because, as my recent web page The Proof and the Lie indicates, I was deeply irritated by the way recent attempts to popularize mathematics have sown confusion about modular functions, and I therefore became interested in learning more about such functions. Modular functions are also distantly related, via the topic of “moonshine” and via the “Happy Family” of the Monster group and the Miracle Octad Generator of R. T. Curtis, to my own work on symmetries of 4×4 matrices.

Incidental Remarks
on Synchronicity,
Part II

There is no Log24 entry for
December 30, 2003,
the day John Gregory Dunne died,
but see this web page for that date.

Here is what I was able to find on the Web about Pesic’s claim:

From Wolfram Research:

From Solving the Quintic —

“Some of the ideas described here can be generalized to equations of higher degree. The basic ideas for solving the sextic using Klein’s approach to the quintic were worked out around 1900. For algebraic equations beyond the sextic, the roots can be expressed in terms of hypergeometric functions in several variables or in terms of Siegel modular functions.”

From Siegel Theta Function —

“Umemura has expressed the roots of an arbitrary polynomial in terms of Siegel theta functions. (Mumford, D. Part C in Tata Lectures on Theta. II. Jacobian Theta Functions and Differential Equations. Boston, MA: Birkhäuser, 1984.)”

From Polynomial —

“… the general quintic equation may be given in terms of the Jacobi theta functions, or hypergeometric functions in one variable. Hermite and Kronecker proved that higher order polynomials are not soluble in the same manner. Klein showed that the work of Hermite was implicit in the group properties of the icosahedron. Klein’s method of solving the quintic in terms of hypergeometric functions in one variable can be extended to the sextic, but for higher order polynomials, either hypergeometric functions in several variables or ‘Siegel functions’ must be used (Belardinelli 1960, King 1996, Chow 1999). In the 1880s, Poincaré created functions which give the solution to the nth order polynomial equation in finite form. These functions turned out to be ‘natural’ generalizations of the elliptic functions.”

Belardinelli, G. “Fonctions hypergéométriques de plusieurs variables er résolution analytique des équations algébrique générales.” Mémoral des Sci. Math. 145, 1960.

King, R. B. Beyond the Quartic Equation. Boston, MA: Birkhäuser, 1996.

Chow, T. Y. “What is a Closed-Form Number.” Amer. Math. Monthly 106, 440-448, 1999.

From Angel Zhivkov,

Preprint series,
Institut für Mathematik,
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin:

“… discoveries of Abel and Galois had been followed by the also remarkable theorems of Hermite and Kronecker: in 1858 they independently proved that we can solve the algebraic equations of degree five by using an elliptic modular function…. Kronecker thought that the resolution of the equation of degree five would be a special case of a more general theorem which might exist. This hypothesis was realized in [a] few cases by F. Klein… Jordan… showed that any algebraic equation is solvable by modular functions. In 1984 Umemura realized the Kronecker idea in his appendix to Mumford’s book… deducing from a formula of Thomae… a root of [an] arbitrary algebraic equation by Siegel modular forms.”

— “Resolution of Degree Less-than-or-equal-to Six Algebraic Equations by Genus Two Theta Constants“

Incidental Remarks
on Synchronicity,
Part III

From Music for Dunne’s Wake:

“Heaven was kind of a hat on the universe,
a lid that kept everything underneath it
where it belonged.”

— Carrie Fisher,
Postcards from the Edge

“720 in
the Book”
and
“Paradise“

“The group Sp₄(F₂) has order 720,”
as does S₆. — Angel Zhivkov, op. cit.

Those seeking
“a rediscovery of
‘the seal of God on things,’ “
as quoted by Mathews above,
should see
The Unity of Mathematics
and the related note
Sacerdotal Jargon.

For more remarks on synchronicity
that may or may not be relevant
to Harvard Magazine and to
the annual Joint Mathematics Meetings
that start tomorrow in Phoenix, see

Log24, June 2003.

For the relevance of the time
of this entry, 10:10, see

the reference to Paradise
on the “postcard” above, and
Storyline (10/10, 2003).

Related recreational reading:

Labyrinth

The Shining

Shining Forth

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Monday, May 26, 2003

Monday May 26, 2003

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 4:25 am

Mental Health Month, Day 26:

Many Dimensions,
Part II — The Blue Matrix

But seriously…

John Baez in July 1999:

"…it's really the fact that the Leech lattice is 24-dimensional that lets us compactify 26-dimensional spacetime in such a way as to get a bosonic string theory with the Monster group as symmetries."

Well, maybe. I certainly hope so. If the Leech lattice and the Monster group turn out to have some significance in theoretical physics, then my own work, which deals with symmetries of substructures of the Leech lattice and the Monster, might be viewed in a different light. Meanwhile, I take (cold) comfort from some writers who pursue the "story" theory of truth, as opposed to the "diamond" theory. See the following from my journal:

Evariste Galois and the Rock that Changed Things, and

A Time to Gather Stones Together: Readings for Yom Kippur.

See, too, this web page on Marion Zimmer Bradley's fictional

Matrices, or Blue Star-Stones, and

the purely mathematical site Diamond Theory, which deals with properties of the above "blue matrix" and its larger relatives.

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