Stanley E. Payne and J. A. Thas in 1983* (previous post) —
“… a 4×4 grid together with
the affine lines on it is AG(2,4).”
Payne and Thas of course use their own definition
of affine lines on a grid.
Actually, a 4×4 grid together with the affine lines on it
is, viewed in a different way, not AG(2,4) but rather AG(4,2).
For AG(4,2) in the proper context, see
Affine Groups on Small Binary Spaces and
The Galois Tesseract.
* And 26 years later, in 2009.
Click image to enlarge.
The above 35 projective lines, within a 4×4 array —
The above 15 projective planes, within a 4×4 array (in white) —
* See Galois Tesseract in this journal.
Yesterday's post suggests a review of the following —
|
Andries Brouwer, preprint, 1982:
"The Witt designs, Golay codes and Mathieu groups" Pages 8-9: Substructures of S(5, 8, 24) An octad is a block of S(5, 8, 24). Theorem 5.1
Let B0 be a fixed octad. The 30 octads disjoint from B0
the design of the points and affine hyperplanes in AG(4, 2), Proof…. … (iv) We have AG(4, 2).
(Proof: invoke your favorite characterization of AG(4, 2) An explicit construction of the vector space is also easy….) |
Related material: Posts tagged Priority.
The three parts of the figure in today's earlier post "Defining Form"—
— share the same vector-space structure:
| 0 | c | d | c + d |
| a | a + c | a + d | a + c + d |
| b | b + c | b + d | b + c + d |
| a + b | a + b + c | a + b + d | a + b + c + d |
(This vector-space a b c d diagram is from Chapter 11 of
Sphere Packings, Lattices and Groups , by John Horton
Conway and N. J. A. Sloane, first published by Springer
in 1988.)
The fact that any 4×4 array embodies such a structure was implicit in
the diamond theorem (February 1979). Any 4×4 array, regarded as
a model of the finite geometry AG(4, 2), may be called a Galois tesseract.
(So called because of the Galois geometry involved, and because the
16 cells of a 4×4 array with opposite edges identified have the same
adjacency pattern as the 16 vertices of a tesseract (see, for instance,
Coxeter's 1950 "Self-Dual Configurations and Regular Graphs," figures
5 and 6).)
A 1982 discussion of a more abstract form of AG(4, 2):
Source:
The above 1982 remarks by Brouwer may or may not have influenced
the drawing of the above 1988 Conway-Sloane diagram.
A post of September 1, The Galois Tesseract, noted that the interplay
of algebraic and geometric properties within the 4×4 array that forms
two-thirds of the Curtis Miracle Octad Generator (MOG) may first have
been described by Cullinane (AMS abstract 79T-A37, Notices , Feb. 1979).
Here is some supporting material—
The passage from Carmichael above emphasizes the importance of
the 4×4 square within the MOG.
The passage from Conway and Sloane, in a book whose first edition
was published in 1988, makes explicit the structure of the MOG's
4×4 square as the affine 4-space over the 2-element Galois field.
The passage from Curtis (1974, published in 1976) describes 35 sets
of four "special tetrads" within the 4×4 square of the MOG. These
correspond to the 35 sets of four parallel 4-point affine planes within
the square. Curtis, however, in 1976 makes no mention of the affine
structure, characterizing his 140 "special tetrads" rather by the parity
of their intersections with the square's rows and columns.
The affine structure appears in the 1979 abstract mentioned above—
The "35 structures" of the abstract were listed, with an application to
Latin-square orthogonality, in a note from December 1978—
See also a 1987 article by R. T. Curtis—
Further elementary techniques using the miracle octad generator, by R. T. Curtis. Abstract:
“In this paper we describe various techniques, some of which are already used by devotees of the art, which relate certain maximal subgroups of the Mathieu group M24, as seen in the MOG, to matrix groups over finite fields. We hope to bring out the wealth of algebraic structure* underlying the device and to enable the reader to move freely between these matrices and permutations. Perhaps the MOG was mis-named as simply an ‘octad generator’; in this paper we intend to show that it is in reality a natural diagram of the binary Golay code.”
(Received July 20 1987)
– Proceedings of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society (Series 2) (1989), 32: 345-353
* For instance:
Update of Sept. 4— This post is now a page at finitegeometry.org.
Euclidean square and triangle—
Galois square and triangle—
Background—
This journal on the date of Hilton Kramer's death,
The Galois Tesseract, and The Purloined Diamond.
From this journal at 1:51 AM ET Thursday, September 8, 2022 —
"The pleasure comes from the illusion" . . .
Exercise:
Compare and contrast the following structure with the three
"bricks" of the R. T. Curtis Miracle Octad Generator (MOG).
Note that the 4-row-2-column "brick" at left is quite
different from the other two bricks, which together
show chevron variations within a Galois tesseract —
.
Further Weil remarks . . .
A Slew of Prayers
"The pleasure comes from the illusion
and the far from clear meaning;
once the illusion is dissipated,
and knowledge obtained, one becomes
indifferent at the same time;
at least in the Gitâ there is a slew of prayers
(slokas) on the subject, each one more final
than the previous ones."
* —
From the previous post, "The Large Language Model,"
a passage from Wikipedia —
"… sometimes large models undergo a 'discontinuous phase shift'
where the model suddenly acquires substantial abilities not seen
in smaller models. These are known as 'emergent abilities,' and
have been the subject of substantial study." — Wikipedia
Compare and contrast
this with the change undergone by a "small space model,"
that of the finite affine 4-space A with 16 points (a Galois tesseract ),
when it is augmented by an eight-point "octad." The 30 eight-point
hyperplanes of A then have a natural extension within the new
24-point set to 759 eight-point octads, and the 322,560 affine
automorphisms of the space expand to the 244,823,040 Mathieu
automorphisms of the 759-octad set — a (5, 8, 24) Steiner system.
For a visual analogue of the enlarged 24-point space and some remarks
on analogy by Simone Weil's brother, a mathematician, see this journal
on September 8 and 9, 2022.
“You’re literally looking for like a one in a million thing.
You filter out the 999,999 of the boring ones, then
you’ve got something that’s weird, and then that’s worth
further exploration.”
— Quote from a mathematics story today at Gizmodo
A different "one in a million" mathematics story —
On Steiner Quadruple Systems of Order 16.
See also Galois Tesseract.
"A struggling music producer sells his soul to a 1970s drum machine."
— Summary of a short film by Kevin Ignatius, "Hook Man."
The music producer pawns his current drum device
and acquires a demonic 1970s machine.
Artistic symbolism —
The 16-pad device at left may be viewed by enthusiasts of ekphrasis
as a Galois tesseract, and the machine at right as the voice of
Hal Foster, an art theorist who graduated from Princeton in 1977.
For an example of Foster's prose style, see
the current London Review of Books.
André Weil in 1940 on analogy in mathematics —
| . "Once it is possible to translate any particular proof from one theory to another, then the analogy has ceased to be productive for this purpose; it would cease to be at all productive if at one point we had a meaningful and natural way of deriving both theories from a single one. In this sense, around 1820, mathematicians (Gauss, Abel, Galois, Jacobi) permitted themselves, with anguish and delight, to be guided by the analogy between the division of the circle (Gauss’s problem) and the division of elliptic functions. Today, we can easily show that both problems have a place in the theory of abelian equations; we have the theory (I am speaking of a purely algebraic theory, so it is not a matter of number theory in this case) of abelian extensions. Gone is the analogy: gone are the two theories, their conflicts and their delicious reciprocal reflections, their furtive caresses, their inexplicable quarrels; alas, all is just one theory, whose majestic beauty can no longer excite us. Nothing is more fecund than these slightly adulterous relationships; nothing gives greater pleasure to the connoisseur, whether he participates in it, or even if he is an historian contemplating it retrospectively, accompanied, nevertheless, by a touch of melancholy. The pleasure comes from the illusion and the far from clear meaning; once the illusion is dissipated, and knowledge obtained, one becomes indifferent at the same time; at least in the Gitâ there is a slew of prayers (slokas) on the subject, each one more final than the previous ones." |
"The pleasure comes from the illusion" . . .
Exercise:
Compare and contrast the following structure with the three
"bricks" of the R. T. Curtis Miracle Octad Generator (MOG).
Note that the 4-row-2-column "brick" at left is quite
different from the other two bricks, which together
show chevron variations within a Galois tesseract —
Note the three quadruplets of parallel edges in the 1984 figure above.
The above Gates article appeared earlier, in the June 2010 issue of
Physics World , with bigger illustrations. For instance —
Exercise: Describe, without seeing the rest of the article,
the rule used for connecting the balls above.
Wikipedia offers a much clearer picture of a (non-adinkra) tesseract —
And then, more simply, there is the Galois tesseract —
For parts of my own world in June 2010, see this journal for that month.
The above Galois tesseract appears there as follows:
See also the Klein correspondence in a paper from 1968
in yesterday's 2:54 PM ET post.
| Name Tag | .Space | .Group | .Art |
|---|---|---|---|
| Box4 |
2×2 square representing the four-point finite affine geometry AG(2,2). (Box4.space) |
S4 = AGL(2,2) (Box4.group) |
(Box4.art) |
| Box6 |
3×2 (3-row, 2-column) rectangular array representing the elements of an arbitrary 6-set. |
S6 | |
| Box8 | 2x2x2 cube or 4×2 (4-row, 2-column) array. | S8 or A8 or AGL(3,2) of order 1344, or GL(3,2) of order 168 | |
| Box9 | The 3×3 square. | AGL(2,3) or GL(2,3) | |
| Box12 | The 12 edges of a cube, or a 4×3 array for picturing the actions of the Mathieu group M12. | Symmetries of the cube or elements of the group M12 | |
| Box13 | The 13 symmetry axes of the cube. | Symmetries of the cube. | |
| Box15 |
The 15 points of PG(3,2), the projective geometry of 3 dimensions over the 2-element Galois field. |
Collineations of PG(3,2) | |
| Box16 |
The 16 points of AG(4,2), the affine geometry of 4 dimensions over the 2-element Galois field. |
AGL(4,2), the affine group of |
|
| Box20 | The configuration representing Desargues's theorem. | ||
| Box21 | The 21 points and 21 lines of PG(2,4). | ||
| Box24 | The 24 points of the Steiner system S(5, 8, 24). | ||
| Box25 | A 5×5 array representing PG(2,5). | ||
| Box27 |
The 3-dimensional Galois affine space over the 3-element Galois field GF(3). |
||
| Box28 | The 28 bitangents of a plane quartic curve. | ||
| Box32 |
Pair of 4×4 arrays representing orthogonal Latin squares. |
Used to represent elements of AGL(4,2) |
|
| Box35 |
A 5-row-by-7-column array representing the 35 lines in the finite projective space PG(3,2) |
PGL(3,2), order 20,160 | |
| Box36 | Eurler's 36-officer problem. | ||
| Box45 | The 45 Pascal points of the Pascal configuration. | ||
| Box48 | The 48 elements of the group AGL(2,3). | AGL(2,3). | |
| Box56 |
The 56 three-sets within an 8-set or |
||
| Box60 | The Klein configuration. | ||
| Box64 | Solomon's cube. |
— Steven H. Cullinane, March 26-27, 2022
The geometry of the 4×4 square may be associated with the name
Galois, as in "the Galois tesseract," or similarly with the name Kummer.
Here is a Google image search using the latter name —
(Click to enlarge.)
The time of the previous post was 4:46 AM ET today.
Fourteen minutes later —
"I'm a groupie, really." — Murray Bartlett in today's online NY Times
The previous post discussed group actions on a 3×3 square array. A tune
about related group actions on a 4×4 square array (a Galois tesseract ) . . .
From "Mathieu Moonshine and Symmetry Surfing" —
(Submitted on 29 Sep 2016, last revised 22 Jan 2018)
by Matthias R. Gaberdiel (1), Christoph A. Keller (2),
and Hynek Paul (1)
(1) Institute for Theoretical Physics, ETH Zurich
(2) Department of Mathematics, ETH Zurich
https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.09302v2 —
"This presentation of the symmetry groups Gi is
particularly well-adapted for the symmetry surfing
philosophy. In particular it is straightforward to
combine them into an overarching symmetry group G
by combining all the generators. The resulting group is
the so-called octad group
G = (Z2)4 ⋊ A8 .
It can be described as a maximal subgroup of M24
obtained by the setwise stabilizer of a particular
'reference octad' in the Golay code, which we take
to be O9 = {3,5,6,9,15,19,23,24} ∈ 𝒢24. The octad
subgroup is of order 322560, and its index in M24
is 759, which is precisely the number of
different reference octads one can choose."
This "octad group" is in fact the symmetry group of the affine 4-space over GF(2),
so described in 1979 in connection not with the Golay code but with the geometry
of the 4×4 square.* Its nature as an affine group acting on the Golay code was
known long before 1979, but its description as an affine group acting on
the 4×4 square may first have been published in connection with the
Cullinane diamond theorem and Abstract 79T-A37, "Symmetry invariance in a
diamond ring," by Steven H. Cullinane in Notices of the American Mathematical
Society , February 1979, pages A-193, 194.
* The Galois tesseract .
Update of March 15, 2020 —
Conway and Sloane on the "octad group" in 1993 —
The phrase "jewel box" in a New York Times obituary online this afternoon
suggests a review. See "And He Built a Crooked House" and Galois Tesseract.
The 4×4 square may also be called the Galois Tesseract .
By analogy, the 4x4x4 cube may be called the Galois Hexeract .
The previous post, "Tesserae for a Tesseract," contains the following
passage from a 1987 review of a book about Finnegans Wake —
"Basically, Mr. Bishop sees the text from above
and as a whole — less as a sequential story than
as a box of pied type or tesserae for a mosaic,
materials for a pattern to be made."
A set of 16 of the Wechsler cubes below are tesserae that
may be used to make patterns in the Galois tesseract.
Another Bellevue story —
“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare
from which I am trying to awake.”
— James Joyce, Ulysses
A Buddhist view —
“Just fancy a scale model of Being
made out of string and cardboard.”
— Nanavira Thera, 1 October 1957,
on a model of Kummer’s Quartic Surface
mentioned by Eddington
A Christian view —
A formal view —
From a Log24 search for High Concept:
See also Galois Tesseract.
The title was suggested by the name "ARTI" of an artificial
intelligence in the new film 2036: Origin Unknown.
The Eye of ARTI —
See also a post of May 19, "Uh-Oh" —
— and a post of June 6, "Geometry for Goyim" —
Mystery box merchandise from the 2011 J. J. Abrams film Super 8
An arty fact I prefer, suggested by the triangular computer-eye forms above —
This is from the July 29, 2012, post The Galois Tesseract.
See as well . . .
"By an archetype I mean a systematic repertoire
of ideas by means of which a given thinker describes,
by analogical extension , some domain to which
those ideas do not immediately and literally apply."
— Max Black in Models and Metaphors
(Cornell, 1962, p. 241)
"Others … spoke of 'ultimate frames of reference' …."
— Ibid.
A "frame of reference" for the concept four quartets —
A less reputable analogical extension of the same
frame of reference —
Madeleine L'Engle in A Swiftly Tilting Planet :
"… deep in concentration, bent over the model
they were building of a tesseract:
the square squared, and squared again…."
See also the phrase Galois tesseract .
"With respect to the story's content, the frame thus acts
both as an inclusion of the exterior and as an exclusion
of the interior: it is a perturbation of the outside at the
very core of the story's inside, and as such, it is a blurring
of the very difference between inside and outside."
— Shoshana Felman on a Henry James story, p. 123 in
"Turning the Screw of Interpretation,"
Yale French Studies No. 55/56 (1977), pp. 94-207.
Published by Yale University Press.
See also the previous post and The Galois Tesseract.
The “Black” of the title refers to the previous post.
For the “Well,” see Hexagram 48.
Related material —
The Galois Tesseract and, more generally, Binary Coordinate Systems.
Or: The Square
"What we do may be small, but it has
a certain character of permanence."
— G. H. Hardy
* See Expanding the Spielraum in this journal.
From a review of the 2016 film "Arrival" —
"A seemingly off-hand reference to Abbott and Costello
is our gateway. In a movie as generally humorless as Arrival,
the jokes mean something. Ironically, it is Donnelly, not Banks,
who initiates the joke, naming the verbally inexpressive
Heptapod aliens after the loquacious Classical Hollywood
comedians. The squid-like aliens communicate via those beautiful,
cryptic images. Those signs, when thoroughly comprehended,
open the perceiver to a nonlinear conception of time; this is
Sapir-Whorf taken to the ludicrous extreme."
— Jordan Brower in the Los Angeles Review of Books
Further on in the review —
"Banks doesn’t fully understand the alien language, but she
knows it well enough to get by. This realization emerges
most evidently when Banks enters the alien ship and, floating
alongside Costello, converses with it in their picture-language.
She asks where Abbott is, and it responds — as presented
in subtitling — that Abbott 'is death process.'
'Death process' — dying — is not idiomatic English, and what
we see, written for us, is not a perfect translation but a
rendering of Banks’s understanding. This, it seems to me, is a
crucial moment marking the hard limit of a human mind,
working within the confines of human language to understand
an ultimately intractable xenolinguistic system."
For what may seem like an intractable xenolinguistic system to
those whose experience of mathematics is limited to portrayals
by Hollywood, see the previous post —
van Lint and Wilson Meet the Galois Tesseract.
The death process of van Lint occurred on Sept. 28, 2004.
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
From a Google image search yesterday —
Sources (left to right, top to bottom) —
Math Guy (July 16, 2014)
The Galois Tesseract (Sept. 1, 2011)
The Full Force of Roman Law (April 21, 2014)
A Great Moonshine (Sept. 25, 2015)
A Point of Identity (August 8, 2016)
Pascal via Curtis (April 6, 2013)
Correspondences (August 6, 2011)
Symmetric Generation (Sept. 21, 2011)
For geeks* —
" Domain, Domain on the Range , "
where Domain = the Galois tesseract and
Range = the four-element Galois field.
This post was suggested by the previous post,
by a Log24 search for Knight + Move, and by
the phrase "discouraging words" found in that search.
* A term from the 1947 film "Nightmare Alley."
The incidences of points and planes in the
Möbius 84 configuration (8 points and 8 planes,
with 4 points on each plane and 4 planes on each point),
were described by Coxeter in a 1950 paper.*
A table from Monday's post summarizes Coxeter's
remarks, which described the incidences in
spatial terms, with the points and planes as the vertices
and face-planes of two mutually inscribed tetrahedra —
Monday's post, "Gallucci's Möbius Configuration,"
may not be completely intelligible unless one notices
that Coxeter has drawn some of the intersections in his
Fig. 24, a schematic representation of the point-plane
incidences, as dotless, and some as hollow dots. The figure,
"Gallucci's version of Möbius's 84," is shown below.
The hollow dots, representing the 8 points (as opposed
to the 8 planes ) of the configuration, are highlighted in blue.
Here a plane (represented by a dotless intersection) contains
the four points that are represented in the square array as lying
in the same row or same column as the plane.
The above Möbius incidences appear also much earlier in
Coxeter's paper, in figures 6 and 5, where they are shown
as describing the structure of a hypercube.
In figures 6 and 5, the dotless intersections representing
planes have been replaced by solid dots. The hollow dots
have again been highlighted in blue.
Figures 6 and 5 demonstrate the fact that adjacency in the set of
16 vertices of a hypercube is isomorphic to adjacency in the set
of 16 subsquares of a square 4×4 array, provided that opposite
sides of the array are identified, as in Fig. 6. The digits in
Coxeter's labels above may be viewed as naming the positions
of the 1's in (0,1) vectors (x4, x3, x2, x1) over the two-element
Galois field.† In that context, the 4×4 array may be called, instead
of a Möbius hypercube , a Galois tesseract .
* "Self-Dual Configurations and Regular Graphs,"
Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society,
Vol. 56 (1950), pp. 413-455
† The subscripts' usual 1-2-3-4 order is reversed as a reminder
that such a vector may be viewed as labeling a binary number
from 0 through 15, or alternately as labeling a polynomial in
the 16-element Galois field GF(24). See the Log24 post
Vector Addition in a Finite Field (Jan. 5, 2013).
(Continued from July 16, 2014.)
Some background from Wikipedia:
"Friedrich Ernst Peter Hirzebruch ForMemRS[2]
(17 October 1927 – 27 May 2012)
was a German mathematician, working in the fields of topology,
complex manifolds and algebraic geometry, and a leading figure
in his generation. He has been described as 'the most important
mathematician in Germany of the postwar period.'
[3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11]"
A search for citations of the A. E. Brouwer paper in
the previous post yields a quotation from the preface
to the third ("2013") edition of Wolfgang Ebeling's
Lattices and Codes: A Course Partially Based
on Lectures by Friedrich Hirzebruch , a book
reportedly published on September 19, 2012 —
|
"Sadly, on May 27 this year, Friedrich Hirzebruch, Hannover, July 2012 Wolfgang Ebeling "
(Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Ebeling, Institute of Algebraic Geometry, |
Also sadly …
From H. S. M. Coxeter's 1950 paper
"Self-Dual Configurations and Regular Graphs,"
a 4×4 array and a more perspicuous rearrangement—
(Click image to enlarge.)
The above rearrangement brings Coxeter's remarks into accord
with the webpage The Galois Tesseract.
Update of Thursday, March 26, 2015 —
For an explanation of Coxeter's Fig. 24, see Thursday's later
post titled "The Möbius Hypercube."
Continued from June 17, 2013
(John Baez as a savior for atheists):
As an atheists-savior, I prefer Galois…
The geometry underlying a figure that John Baez
posted four days ago, "A Hypercube of Bits," is
Galois geometry —
See The Galois Tesseract and an earlier
figure from Log24 on May 21, 2007:
For the genesis of the figure,
see The Geometry of Logic.
From Zettel (repunctuated for clarity):
249. « Nichts leichter, als sich einen 4-dimensionalen Würfel
vorstellen! Er schaut so aus… »
"Nothing easier than to imagine a 4-dimensional cube!
It looks like this…
[Here the editor supplied a picture of a 4-dimensional cube
that was omitted by Wittgenstein in the original.]
« Aber das meine ich nicht, ich meine etwas wie…
"But I don't mean that, I mean something like…
…nur mit 4 Ausdehnungen! »
but with four dimensions!
« Aber das ist nicht, was ich dir gezeigt habe,
eben etwas wie…
"But isn't what I showed you like…
…nur mit 4 Ausdehnungen? »
…only with four dimensions?"
« Nein; das meine ich nicht! »
"No, I don't mean that!"
« Was aber meine ich? Was ist mein Bild?
Nun der 4-dimensionale Würfel, wie du ihn gezeichnet hast,
ist es nicht ! Ich habe jetzt als Bild nur die Worte und
die Ablehnung alles dessen, was du mir zeigen kanst. »
"But what do I mean? What is my picture?
Well, it is not the four-dimensional cube
as you drew it. I have now for a picture only
the words and my rejection of anything
you can show me."
"Here's your damn Bild , Ludwig —"
Context: The Galois Tesseract.
Introducing a group of 322,560 affine transformations of Dürer’s ‘Magic’ Square
The four vector-space substructures of digits in 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th place,
together with the diamond theorem, indicate that Dürer’s square “minus one”
can be transformed by permutations of rows, columns, and quadrants to a
square with (decimal) digits in the usual numerical order, increasing from
top left to bottom right. Such permutations form a group of order 322,560.
(Continued from Vector Addition in a Finite Field, Twelfth Night, 2013.)
The page of Whitehead linked to this morning
suggests a review of Polster's tetrahedral model
of the finite projective 3-space PG(3,2) over the
two-element Galois field GF(2).
|
The above passage from Whitehead's 1906 book suggests
that the tetrahedral model may be older than Polster thinks.
Shown at right below is a correspondence between Whitehead's
version of the tetrahedral model and my own square model,
based on the 4×4 array I call the Galois tesseract (at left below).
(Click to enlarge.)
"… this notion of ‘depth’ is an elusive one
even for a mathematician who can recognize it…."
— G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology
Part I: An Inch Deep
Part II: An Inch Wide
See a search for "square inch space" in this journal.
See also recent posts with the tag depth.
The sixteen-dot square array in yesterday’s noon post suggests
the following remarks.
“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
The Galois tesseract appeared in an early form in the journal
Computer Graphics and Art , Vol. 2, No. 1, February 1977—
The 1977 matrix Q is echoed in the following from 2002—
A different representation of Cullinane’s 1977 square model of the
16-point affine geometry over the two-element Galois field GF(2)
is supplied by Conway and Sloane in Sphere Packings, Lattices and Groups
(first published in 1988) :
Here a, b, c, d are basis vectors in the vector 4-space over GF(2).
(For a 1979 version of this vector space, see AMS Abstract 79T-A37.)
See also a 2011 publication of the Mathematical Association of America —
(On His Dies Natalis )…
This is asserted in an excerpt from…
"The smallest non-rank 3 strongly regular graphs
which satisfy the 4-vertex condition"
by Mikhail Klin, Mariusz Meszka, Sven Reichard, and Alex Rosa,
BAYREUTHER MATHEMATISCHE SCHRIFTEN 73 (2005), 152-212—
(Click for clearer image)
Note that Theorem 46 of Klin et al. describes the role
of the Galois tesseract in the Miracle Octad Generator
of R. T. Curtis (original 1976 version). The tesseract
(a 4×4 array) supplies the geometric part of the above
exceptional geometric-combinatorial isomorphism.
"How about another hand for the band?
They work real hard for it.
The Cherokee Cowboys, ladies and gentlemen."
— Ray Price, video, "Danny Boy Mid 80's Live"
Other deathly hallows suggested by today's NY Times—
Click the above image for posts from December 14.
That image mentions a death on August 5, 2005, in
"entertainment Mecca" Branson, Missouri.
Another note from August 5, 2005, reposted here
on Monday—
Happy birthday, Keith Richards.
Happy Beethoven's Birthday.
Related material: Abel 2005 and, more generally, Abel.
See also Visible Mathematics.
Odin's Jewel
Jim Holt, the author of remarks in yesterday's
Saturday evening post—
"It turns out that the Kyoto school of Buddhism
makes Heidegger seem like Rush Limbaugh—
it’s so rarified, I’ve never been able to
understand it at all. I’ve been knocking my head
against it for years."
— Vanity Fair Daily , July 16, 2012
Backstory: Odin + Jewel in this journal.
See also Odin on the Kyoto school —
For another version of Odin's jewel, see Log24
on the date— July 16, 2012— that Holt's Vanity Fair
remarks were published. Scroll to the bottom of the
"Mapping Problem continued" post for an instance of
the Galois tesseract —
The Kummer 166 configuration is the configuration of sixteen
6-sets within a 4×4 square array of points in which each 6-set
is determined by one of the 16 points of the array and
consists of the 3 other points in that point's row and the
3 other points in that point's column.
See Configurations and Squares.
The Wikipedia article Kummer surface uses a rather poetic
phrase* to describe the relationship of the 166 to a number
of other mathematical concepts — "geometric incarnation."
Related material from finitegeometry.org —
* Apparently from David Lehavi on March 18, 2007, at Citizendium .
The Galois tesseract appeared in an early form in the journal
Computer Graphics and Art , Vol. 2, No. 1, February 1977—
The Galois tesseract is the basis for a representation of the smallest
projective 3-space, PG(3,2), that differs from the representation at
Wolfram Demonstrations Project. For the latter, see yesterday’s post.
The tesseract representation underlies the diamond theorem, illustrated
below in its earliest form, also from the above February 1977 article—
As noted in a more recent version, the group described by
the diamond theorem is also the group of the 35 square
patterns within the 1976 Miracle Octad Generator (MOG) of
R. T. Curtis.
The Daily Princetonian today:
A different cover act, discussed here Saturday:
See also, in this journal, the Galois tesseract and the Crosswicks Curse.
"There is such a thing as a tesseract." — Crosswicks saying
The hypercube model of the 4-space over the 2-element Galois field GF(2):
The phrase Galois tesseract may be used to denote a different model
of the above 4-space: the 4×4 square.
MacWilliams and Sloane discussed the Miracle Octad Generator
(MOG) of R. T. Curtis further on in their book (see below), but did not
seem to realize in 1977 that the 4×4 structures within the MOG are
based on the Galois-tesseract model of the 4-space over GF(2).
The thirty-five 4×4 structures within the MOG:
Curtis himself first described these 35 square MOG patterns
combinatorially, (as his title indicated) rather than
algebraically or geometrically:
A later book co-authored by Sloane, first published in 1988,
did recognize the 4×4 MOG patterns as based on the 4×4
Galois-tesseract model.
Between the 1977 and 1988 Sloane books came the diamond theorem.
Update of May 29, 2013:
The Galois tesseract appeared in an early form in the journal
Computer Graphics and Art , Vol. 2, No. 1, February 1977
(the year the above MacWilliams-Sloane book was first published):
Best vs. Bester
The previous post ended with a reference mentioning Rosenhain.
For a recent application of Rosenhain's work, see
Desargues via Rosenhain (April 1, 2013).
From the next day, April 2, 2013:
"The proof of Desargues' theorem of projective geometry
comes as close as a proof can to the Zen ideal.
It can be summarized in two words: 'I see!' "
– Gian-Carlo Rota in Indiscrete Thoughts (1997)
Also in that book, originally from a review in Advances in Mathematics ,
Vol. 84, Number 1, Nov. 1990, p. 136:
See, too, in the Conway-Sloane book, the Galois tesseract …
and, in this journal, Geometry for Jews and The Deceivers , by Bester.
From an arXiv preprint submitted July 18, 2011,
and last revised on March 11, 2013 (version 4):
"By our construction, this vector space is the dual
of our hypercube F24 built on I \ O9. The vector space
structure of the latter, to our knowledge, is first
mentioned by Curtis in [Cur89]. Hence altogether
our proposition 2.3.4 gives a novel geometric
meaning in terms of Kummer geometry to the known
vector space structure on I \ O9."
[Cur89] reference:
R. T. Curtis, "Further elementary techniques using
the miracle octad generator," Proc. Edinburgh
Math. Soc. 32 (1989), 345-353 (received on
July 20, 1987).
— Anne Taormina and Katrin Wendland,
"The overarching finite symmetry group of Kummer
surfaces in the Mathieu group M 24 ,"
arXiv.org > hep-th > arXiv:1107.3834
"First mentioned by Curtis…."
No. I claim that to the best of my knowledge, the
vector space structure was first mentioned by me,
Steven H. Cullinane, in an AMS abstract submitted
in October 1978, some nine years before the
Curtis article.
|
Update of the above paragraph on July 6, 2013—
No. The vector space structure was described by
The vector space structure as it occurs in a 4×4 array |
See Notes on Finite Geometry for some background.
See in particular The Galois Tesseract.
For the relationship of the 1978 abstract to Kummer
geometry, see Rosenhain and Göpel Tetrads in PG(3,2).
"The proof of Desargues' theorem of projective geometry
comes as close as a proof can to the Zen ideal.
It can be summarized in two words: 'I see!' "
— Gian-Carlo Rota in Indiscrete Thoughts (1997)
Also in that book, originally from a review in Advances in Mathematics,
Vol. 84, Number 1, Nov. 1990, p. 136:
Related material:
Pascal and the Galois nocciolo ,
Conway and the Galois tesseract,
Gardner and Galois.
See also Rota and Psychoshop.
Today's previous post recalled a post
from ten years before yesterday's date.
The subject of that post was the
Galois tesseract.
Here is a post from ten years before
today's date.
The subject of that post is the Halmos
tombstone:
"The symbol 
is used throughout the entire book
in place of such phrases as 'Q.E.D.' or 'This
completes the proof of the theorem' to signal
the end of a proof."
— Measure Theory (1950)
For exact proportions, click on the tombstone.
For some classic mathematics related
to the proportions, see September 2003.
Story, Structure, and the Galois Tesseract
Recent Log24 posts have referred to the
"Penrose diamond" and Minkowski space.
The Penrose diamond has nothing whatever
to do with my 1976 monograph "Diamond Theory,"
except for the diamond shape and the connection
of the Penrose diamond to the Klein quadric—
The Klein quadric occurs in the five-dimensional projective space
over a field. If the field is the two-element Galois field GF(2), the
quadric helps explain certain remarkable symmetry properties
of the R. T. Curtis Miracle Octad Generator (MOG), hence of
the large Mathieu group M24. These properties are also
relevant to the 1976 "Diamond Theory" monograph.
For some background on the quadric, see (for instance)…
See also The Klein Correspondence,
Penrose Space-Time, and a Finite Model.
Related material:
|
"… one might crudely distinguish between philosophical – J. M. E. Hyland. "Proof Theory in the Abstract." (pdf) |
Those who prefer story to structure may consult
The finite (i.e., Galois) field GF(16),
according to J. J. Seidel in 1974—
The same field according to Steven H. Cullinane in 1986,
in its guise as the affine 4-space over GF(2)—
The same field, again disguised as an affine 4-space,
according to John H. Conway and N.J.A. Sloane in
Sphere Packings, Lattices, and Groups , first published in 1988—
The above figure by Conway and Sloane summarizes, using
a 4×4 array, the additive vector-space structure of the finite
field GF(16).
This structure embodies what in Euclidean space is called
the parallelogram rule for vector addition—
(Thanks to June Lester for the 3D (uvw) part of the above figure.)
For the transition from this colored Euclidean hypercube
(used above to illustrate the parallelogram rule) to the
4×4 Galois space (illustrated by Cullinane in 1979 and
Conway and Sloane in 1988— or later… I do not have
their book’s first edition), see Diamond Theory in 1937,
Vertex Adjacency in a Tesseract and in a 4×4 Array,
Spaces as Hypercubes, and The Galois Tesseract.
For some related narrative, see tesseract in this journal.
(This post has been added to finitegeometry.org.)
Update of August 9, 2013—
Coordinates for hypercube vertices derived from the
parallelogram rule in four dimensions were better
illustrated by Jürgen Köller in a web page archived in 2002.
Update of August 13, 2013—
The four basis vectors in the 2002 Köller hypercube figure
are also visible at the bottom of the hypercube figure on
page 7 of “Diamond Theory,” excerpts from a 1976 preprint
in Computer Graphics and Art , Vol. 2, No. 1, February 1977.
A predecessor: Coxeter’s 1950 hypercube figure from
“Self-Dual Configurations and Regular Graphs.”
Background— George Steiner in this journal
and elsewhere—
"An intensity of outward attention —
interest, curiosity, healthy obsession —
was Steiner’s version of God’s grace."
— Lee Siegel in The New York Times ,
March 12, 2009
(See also Aesthetics of Matter in this journal on that date.)
Steiner in 1969 defined man as "a language animal."
Here is Steiner in 1974 on another definition—
Related material—
Also related — Kantor in 1981 on "exquisite finite geometries," and The Galois Tesseract.
"Debates about canonicity have been raging in my field
(literary studies) for as long as the field has been
around. Who's in? Who's out? How do we decide?"
— Stephen Ramsay, "The Hermeneutics of Screwing Around"
An example of canonicity in geometry—
"There are eight heptads of 7 mutually azygetic screws, each consisting of the screws having a fixed subscript (from 0 to 7) in common. The transformations of LF(4,2) correspond in a one-to-one manner with the even permutations on these heptads, and this establishes the isomorphism of LF(4,2) and A8. The 35 lines in S3 correspond uniquely to the separations of the eight heptads into two complementary sets of 4…."
— J.S. Frame, 1955 review of a 1954 paper by W.L. Edge,
"The Geometry of the Linear Fractional Group LF(4,2)"
Thanks for the Ramsay link are due to Stanley Fish
(last evening's online New York Times ).
For further details, see The Galois Tesseract.
J. H. Conway in 1971 discussed the role of an elementary abelian group
of order 16 in the Mathieu group M24. His approach at that time was
purely algebraic, not geometric—
For earlier (and later) discussions of the geometry (not the algebra )
of that order-16 group (i.e., the group of translations of the affine space
of 4 dimensions over the 2-element field), see The Galois Tesseract.
"Design is how it works." — Steve Jobs
From a commercial test-prep firm in New York City—
From the date of the above uploading—
|
|
From a New Year's Day, 2012, weblog post in New Zealand—
From Arthur C. Clarke, an early version of his 2001 monolith—
"So they left a sentinel, one of millions they have scattered
throughout the Universe, watching over all worlds with the
promise of life. It was a beacon that down the ages has been
patiently signaling the fact that no one had discovered it.
Perhaps you understand now why that crystal pyramid was set…."
The numerical (not crystal) pyramid above is related to a sort of
mathematical block design known as a Steiner system.
For its relationship to the graphic block design shown above,
see the webpages Block Designs and The Diamond Theorem
as well as The Galois Tesseract and R. T. Curtis's classic paper
"A New Combinatorial Approach to M24," which contains the following
version of the above numerical pyramid—
For graphic block designs, I prefer the blocks (and the parents)
of Grand Rapids to those of New York City.
For the barbed tail of Clarke's "Angel" story, see the New Zealand post
of New Year's Day mentioned above.
Mathematics —
(Some background for the Galois tesseract )
Narrative —
An essay on science and philosophy in the January 2012
Notices of the American Mathematical Society .
Note particularly the narrative explanation of the double-slit experiment—
"The assertion that elementary particles have
free will and follow Quality very closely leads to
some startling consequences. For instance, the
wave-particle duality paradox, in particular the baffling
results of the famous double slit experiment,
may now be reconsidered. In that experiment, first
conducted by Thomas Young at the beginning
of the nineteenth century, a point light source
illuminated a thin plate with two adjacent parallel
slits in it. The light passing through the slits
was projected on a screen behind the plate, and a
pattern of bright and dark bands on the screen was
observed. It was precisely the interference pattern
caused by the diffraction patterns of waves passing
through adjacent holes in an obstruction. However,
when the same experiment was carried out much
later, only this time with photons being shot at
the screen one at a time—the same interference
pattern resulted! But the Metaphysics of Quality
can offer an explanation: the photons each follow
Quality in their actions, and so either individually
or en masse (i.e., from a light source) will do the
same thing, that is, create the same interference
pattern on the screen."
This is from "a Ph.D. candidate in mathematics at the University of Calgary."
His essay is titled "A Perspective on Wigner’s 'Unreasonable Effectiveness
of Mathematics.'" It might better be titled "Ineffective Metaphysics."
Mathematics and Narrative, continued
"… a vision invisible, even ineffable, as ineffable as the Angels and the Universal Souls"
— Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word , 1975, quoted here on October 30th
"… our laughable abstractions, our wryly ironic po-mo angels dancing on the heads of so many mis-imagined quantum pins."
— Dan Conover on September 1st, 2011
"Recently I happened to be talking to a prominent California geologist, and she told me: 'When I first went into geology, we all thought that in science you create a solid layer of findings, through experiment and careful investigation, and then you add a second layer, like a second layer of bricks, all very carefully, and so on. Occasionally some adventurous scientist stacks the bricks up in towers, and these towers turn out to be insubstantial and they get torn down, and you proceed again with the careful layers. But we now realize that the very first layers aren't even resting on solid ground. They are balanced on bubbles, on concepts that are full of air, and those bubbles are being burst today, one after the other.'
I suddenly had a picture of the entire astonishing edifice collapsing and modern man plunging headlong back into the primordial ooze. He's floundering, sloshing about, gulping for air, frantically treading ooze, when he feels something huge and smooth swim beneath him and boost him up, like some almighty dolphin. He can't see it, but he's much impressed. He names it God."
— Tom Wolfe, "Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died," Forbes , 1996
"… Ockham's idea implies that we probably have the ability to do something now such that if we were to do it, then the past would have been different…"
— Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
"Today is February 28, 2008, and we are privileged to begin a conversation with Mr. Tom Wolfe."
— Interviewer for the National Association of Scholars
From that conversation—
Wolfe : "People in academia should start insisting on objective scholarship, insisting on it, relentlessly, driving the point home, ramming it down the gullets of the politically correct, making noise! naming names! citing egregious examples! showing contempt to the brink of brutality!"
As for "mis-imagined quantum pins"…
This journal on the date of the above interview— February 28, 2008—
Illustration from a Perimeter Institute talk given on July 20, 2005
The date of Conover's "quantum pins" remark above (together with Ockham's remark above and the above image) suggests a story by Conover, "The Last Epiphany," and four posts from September 1st, 2011—
Boundary, How It Works, For Thor's Day, and The Galois Tesseract.
Those four posts may be viewed as either an exploration or a parody of the boundary between mathematics and narrative.
"There is such a thing as a tesseract." —A Wrinkle in Time
Today is day 256 of 2011, Programmers' Day.
Yesterday, Monday, R. W. Barraclough's website pictured the Octad of the Week—
" X never, ever, marks the spot."
See also The Galois Tesseract.
Paul Robeson in
"King Solomon's Mines," 1937—
The image above is an illustration from
"Romancing the Hyperspace," May 4, 2010.
This illustration, along with Georgia Brown's
song from "Cabin in the Sky"—
"There's honey in the honeycomb"—
suggests the following picture.
"What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present."
— Four Quartets
Two of the thumbnail previews
from yesterday's 1 AM post …
Further down in the "6 Prescott St." post, the link 5 Divinity Avenue
leads to …
|
A Letter from Timothy Leary, Ph.D., July 17, 1961
Harvard University July 17, 1961
Dr. Thomas S. Szasz Dear Dr. Szasz: Your book arrived several days ago. I've spent eight hours on it and realize the task (and joy) of reading it has just begun. The Myth of Mental Illness is the most important book in the history of psychiatry. I know it is rash and premature to make this earlier judgment. I reserve the right later to revise and perhaps suggest it is the most important book published in the twentieth century. It is great in so many ways–scholarship, clinical insight, political savvy, common sense, historical sweep, human concern– and most of all for its compassionate, shattering honesty. . . . . |
The small Morton Prince House in the above letter might, according to
the above-quoted remarks by Corinna S. Rohse, be called a "jewel box."
Harvard moved it in 1978 from Divinity Avenue to its current location at
6 Prescott Street.
Related "jewel box" material for those who
prefer narrative to mathematics —
"In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test , Tom Wolfe writes about encountering
'a young psychologist,' 'Clifton Fadiman’s nephew, it turned out,' in the
waiting room of the San Mateo County jail. Fadiman and his wife were
'happily stuffing three I-Ching coins into some interminable dense volume*
of Oriental mysticism' that they planned to give Ken Kesey, the Prankster-
in-Chief whom the FBI had just nabbed after eight months on the lam.
Wolfe had been granted an interview with Kesey, and they wanted him to
tell their friend about the hidden coins. During this difficult time, they
explained, Kesey needed oracular advice."
— Tim Doody in The Morning News web 'zine on July 26, 2012**
Oracular advice related to yesterday evening's
"jewel box" post …
A 4-dimensional hypercube H (a tesseract ) has 24 square
2-dimensional faces. In its incarnation as a Galois tesseract
(a 4×4 square array of points for which the appropriate transformations
are those of the affine 4-space over the finite (i.e., Galois) two-element
field GF(2)), the 24 faces transform into 140 4-point "facets." The Galois
version of H has a group of 322,560 automorphisms. Therefore, by the
orbit-stabilizer theorem, each of the 140 facets of the Galois version has
a stabilizer group of 2,304 affine transformations.
Similar remarks apply to the I Ching In its incarnation as
a Galois hexaract , for which the symmetry group — the group of
affine transformations of the 6-dimensional affine space over GF(2) —
has not 322,560 elements, but rather 1,290,157,424,640.
* The volume Wolfe mentions was, according to Fadiman, the I Ching.
** See also this journal on that date — July 26, 2012.
Besides omitting the name Cullinane, the anonymous Wikipedia author
also omitted the step of representing the hypercube by a 4×4 array —
an array called in this journal a Galois tesseract.
A passage that may or may not have influenced Madeleine L'Engle's
writings about the tesseract :
|
From Mere Christianity , by C. S. Lewis (1952) —
"Book IV – Beyond Personality: I warned you that Theology is practical. The whole purpose for which we exist is to be thus taken into the life of God. Wrong ideas about what that life is, will make it harder. And now, for a few minutes, I must ask you to follow rather carefully. You know that in space you can move in three ways—to left or right, backwards or forwards, up or down. Every direction is either one of these three or a compromise between them. They are called the three Dimensions. Now notice this. If you are using only one dimension, you could draw only a straight line. If you are using two, you could draw a figure: say, a square. And a square is made up of four straight lines. Now a step further. If you have three dimensions, you can then build what we call a solid body, say, a cube—a thing like a dice or a lump of sugar. And a cube is made up of six squares. Do you see the point? A world of one dimension would be a straight line. In a two-dimensional world, you still get straight lines, but many lines make one figure. In a three-dimensional world, you still get figures but many figures make one solid body. In other words, as you advance to more real and more complicated levels, you do not leave behind you the things you found on the simpler levels: you still have them, but combined in new ways—in ways you could not imagine if you knew only the simpler levels. Now the Christian account of God involves just the same principle. The human level is a simple and rather empty level. On the human level one person is one being, and any two persons are two separate beings—just as, in two dimensions (say on a flat sheet of paper) one square is one figure, and any two squares are two separate figures. On the Divine level you still find personalities; but up there you find them combined in new ways which we, who do not live on that level, cannot imagine. In God's dimension, so to speak, you find a being who is three Persons while remaining one Being, just as a cube is six squares while remaining one cube. Of course we cannot fully conceive a Being like that: just as, if we were so made that we perceived only two dimensions in space we could never properly imagine a cube. But we can get a sort of faint notion of it. And when we do, we are then, for the first time in our lives, getting some positive idea, however faint, of something super-personal—something more than a person. It is something we could never have guessed, and yet, once we have been told, one almost feels one ought to have been able to guess it because it fits in so well with all the things we know already. You may ask, "If we cannot imagine a three-personal Being, what is the good of talking about Him?" Well, there isn't any good talking about Him. The thing that matters is being actually drawn into that three-personal life, and that may begin any time —tonight, if you like. . . . . |
But beware of being drawn into the personal life of the Happy Family .
https://www.jstor.org/stable/24966339 —
"The colorful story of this undertaking begins with a bang."
And ends with …
"Galois was a thoroughly obnoxious nerd,
suffering from what today would be called
a 'personality disorder.' His anger was
paranoid and unremitting."
Naive readers may suppose that this sort of thing is
related to what has been dubbed "geometric group theory."
It is not. See posts now tagged Aesthetic Distance.
The images in the previous post do not lend themselves
to any straightforward narrative. Two portions of the
large image search are, however, suggestive —
Cross and Boolean lattice.
The improvised cross in the second pair of images
is perhaps being wielded to counteract the
Boole of the first pair of images. See the heading
of the webpage that is the source of the lattice
diagram toward which the cross is directed —
Update of 10 am on August 16, 2016 —
See also Atiyah on the theology of
(Boolean) algebra vs. (Galois) geometry:
It is an odd fact that the close relationship between some
small Galois spaces and small Boolean spaces has gone
unremarked by mathematicians.
A Google search today for “Galois spaces” + “Boolean spaces”
yielded, apart from merely terminological sources, only some
introductory material I have put on the Web myself.
Some more sophisticated searches, however led to a few
documents from the years 1971 – 1981 …
“Harmonic Analysis of Switching Functions” ,
by Robert J. Lechner, Ch. 5 in A. Mukhopadhyay, editor,
Recent Developments in Switching Theory , Academic Press, 1971.
“Galois Switching Functions and Their Applications,”
by B. Benjauthrit and I. S. Reed,
JPL Deep Space Network Progress Report 42-27 , 1975
D.K. Pradhan, “A Theory of Galois Switching Functions,”
IEEE Trans. Computers , vol. 27, no. 3, pp. 239-249, Mar. 1978
“Switching functions constructed by Galois extension fields,”
by Iwaro Takahashi, Information and Control ,
Volume 48, Issue 2, pp. 95–108, February 1981
An illustration from the Lechner paper above —
“There is such a thing as harmonic analysis of switching functions.”
— Saying adapted from a young-adult novel
There is such a thing as geometry.*
* Proposition adapted from A Wrinkle in Time , by Madeleine L'Engle.
* For related remarks, see posts of May 26-28, 2012.
Raiders of the Lost (Continued)
"Socrates: They say that the soul of man is immortal…."
From August 16, 2012—
In the geometry of Plato illustrated below,
"the figure of eight [square] feet" is not , at this point
in the dialogue, the diamond in Jowett's picture.
An 1892 figure by Jowett illustrating Plato's Meno—
A more correct version, from hermes-press.com —
|
Socrates: He only guesses that because the square is double, the line is double.Meno: True.
Socrates: Observe him while he recalls the steps in regular order. (To the Boy.) Tell me, boy, do you assert that a double space comes from a double line? Remember that I am not speaking of an oblong, but of a figure equal every way, and twice the size of this-that is to say of eight feet; and I want to know whether you still say that a double square comes from double line? [Boy] Yes. Socrates: But does not this line (AB) become doubled if we add another such line here (BJ is added)? [Boy] Certainly.
Socrates: And four such lines [AJ, JK, KL, LA] will make a space containing eight feet? [Boy] Yes. Socrates: Let us draw such a figure: (adding DL, LK, and JK). Would you not say that this is the figure of eight feet? [Boy] Yes. Socrates: And are there not these four squares in the figure, each of which is equal to the figure of four feet? (Socrates draws in CM and CN) [Boy] True. Socrates: And is not that four times four? [Boy] Certainly. Socrates: And four times is not double? [Boy] No, indeed. Socrates: But how much? [Boy] Four times as much. Socrates: Therefore the double line, boy, has given a space, not twice, but four times as much. [Boy] True. Socrates: Four times four are sixteen— are they not? [Boy] Yes. |
As noted in the 2012 post, the diagram of greater interest is
Jowett's incorrect version rather than the more correct version
shown above. This is because the 1892 version inadvertently
illustrates a tesseract:
A 4×4 square version, by Coxeter in 1950, of a tesseract—
This square version we may call the Galois tesseract.
Profile picture of "Jo Lyxe" (Josefine Lyche) at Vimeo—
Compare to an image of Vril muse Maria Orsitsch.
From the catalog of a current art exhibition
(25 May – 31 August, 2013) in Norway,
I DE LANGE NÆTTER —
|
Josefine Lyche
Keywords (to help place my artwork in the (See also the original catalog page.) |
Clearly most of this (the non-highlighted parts) was taken
from my webpage Diamond Theory. I suppose I should be
flattered, but I am not thrilled to be associated with the
(apparently fictional) Vril Society.
For some background, see (for instance)
Conspiracy Theories and Secret Societies for Dummies .
The title is that of a talk (see video) given by
George Dyson at a Princeton land preservation trust,
reportedly on March 21, 2013. The talk's subtitle was
"Oswald Veblen and the Six-hundred-acre Woods."
Meanwhile…
Thursday, March 21, 2013
|
Related material for those who prefer narrative
to mathematics:
|
Log24 on June 6, 2006:
The Omen :
|
Related material for those who prefer mathematics
to narrative:
What the Omen narrative above and the mathematics of Veblen
have in common is the number 6. Veblen, who came to
Princeton in 1905 and later helped establish the Institute,
wrote extensively on projective geometry. As the British
geometer H. F. Baker pointed out, 6 is a rather important number
in that discipline. For the connection of 6 to the Göpel tetrads
figure above from March 21, see a note from May 1986.
See also last night's Veblen and Young in Light of Galois.
"There is such a thing as a tesseract." — Madeleine L'Engle
From the prologue to the new Joyce Carol Oates
novel Accursed—
"This journey I undertake with such anticipation
is not one of geographical space but one of Time—
for it is the year 1905 that is my destination.
1905!—the very year of the Curse."
Today's previous post supplied a fanciful link
between the Crosswicks Curse of Oates and
the Crosswicks tesseract of Madeleine L'Engle.
The Crosswicks Curse according to L'Engle
in her classic 1962 novel A Wrinkle in Time —
"There is such a thing as a tesseract."
A tesseract is a 4-dimensional hypercube that
(as pointed out by Coxeter in 1950) may also
be viewed as a 4×4 array (with opposite edges
identified).
Meanwhile, back in 1905…
For more details, see how the Rosenhain and Göpel tetrads occur naturally
in the diamond theorem model of the 35 lines of the 15-point projective
Galois space PG(3,2).
See also Conwell in this journal and George Macfeely Conwell in the
honors list of the Princeton Class of 1905.
The subtitle of Jack Kerouac's novel Doctor Sax
is Faust Part Three.
Related material—
Types of Ambiguity— Galois Meets Doctor Faustus
(this journal, December 14, 2010).
From an obituary for Helen Nicoll, author
of a popular series of British children's books—
"They feature Meg, a witch whose spells
always seem to go wrong, her cat Mog,
and their friend Owl."
For some (very loosely) related concepts that
have been referred to in this journal, see…
See, too, "Kids grow up" (Feb. 13, 2012).
In the above view, four of the tesseract's 16
vertices are overlaid by other vertices.
For views that are more complete and
moveable, see Smith's tesseract page.
Four-Part Tesseract Divisions—
The above figure shows how four-part partitions
of the 16 vertices of a tesseract in an infinite
Euclidean space are related to four-part partitions
of the 16 points in a finite Galois space
|
Euclidean spaces versus Galois spaces in a larger context— Infinite versus Finite 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." |
Another picture related to philosophy and religion—
Jung's Four-Diamond Figure from Aion—
This figure was devised by Jung
to represent the Self. Compare the
remarks of Paul Valéry on the Self—
|
Flight from Eden: The Origins of Modern Literary Criticism and Theory, by Steven Cassedy, U. of California Press, 1990, pages 156-157—
Valéry saw the mind as essentially a relational system whose operation he attempted to describe in the language of group mathematics. "Every act of understanding is based on a group," he says (C, 1:331). "My specialty— reducing everything to the study of a system closed on itself and finite" (C, 19: 645). The transformation model came into play, too. At each moment of mental life the mind is like a group, or relational system, but since mental life is continuous over time, one "group" undergoes a "transformation" and becomes a different group in the next moment. If the mind is constantly being transformed, how do we account for the continuity of the self? Simple; by invoking the notion of the invariant. And so we find passages like this one: "The S[elf] is invariant, origin, locus or field, it's a functional property of consciousness" (C, 15:170 [2:315]). Just as in transformational geometry, something remains fixed in all the projective transformations of the mind's momentary systems, and that something is the Self (le Moi, or just M, as Valéry notates it so that it will look like an algebraic variable). Transformation theory is all over the place. "Mathematical science… reduced to algebra, that is, to the analysis of the transformations of a purely differential being made up of homogeneous elements, is the most faithful document of the properties of grouping, disjunction, and variation in the mind" (O, 1:36). "Psychology is a theory of transformations, we just need to isolate the invariants and the groups" (C, 1:915). "Man is a system that transforms itself" (C, 2:896). O Paul Valéry, Oeuvres (Paris: Pléiade, 1957-60) C Valéry, Cahiers, 29 vols. (Paris: Centre National de le Recherche Scientifique, 1957-61) |
Note also the remarks of George David Birkhoff at Rice University
in 1940 (pdf) on Galois's theory of groups and the related
"theory of ambiguity" in Galois's testamentary letter—
|
… metaphysical reasoning always relies on the Principle of Sufficient Reason, and… the true meaning of this Principle is to be found in the “Theory of Ambiguity” and in the associated mathematical “Theory of Groups.” If I were a Leibnizian mystic, believing in his “preestablished harmony,” and the “best possible world” so satirized by Voltaire in “Candide,” I would say that the metaphysical importance of the Principle of Sufficient Reason and the cognate Theory of Groups arises from the fact that God thinks multi-dimensionally* whereas men can only think in linear syllogistic series, and the Theory of Groups is the appropriate instrument of thought to remedy our deficiency in this respect. * That is, uses multi-dimensional symbols beyond our grasp. |
Related material:
A medal designed by Leibniz to show how
binary arithmetic mirrors the creation by God
of something (1) from nothing (0).
Another array of 16 strings of 0's and 1's, this time
regarded as coordinates rather than binary numbers—
Some context by a British mathematician —
|
Imago by Wallace Stevens Who can pick up the weight of Britain, Who can move the German load Or say to the French here is France again? Imago. Imago. Imago. It is nothing, no great thing, nor man Of ten brilliancies of battered gold And fortunate stone. It moves its parade Of motions in the mind and heart, A gorgeous fortitude. Medium man In February hears the imagination's hymns And sees its images, its motions And multitudes of motions And feels the imagination's mercies, In a season more than sun and south wind, Something returning from a deeper quarter, A glacier running through delirium, Making this heavy rock a place, Which is not of our lives composed . . . Lightly and lightly, O my land, Move lightly through the air again. |
|
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 |
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 FiguringSerious
"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.
A Logocentric Archetype
Today we examine the relativist, nominalist, leftist, nihilist, despairing, depressing, absurd, and abominable work of Samuel Beckett, darling of the postmodernists.
One lens through which to view Beckett is an essay by Jennifer Martin, "Beckettian Drama as Protest: A Postmodern Examination of the 'Delogocentering' of Language." Martin begins her essay with two quotations: one from the contemptible French twerp Jacques Derrida, and one from Beckett's masterpiece of stupidity, Molloy. For a logocentric deconstruction of Derrida, see my note, "The Shining of May 29," which demonstrates how Derrida attempts to convert a rather important mathematical result to his brand of nauseating and pretentious nonsense, and of course gets it wrong. For a logocentric deconstruction of Molloy, consider the following passage:
"I took advantage of being at the seaside to lay in a store of sucking-stones. They were pebbles but I call them stones…. I distributed them equally among my four pockets, and sucked them turn and turn about. This raised a problem which I first solved in the following way. I had say sixteen stones, four in each of my four pockets these being the two pockets of my trousers and the two pockets of my greatcoat. Taking a stone from the right pocket of my greatcoat, and putting it in my mouth, I replaced it in the right pocket of my greatcoat by a stone from the right pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my trousers, which I replaced by a stone from the left pocket of my greatcoat, which I replaced by the stone which was in my mouth, as soon as I had finished sucking it. Thus there were still four stones in each of my four pockets, but not quite the same stones….But this solution did not satisfy me fully. For it did not escape me that, by an extraordinary hazard, the four stones circulating thus might always be the same four."
Beckett is describing, in great detail, how a damned moron might approach the extraordinarily beautiful mathematical discipline known as group theory, founded by the French anticleric and leftist Evariste Galois. Disciples of Derrida may play at mimicking the politics of Galois, but will never come close to imitating his genius. For a worthwhile discussion of permutation groups acting on a set of 16 elements, see R. D. Carmichael's masterly work, Introduction to the Theory of Groups of Finite Order, Ginn, Boston, 1937, reprinted by Dover, New York, 1956.
There are at least two ways of approaching permutations on 16 elements in what Pascal calls "l'esprit géométrique." My website Diamond Theory discusses the action of the affine group in a four-dimensional finite geometry of 16 points. For a four-dimensional euclidean hypercube, or tesseract, with 16 vertices, see the highly logocentric movable illustration by Harry J. Smith. The concept of a tesseract was made famous, though seen through a glass darkly, by the Christian writer Madeleine L'Engle in her novel for children and young adults, A Wrinkle in Tme.
This tesseract may serve as an archetype for what Pascal, Simone Weil (see my earlier notes), Harry J. Smith, and Madeleine L'Engle might, borrowing their enemies' language, call their "logocentric" philosophy.
For a more literary antidote to postmodernist nihilism, see Archetypal Theory and Criticism, by Glen R. Gill.
For a discussion of the full range of meaning of the word "logos," which has rational as well as religious connotations, click here.
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