Log24

Friday, November 17, 2023

The Center

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:15 am

See "Concordance + Center" in this journal, a search
suggested by the new URL "geometry.center."
 

Tuesday, July 2, 2019

Depth Psychology Meets Inscape Geometry

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:00 am

An illustration from the previous post may be interpreted
as an attempt to unbokeh  an inscape

The 15 lines above are Euclidean  lines based on pairs within a six-set. 
For examples of Galois  lines so based, see Six-Set Geometry:

Thursday, October 26, 2017

A Center

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 8:40 pm

This post was suggested by a New York Times  obituary this evening —

"Tom Mathews, Promoter of Liberal Causes and Candidates, Dies at 96."

Mathews reportedly died on October 14, 2017.

"Mr. Mathews and his business partner Roger Craver 'dreamed for years
of finding the perfect citizen-candidate,' the authors wrote, 'a man or
woman of the center-left with a feel for issues, a history of independence,
a winning television manner and, most important of all, a center — a core
of beliefs more important to him or her than getting elected.'

Dream on.

From the date of Mathews's death:

Posts now tagged A Center for Krauss

"Let no one ignorant of geometry enter"

Saturday, November 14, 2015

Search for a Center

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

See Geometry + Center in this journal.

Sunday, May 4, 2014

Geometry for Scarlett

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 11:16 am

Scarlett Johansson stars in a new film, "Lucy," due to be
released on August 8, directed by Luc Besson, auteur  of
The Fifth Element  (1997). In other pop culture…

 "There have long been rumors of a mythical Ninth Element
that grants ultimate power to the Wizard who masters it.
The Order of Magick says there is no such thing. But…."

— Website of Magicka: The Ninth Element Novel

See also, in this journal, Holy Field as well as Power of the Center.

Saturday, August 17, 2013

Up-to-Date Geometry

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 7:24 pm

The following excerpt from a January 20, 2013, preprint shows that
a Galois-geometry version of the large Desargues 154203 configuration,
although based on the nineteenth-century work of Galois* and of Fano,** 
may at times have twenty-first-century applications.

IMAGE- James Atkinson, Jan. 2013 preprint on Yang-Baxter maps mentioning finite geometry

Some context —

Atkinson's paper does not use the square model of PG(3,2), which later
in 2013 provided a natural view of the large Desargues 154203 configuration.
See my own Classical Geometry in Light of Galois Geometry.  Atkinson's
"subset of 20 lines" corresponds to 20 of the 80 Rosenhain tetrads
mentioned in that later article and pictured within 4×4 squares in Hudson's
1905 classic Kummer's Quartic Surface.

* E. Galois, definition of finite fields in "Sur la Théorie des Nombres,"
  Bulletin des Sciences Mathématiques de M. Férussac,
  Vol. 13, 1830, pp. 428-435.

** G. Fano, definition of PG(3,2) in "Sui Postulati Fondamentali…,"
    Giornale di Matematiche, Vol. 30, 1892, pp. 106-132.

Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Elementary Finite Geometry

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 7:16 pm

I. General finite geometry (without coordinates):

A finite affine plane of order has n^2 points.

A finite projective plane of order n  has n^2 + n + 1 

points because it is formed from an order-n finite affine 

plane by adding a line at infinity  that contains n + 1 points.

Examples—

Affine plane of order 3

Projective plane of order 3

II. Galois finite geometry (with coordinates over a Galois field):

A finite projective Galois plane of order n has n^2 + n + 1

points because it is formed from a finite affine Galois 3-space

of order n with n^3 points by discarding the point (0,0,0) and 

identifying the points whose coordinates are multiples of the

(n-1) nonzero scalars.

Note: The resulting Galois plane of order n has 

(n^3-1)/(n-1)= (n^2 + n + 1) points because 

(n^2 + n + 1)(n – 1) =

(n^3 + n^2 + n – n^2 – n – 1) = (n^3 – 1) .
 

III. Related art:

Another version of a 1994 picture that accompanied a New Yorker
article, "Atheists with Attitude," in the issue dated May 21, 2007:

IMAGE- 'Four Gods,' by Jonathan Borofsky

The Four Gods  of Borofsky correspond to the four axes of 
symmetry
  of a square and to the four points on a line at infinity 
in an order-3 projective plane as described in Part I above.

Those who prefer literature to mathematics may, if they like,
view the Borofsky work as depicting

"Blake's Four Zoas, which represent four aspects
of the Almighty God" —Wikipedia

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Geometry of Language

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

(Continued from April 23, 2009, and February 13, 2010.)

Paul Valéry as quoted in yesterday’s post:

“The S[elf] is invariant, origin, locus or field, it’s a functional property of consciousness” (Cahiers, 15:170 [2: 315])

The geometric example discussed here yesterday as a Self symbol may seem too small to be really impressive. Here is a larger example from the Chinese, rather than European, tradition. It may be regarded as a way of representing the Galois field GF(64). (“Field” is a rather ambiguous term; here it does not, of course, mean what it did in the Valéry quotation.)

From Geometry of the I Ching

Image-- The 64 hexagrams of the I Ching

The above 64 hexagrams may also be regarded as
the finite affine space AG(6,2)— a larger version
of the finite affine space AG(4,2) in yesterday’s post.
That smaller space has a group of 322,560 symmetries.
The larger hexagram  space has a group of
1,290,157,424,640 affine symmetries.

From a paper on GL(6,2), the symmetry group
of the corresponding projective  space PG(5,2),*
which has 1/64 as many symmetries—

(Click to enlarge.)

Image-- Classes of the Group GL(6,)

For some narrative in the European  tradition
related to this geometry, see Solomon’s Cube.

* Update of July 29, 2011: The “PG(5,2)” above is a correction from an earlier error.

Saturday, June 12, 2010

Holy Geometry

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 10:31 am

The late mathematician V.I. Arnold was born on this date in 1937.

"By groping toward the light we are made to realize
 how deep the darkness is around us."
  — Arthur Koestler, The Call Girls: A Tragi-Comedy

Light

Image-- AMS site screenshot of V.I. Arnold obituary, June 12, 2010

Darkness

Image-- AMS site screenshot of Martin Gardner tribute, May 25, 2010

Choosing light rather than darkness, we observe Arnold's birthday with a quotation from his 1997 Paris talk 'On Teaching Mathematics.'

"The Jacobi identity (which forces the heights of a triangle to cross at one point) is an experimental fact…."

The "experimental fact" part, perhaps offered with tongue in cheek, is of less interest than the assertion that the Jacobi identity forces the altitude-intersection theorem.

Albert Einstein on that theorem in the "holy geometry book" he read at the age of 12—

"Here were assertions, as for example the intersection of the three altitudes of a triangle in one point, which– though by no means evident– could nevertheless be proved with such certainty that any doubt appeared to be out of the question.  This lucidity and certainty made an indescribable impression upon me.”

Arnold's much less  evident assertion about altitudes and the Jacobi identity is discussed in "Arnol'd, Jacobi identity, and orthocenters" (pdf) by Nikolai V. Ivanov.

Ivanov says, without giving a source,  that the altitudes theorem "was known to Euclid." Alexander Bogomolny, on the other hand, says it is "a matter of real wonderment that the fact of the concurrency of altitudes is not mentioned in either Euclid's Elements  or subsequent writings of the Greek scholars. The timing of the first proof is still an open question."

For other remarks on geometry, search this journal for the year of Arnold's birth.

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

From Plato to Finite Geometry

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 12:30 pm

A supplement to yesterday's post on variation of an eidos

Image-- Plato's diamond and a modern version from finite geometry

Enlarge.

Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Eightfold Geometry

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , , , — m759 @ 11:07 am

Image-- The 35 partitions of an 8-set into two 4-sets

Image-- Analysis of structure of the 35 partitions of an 8-set into two 4-sets

Image-- Miracle Octad Generator of R.T. Curtis

Related web pages:

Miracle Octad Generator,
Generating the Octad Generator,
Geometry of the 4×4 Square

Related folklore:

"It is commonly known that there is a bijection between the 35 unordered triples of a 7-set [i.e., the 35 partitions of an 8-set into two 4-sets] and the 35 lines of PG(3,2) such that lines intersect if and only if the corresponding triples have exactly one element in common." –"Generalized Polygons and Semipartial Geometries," by F. De Clerck, J. A. Thas, and H. Van Maldeghem, April 1996 minicourse, example 5 on page 6

The Miracle Octad Generator may be regarded as illustrating the folklore.

Update of August 20, 2010–

For facts rather than folklore about the above bijection, see The Moore Correspondence.

Thursday, April 22, 2010

Mere Geometry

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

Image-- semeion estin ou meros outhen

Image-- Euclid's definition of 'point'

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Mereology (from the Greek μερος, ‘part’) is the theory of parthood relations: of the relations of part to whole and the relations of part to part within a whole. Its roots can be traced back to the early days of philosophy, beginning with the Presocratics….”

A non-Euclidean* approach to parts–

Image-- examples from Galois affine geometry

Corresponding non-Euclidean*
projective points —

Image-- The smallest Galois geometries

Richard J. Trudeau in The Non-Euclidean Revolution, chapter on “Geometry and the Diamond Theory of Truth”–

“… Plato and Kant, and most of the philosophers and scientists in the 2200-year interval between them, did share the following general presumptions:

(1) Diamonds– informative, certain truths about the world– exist.
(2) The theorems of Euclidean geometry are diamonds.

Presumption (1) is what I referred to earlier as the ‘Diamond Theory’ of truth. It is far, far older than deductive geometry.”

Trudeau’s book was published in 1987. The non-Euclidean* figures above illustrate concepts from a 1976 monograph, also called “Diamond Theory.”

Although non-Euclidean,* the theorems of the 1976 “Diamond Theory” are also, in Trudeau’s terminology, diamonds.

* “Non-Euclidean” here means merely “other than  Euclidean.” No violation of Euclid’s parallel postulate is implied.

Tuesday, December 22, 2009

New Finite Geometry Note

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

Click screenshot to try the page:

Half-Circle Patterns

Sunday, February 4, 2024

Microsoft Copilot Doggerel

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 4:31 am

A poem written yesterday by Microsoft Copilot —

The prompt: "Write a poem about the Cullinane diamond theorem."

In the mind of the mathematician,
Among the figures and forms,
Lies the Cullinane diamond theorem,
A structure that transforms.

Four-diamond figure, a 4×4 array,
Of two-color diagonally-divided square tiles,
Permutations of these sixteen,
In rows, columns, and quadrants compiles.

Every G-image of the four-diamond figure,
Has some ordinary or color-interchange symmetry,
A pattern, a structure, a mathematical picture,
A testament to geometry's clarity.

The symmetry of the line diagrams,
Accounts for the symmetry of the two-color patterns,
A proof shows that a 2nx2n two-color triangular half-squares pattern,
Must have a 2×2 center with a symmetry that matters.

And this symmetry must be shared by the entire pattern,
A statement, a theorem, a mathematical lantern,
G is isomorphic to the affine group A,
On the linear 4-space over GF (2), they say.

The 35 structures of the 840 = 35 x 24 G-images,
Are isomorphic to the 35 lines,
In the 3-dimensional projective space over GF (2),
A concept that shines.

So here lies the beauty of the Cullinane diamond theorem,
In the mind of the mathematician, it's a gem,
A structure, a pattern, a mathematical diagram,
A testament to the beauty of STEM.

Actually, the complete  prompt, suggested by a Log24 post of
12:12 PM ET yesterday, was . . .

"Write a poem in the style of Wallace Stevens
about the Cullinane diamond theorem."

Copilot still has a thing or two to learn about poetic style.

Monday, January 29, 2024

Self as Imago Dei:  Hofstadter vs. Valéry

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:41 am
 

Google search result:

Imago Dei  in Thomas Aquinas

Saint Anselm College

https://www.anselm.edu › Documents › Brown

PDF

by M Brown · 2014 · Cited by 14 — Thomas insists that the image of God exists most perfectly in the acts of the soul, for the soul is that which is most perfect in us and so best images God, and …

11 pages

For a Douglas Hofstadter version of the Imago Dei , see the
"Gödel, Escher, Bach" illustration in the Jan. 15 screenshot below —

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Imago, Imago, Imago
 

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , , — m759 @ 11:07 am

Recommended— an online book—

Flight from Eden: The Origins of Modern Literary Criticism and Theory,
by Steven Cassedy, U. of California Press, 1990.

See in particular

Valéry and the Discourse On His Method.

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).

Notes:

  Paul Valéry, Oeuvres (Paris: Pléiade, 1957-60)

C   Valéry, Cahiers, 29 vols. (Paris: Centre National de le Recherche Scientifique, 1957-61)

Compare Jung’s image in Aion  of the Self as a four-diamond figure:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10A/100615-JungImago.gif

and Cullinane’s purely geometric four-diamond figure:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10A/100615-FourD.gif

For a natural group of 322,560 transformations acting on the latter figure, see the diamond theorem.

What remains fixed (globally, not pointwise) under these transformations is the system  of points and hyperplanes from the diamond theorem.

Thursday, December 28, 2023

Basque Country Art Book

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 6:20 pm

Book description at Amazon.com, translated by Google —

Las matemáticas como herramienta
de creación artística

Mathematics as a tool
for artistic creation

by Raúl Ibáñez Torres

Kindle edition in Spanish, 2023

Although the relationship between mathematics and art can be traced back to ancient times, mainly in geometric and technical aspects, it is with the arrival of the avant-garde and abstract art at the beginning of the 20th century that mathematics takes on greater and different relevance: as a source of inspiration and as a tool for artistic creation. Let us think, for example, of the importance of the fourth dimension for avant-garde movements or, starting with Kandisnky and later Max Bill and concrete art, the vindication of mathematical thinking in artistic creation. An idea that would have a fundamental influence on currents such as constructivism, minimalism, the fluxus movement, conceptual art, systematic art or optical art, among others. Following this approach, this book analyzes, through a variety of examples and activities, how mathematics is present in contemporary art as a creative tool. And it does so through five branches and the study of some of its mathematical topics: geometry (the Pythagorean theorem), topology (the Moebius strip), algebra (algebraic groups and matrices), combinatorics (permutations and combinations) and recreational mathematics (magic and Latin squares).

From the book ("Cullinane Diamond Theorem" heading and picture of
book's cover added) —

Publisher:Los Libros de La Catarata  (October 24, 2023)

Author: Raúl Ibáñez Torres, customarily known as Raúl Ibáñez

(Ibáñez does not mention Cullinane as the author of the above theorem
in his book (except indirectly, quoting Josefine Lyche), but he did credit
him fully in an earlier article, "The Truchet Tiles and the Diamond Puzzle"
(translation by Google).)

About Ibáñez (translated from Amazon.com by Google):

Mathematician, professor of Geometry at the University of the Basque Country
and scientific disseminator. He is part of the Chair of Scientific Culture of the
UPV/EHU and its blog Cuaderno de Cultura Cientifica. He has been a scriptwriter
and presenter of the program “Una de Mates” on the television program Órbita Laika.
He has collaborated since 2005 on the programs Graffiti and La mechanica del caracol
on Radio Euskadi. He has also been a collaborator and co-writer of the documentary
Hilos de tiempo (2020) about the artist Esther Ferrer. For 20 years he directed the
DivulgaMAT portal, Virtual Center for the Dissemination of Mathematics, and was a
member of the dissemination commission of the Royal Spanish Mathematical Society.
Author of several books, including The Secrets of Multiplication (2019) and
The Great Family of Numbers (2021), in the collection Miradas Matemáticas (Catarata).
He has received the V José María Savirón Prize for Scientific Dissemination
(national modality, 2010) and the COSCE Prize for the Dissemination of Science (2011).

Tuesday, December 5, 2023

The Annenberg Knell

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:38 pm

From a Log24 search for the above phrase . . .

"For many of us, the geometry course sounded the death knell
for our progress — and interest — in mathematics."

— "Shape and Space in Geometry"

© 1997-2003 Annenberg/CPB. All rights reserved.

See also Annenberg Hall.

Sunday, November 26, 2023

Stella for Macbeth

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:54 pm

"Play Stella by Starlight for Lady Macbeth" — Bob Dylan

Die Fahne Hoch,
Frank Stella,
1959


Dorothy Miller,
MoMA curator,

died at 99 on
July 11, 2003
.

A variation for Macbeth

For enthusiasts of arithmetic rather than geometry —

"4 + 12 = 16."

And for fans of Christoper Nolan — Window Panes :

Sunday, January 22, 2023

The Stillwell Dichotomies

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 1:18 am

Number Space
Arithmetic  Geometry
Discrete  Continuous

Related literature —

IMAGE- History of Mathematics in a Nutshell

Bourbaki on arithmetic and geometry

From a "Finite Fields in 1956" post —

The Nutshell:

    Related Narrative:

Wednesday, December 28, 2022

The Santa Fe Institute as Magisterium Wannabe

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:23 am

"The novelist Cormac McCarthy has been a fixture around
the Santa Fe Institute since its embryonic stages in the
early 1980s. Cormac received a MacArthur Award in 1981
and met one of the members of the board of the MacArthur
Foundation, Murray Gell-Mann, who had won the Nobel Prize
in physics in 1969. Cormac and Murray discovered that they
shared a keen interest in just about everything under the sun
and became fast friends. When Murray helped to found the
Santa Fe Institute in 1984, he brought Cormac along, knowing
that everyone would benefit from this cross-disciplinary
collaboration." — https://www.santafe.edu/news-center/news/
cormac-and-sfi-abiding-friendship

Joy Williams, review of two recent Cormac McCarthy novels —

"McCarthy has pocketed his own liturgical, ecstatic style
as one would a coin, a ring, a key, in the service of a more
demanding and heartless inquiry through mathematics and
physics into the immateriality, the indeterminacy, of reality."

A Demanding and Heartless Coin, Ring, and Key:
 

COIN
 

https://www.armstrong.edu/history-journal/history-journal-myth-ritual-and-the-labyrinth-of-king-minos
 

RING


"We can define sums and products so that the G-images of D generate
an ideal (1024 patterns characterized by all horizontal or vertical "cuts"
being uninterrupted) of a ring of 4096 symmetric patterns. There is an 
infinite family of such 'diamond' rings, isomorphic to rings of matrices
over GF(4)."
 

KEY


"It must be remarked that these 8 heptads are the key to an elegant proof…."

— Philippe Cara, "RWPRI Geometries for the Alternating Group A8," in 
Finite Geometries: Proceedings of the Fourth Isle of Thorns Conference 
(July 16-21, 2000), Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001, ed. Aart Blokhuis,
James W. P. Hirschfeld, Dieter Jungnickel, and Joseph A. Thas, pp. 61-97.
 

For those who prefer a "liturgical, ecstatic style" —

Wednesday, December 14, 2022

Plan 9 From Moriarty

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

Some related mathematical windmills —

IMAGE- The eight Galois quaternions

For the eight-limbed star at the top of the quaternion array
above, see "Damnation Morning" in this journal —

She drew from her handbag a pale grey gleaming 
implement that looked by quick turns to me like 
a knife, a gun, a slim sceptre, and a delicate 
branding iron—especially when its tip sprouted 
an eight-limbed star of silver wire.

“The test?” I faltered, staring at the thing.

“Yes, to determine whether you can live in 
the fourth dimension or only die in it.”

— Fritz Leiber, short story, 1959

See as well . . .

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2022/12/13/
harvard-psychedelics-club-signet-society-art-show-2022/
.

Sunday, December 11, 2022

Pawner versus Pawnee

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 3:18 pm

A music producer pawns his current drum device 
and acquires a demonic 1970s machine.

Related material —

This  post was suggested by a remark made during the filming
of "Edge of Tomorrow," by a Log24 post on the new Nolan film
about Oppenheimer, and by the work of a different  Edge:

"… a reality that only my notes can provide."
    — Kinbote in Nabokov's novel Pale Fire

Friday, May 6, 2022

Interality and the Bead Game

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 3:00 pm

WIkipedia on the URL suffix ".io" —

"In computer science, "IO" or "I/O" is commonly used
as an abbreviation for input/output, which makes the
.io domain desirable for services that want to be
associated with technology. .io domains are often used
for open source projects, application programming
interfaces ("APIs"), startup companiesbrowser games,
and other online services."

An association with the Bead Game from a post of April 7, 2018

IMAGE- 'Solomon's Cube'

Glasperlenspiel  passage quoted here in Summa Mythologica 

“"I suddenly realized that in the language, or at any rate
in the spirit of the Glass Bead Game, everything actually
was all-meaningful, that every symbol and combination of
symbols led not hither and yon, not to single examples,
experiments, and proofs, but into the center, the mystery
and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge.
Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every
transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical
or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment,
if seen with a truly meditative mind, nothing but a direct route
into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation
between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth,
between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created.”

A less poetic meditation on the above 4x4x4 design cube —

"I saw that in the alternation between front and back,
between top and bottom, between left and right,
symmetry is forever being created."

See also a related remark by Lévi-Strauss in 1955

"…three different readings become possible:
left to right, top to bottom, front to back."

The recent use by a startup company of the URL "interality.io" suggests
a fourth  reading for the 1955 list of Lévi-Strauss — in and out
i.e., inner and outer group automorphisms —  from a 2011 post
on the birthday of T. S. Eliot :

A transformation:

Inner and outer group automorphisms

Click on the picture for details.

Sunday, April 24, 2022

Structuralism: Three Betweens

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 10:44 am
 

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Summa Mythologica

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags:  — m759 @ 10:10 PM 

Book review by Jadran Mimica in Oceania, Vol. 74, 2003:

"In his classic essay of 1955 'The Structural Study of Myth' Levi-Strauss came up with a universal formula of mythopoeic dynamics

[fx(a) : fy(b) :: fx(b) : fa-1(y)]

that he called canonical 'for it can represent any mythic transformation'. This formulation received its consummation in the four massive Mythologiques volumes, the last of which crystallises the fundamental dialectics of mythopoeic thought: that there is 'one myth only' and the primal ground of this 'one' is 'nothing'. The elucidation of the generative matrix of the myth-work is thus completed as is the self-totalisation of both the thinker and his object."

So there.

At least one mathematician has claimed that the Levi-Strauss formula makes sense. (Jack Morava, arXiv pdf, 2003.)

I prefer the earlier (1943) remarks of Hermann Hesse on transformations of myth:

"…in the spirit of the Glass Bead Game, everything actually was all-meaningful, that every symbol and combination of symbols led not hither and yon, not to single examples, experiments, and proofs, but into the center, the mystery and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge. Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment, if seen with a truly meditative mind, nothing but a direct route into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth, between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created."

Tuesday, September 7, 2021

Raiders of the Lost Symbol … Continues*

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:12 pm

A Log24 search for "Watercourse" leads to . . .

("Watercourse" is in the Customer review link.)

The "five years ago" link leads to . . .

Invariants 

"What modern painters are trying to do,
if they only knew it, is paint invariants."

— James J. Gibson in Leonardo
(Vol. 11, pp. 227-235.
Pergamon Press Ltd., 1978)

An example of invariant structure:

The three line diagrams above result from the three partitions, into pairs of 2-element sets, of the 4-element set from which the entries of the bottom colored figure are drawn.  Taken as a set, these three line diagrams describe the structure of the bottom colored figure.  After coordinatizing the figure in a suitable manner, we find that this set of three line diagrams is invariant under the group of 16 binary translations acting on the colored figure.

A more remarkable invariance — that of symmetry itself — is observed if we arbitrarily and repeatedly permute rows and/or columns and/or 2×2 quadrants of the colored figure above. Each resulting figure has some ordinary or color-interchange symmetry.

This sort of mathematics illustrates the invisible "form" or "idea" behind the visible two-color pattern.  Hence it exemplifies, in a way, the conflict described by Plato between those who say that "real existence belongs only to that which can be handled" and those who say that "true reality consists in certain intelligible and bodiless forms."

* See that title in this journal.

Monday, July 5, 2021

Do Hillbillies Dream of Dinner Parties?

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , , — m759 @ 2:55 am

The title was suggested by a New Yorker  photo caption
about Yale on June 19, 2021 —

"Amy Chua, a celebrity professor at the top-ranked
law school in the country, is at the center of a
campus-wide fracas known as 'Dinner Party-gate.' "

Other recent Yale material —

Remarks related to New Haven and geometry —

The Lo Shu as a Finite Space

Thursday, May 27, 2021

The Four  Posters

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:26 pm

         Diamond arrangement of the four elements

and   

Logo by Steven H. Cullinane for website on finite geometry

Saturday, March 6, 2021

An Echo from Ahab

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 11:39 am

From The New York Times  today —

From Log24  yesterday, Echo Arc

Related quote from Polonius — “To thine own self be true ….”

Monday, July 13, 2020

The Lexicographic Octad Generator (LOG)*

The lexicographic Golay code
contains, embedded within it,
the Miracle Octad Generator.

By Steven H. Cullinane, July 13, 2020

Background —


The Miracle Octad Generator (MOG)
of R. T. Curtis (Conway-Sloane version) —

Embedding Change, Illustrated

A basis for the Golay code, excerpted from a version of
the code generated in lexicographic order, in

"Constructing the Extended Binary Golay Code"
Ben Adlam
Harvard University
August 9, 2011:

000000000000000011111111
000000000000111100001111
000000000011001100110011
000000000101010101010101
000000001001011001101001
000000110000001101010110
000001010000010101100011
000010010000011000111010
000100010001000101111000
001000010001001000011101
010000010001010001001110
100000010001011100100100

Below, each vector above has been reordered within
a 4×6 array, by Steven H. Cullinane, to form twelve
independent Miracle Octad Generator  vectors
(as in the Conway-Sloane SPLAG version above, in
which Curtis's earlier heavy bricks are reflected in
their vertical axes) —

01 02 03 04 05 . . . 20 21 22 23 24 -->

01 05 09 13 17 21
02 06 10 14 18 22
03 07 11 15 19 23
04 08 12 16 20 24

0000 0000 0000 0000 1111 1111 -->

0000 11
0000 11
0000 11
0000 11 as in the MOG.

0000 0000 0000 1111 0000 1111 -->

0001 01
0001 01
0001 01
0001 01 as in the MOG.

0000 0000 0011 0011 0011 0011 -->

0000 00
0000 00
0011 11
0011 11 as in the MOG.

0000 0000 0101 0101 0101 0101 -->

0000 00
0011 11
0000 00
0011 11 as in the MOG.

0000 0000 1001 0110 0110 1001 -->

0010 01
0001 10
0001 10
0010 01 as in the MOG.

0000 0011 0000 0011 0101 0110 -->

0000 00
0000 11
0101 01
0101 10 as in the MOG.

0000 0101 0000 0101 0110 0011 -->

0000 00
0101 10
0000 11
0101 01 as in the MOG.

0000 1001 0000 0110 0011 1010 -->

0100 01
0001 00
0001 11
0100 10 as in the MOG.

0001 0001 0001 0001 0111 1000 -->

0000 01
0000 10
0000 10
1111 10 as in the MOG.

0010 0001 0001 0010 0001 1101 -->

0000 01
0000 01
1001 00
0110 11 as in the MOG.

0100 0001 0001 0100 0100 1110 -->

0000 01
1001 11
0000 01
0110 00 as in the MOG.

1000 0001 0001 0111 0010 0100 -->

10 00 00
00 01 01
00 01 10
01 11 00 as in the MOG (heavy brick at center).

Update at 7:41 PM ET the same day —
A check of SPLAG shows that the above result is not new:
MOG in LOG embedding

And at 7:59 PM ET the same day —
Conway seems to be saying that at some unspecified point in the past,
M.J.T. Guy, examining the lexicographic Golay code,  found (as I just did)
that weight-8 lexicographic Golay codewords, when arranged naturally
in 4×6 arrays, yield certain intriguing visual patterns. If the MOG existed
at the time of his discovery, he would have identified these patterns as
those of the MOG.  (Lexicographic codes have apparently been
known since 1960, the MOG since the early 1970s.)

* Addendum at 4 AM ET  the next day —
See also Logline  (Walpurgisnacht 2013).

Thursday, February 27, 2020

Occult Writings

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:44 pm

From the author who in 2001 described "God's fingerprint"
(see the previous post) —

From the same publisher —

From other posts tagged Triskele in this journal —

IMAGE- Eightfold cube with detail of triskelion structure

Other geometry for enthusiasts of the esoteric —

Monday, November 4, 2019

As Above, So Below*

Filed under: General —
Tags:  —
m759 @ 5:43 AM 

Braucht´s noch Text?

       — Deutsche Schule Montevideo

* An "established rule of law
across occult writings.
"

Tuesday, January 28, 2020

Very Stable Kool-Aid

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 2:16 pm

Two of the thumbnail previews
from yesterday's 1 AM  post

"Hum a few bars"

"For 6 Prescott Street"

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
Department of Social Relations
Center for Research in Personality
Morton Prince House
5 Divinity Avenue
Cambridge 38, Massachusetts

July 17, 1961

Dr. Thomas S. Szasz
c/o Upstate Medical School
Irving Avenue
Syracuse 10, New York

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.

Sunday, January 26, 2020

Looking Glass Meets Rabbit Hole

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:53 pm

The New York Times  promoting paranoia on Jan. 24, 2020 —

"The fruit of that victory was a new economic logic that I call
'surveillance capitalism.' Its success depends upon one-way-mirror
operations engineered for our ignorance and wrapped in a fog of
misdirection, euphemism and mendacity. . . ."

"It’s not surprising that so many of us rushed to follow the bustling
White Rabbit down his tunnel into a promised digital Wonderland
where, like Alice, we fell prey to delusion." 

Block
those metaphors.

Friday, November 8, 2019

Glitch

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 7:12 am

The terms glitch  and cross-carrier  in the previous post
suggest a review

 

Gerard Manley Hopkins in 1888

Cross-Carrier

For some backstory, see GlitchGerard Manley HopkinsInscape
particularly the post A Balliol Star.

Sunday, July 7, 2019

Schoolgirl Problem

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 11:18 pm

Anonymous remarks on the schoolgirl problem at Wikipedia —

"This solution has a geometric interpretation in connection with 
Galois geometry and PG(3,2). Take a tetrahedron and label its
vertices as 0001, 0010, 0100 and 1000. Label its six edge centers
as the XOR of the vertices of that edge. Label the four face centers
as the XOR of the three vertices of that face, and the body center
gets the label 1111. Then the 35 triads of the XOR solution correspond
exactly to the 35 lines of PG(3,2). Each day corresponds to a spread
and each week to a packing
."

See also Polster + Tetrahedron in this  journal.

There is a different "geometric interpretation in connection with
Galois geometry and PG(3,2)" that uses a square  model rather
than a tetrahedral  model. The square  model of PG(3,2) last
appeared in the schoolgirl-problem article on Feb. 11, 2017, just
before a revision that removed it.

Tuesday, May 28, 2019

Quaternion at Candlebrow

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:00 am

From a Groundhog Day post in 2009 —

The Candlebrow Conference
in Pynchon's Against the Day:

The conferees had gathered here from all around the world…. Their spirits all one way or another invested in, invested by, the siegecraft of Time and its mysteries.

"Fact is, our system of so-called linear time is based on a circular or, if you like, periodic phenomenon– the earth's own spin. Everything spins, up to and including, probably, the whole universe. So we can look to the prairie, the darkening sky, the birthing of a funnel-cloud to see in its vortex the fundamental structure of everything–"

Quaternion in finite geometry
Quaternion  by  S. H. Cullinane

"Um, Professor–"….

… Those in attendance, some at quite high speed, had begun to disperse, the briefest of glances at the sky sufficing to explain why. As if the professor had lectured it into being, there now swung from the swollen and light-pulsing clouds to the west a classic prairie "twister"….

… In the storm cellar, over semiliquid coffee and farmhouse crullers left from the last twister, they got back to the topic of periodic functions….

"Eternal Return, just to begin with. If we may construct such functions in the abstract, then so must it be possible to construct more secular, more physical expressions."

"Build a time machine."

"Not the way I would have put it, but if you like, fine."

Vectorists and Quaternionists in attendance reminded everybody of the function they had recently worked up….

"We thus enter the whirlwind. It becomes the very essence of a refashioned life, providing the axes to which everything will be referred. Time no long 'passes,' with a linear velocity, but 'returns,' with an angular one…. We are returned to ourselves eternally, or, if you like, timelessly."

"Born again!" exclaimed a Christer in the gathering, as if suddenly enlightened.

Above, the devastation had begun.

"As if the professor had lectured it into being . . . ."

See other posts now tagged McLuhan Time.

Wednesday, February 13, 2019

April 18, 2003 (Good Friday), Continued

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:03 am

"The purpose of mathematics cannot be derived from an activity 
inferior to it but from a higher sphere of human activity, namely,
religion."

Igor Shafarevitch, 1973 remark published as above in 1982.

"Perhaps."

— Steven H. Cullinane, February 13, 2019

From Log24 on Good Friday, April 18, 2003

. . . What, indeed, is truth?  I doubt that the best answer can be learned from either the Communist sympathizers of MIT or the “Red Mass” leftists of Georgetown.  For a better starting point than either of these institutions, see my note of April 6, 2001, Wag the Dogma.

See, too, In Principio Erat Verbum , which notes that “numbers go to heaven who know no more of God on earth than, as it were, of sun in forest gloom.”

Since today is the anniversary of the death of MIT mathematics professor Gian-Carlo Rota, an example of “sun in forest gloom” seems the best answer to Pilate’s question on this holy day.  See

The Shining of May 29.

“Examples are the stained glass windows
of knowledge.” — Vladimir Nabokov

AGEOMETRETOS MEDEIS EISITO

Motto of Plato’s Academy


 The Exorcist, 1973

Detail from an image linked to in the above footnote —

"And the darkness comprehended it not."

Id est :

A Good Friday, 2003, article by 
a student of Shafarevitch

" there are 25 planes in W . . . . Of course,
replacing {a,b,c} by the complementary set
does not change the plane. . . ."

Of course.

See. however, Six-Set Geometry in this  journal.

Saturday, July 21, 2018

Comic-Con 2018

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 9:31 pm

"For many of us, the geometry course sounded the death knell
for our progress — and interest — in mathematics."

— "Shape and Space in Geometry"

© 1997-2003 Annenberg/CPB. All rights reserved.
Legal Policy

Friday, July 13, 2018

Segue for Harlan Ellison

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

From a Log24 post of March 13, 2003

"For many of us, the geometry course sounded the death knell
for our progress — and interest — in mathematics."

— "Shape and Space in Geometry"

© 1997-2003 Annenberg/CPB. All rights reserved.
Legal Policy

Saturday, April 7, 2018

Sides

The FBI holding cube in "The Blacklist" —

" 'The Front' is not the whole story . . . ."

— Vincent Canby, New York Times  film review, 1976,
     as quoted in Wikipedia.

See also Solomon's Cube in this  journal.

IMAGE- 'Solomon's Cube'

Webpage demonstrating symmetries of 'Solomon's Cube'

Some may view the above web page as illustrating the
Glasperlenspiel  passage quoted here in Summa Mythologica 

“"I suddenly realized that in the language, or at any rate
in the spirit of the Glass Bead Game, everything actually
was all-meaningful, that every symbol and combination of
symbols led not hither and yon, not to single examples,
experiments, and proofs, but into the center, the mystery
and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge.
Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every
transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical
or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment,
if seen with a truly meditative mind, nothing but a direct route
into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation
between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth,
between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created.”

A less poetic meditation on the above 4x4x4 design cube —

"I saw that in the alternation between front and back,
between top and bottom, between left and right,
symmetry is forever being created."

See also a related remark by Lévi-Strauss in 1955

"…three different readings become possible:
left to right, top to bottom, front to back."

Wednesday, April 12, 2017

Contracting the Spielraum

The contraction of the title is from group actions on
the ninefold square  (with the center subsquare fixed)
to group actions on the eightfold cube.

From a post of June 4, 2014

At math.stackexchange.com on March 1-12, 2013:

Is there a geometric realization of the Quaternion group?” —

The above illustration, though neatly drawn, appeared under the
cloak of anonymity.  No source was given for the illustrated group actions.
Possibly they stem from my Log24 posts or notes such as the Jan. 4, 2012,
note on quaternion actions at finitegeometry.org/sc (hence ultimately
from my note “GL(2,3) actions on a cube” of April 5, 1985).

Saturday, February 18, 2017

Verbum

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 3:00 am

The Log24 version  (Nov. 9, 2005, and later posts) —

VERBUM
SAT
SAPIENTI

 

Escher's 'Verbum'

Escher's Verbum


Solomon's Cube

Solomon's Cube
 

I Ching hexagrams as parts of 4x4x4 cube

Geometry of the I Ching

The Warner Brothers version

The Paramount version

See also related material in the previous post, Transformers.

Sunday, October 2, 2016

Westworld

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:45 am

On a new HBO series that opens at 9 PM ET tonight —

Watching Westworld , you can sense a grand mythology unfolding before your eyes. The show’s biggest strength is its world-building, an aspect of screenwriting that many television series have botched before. Often shows will rush viewers into plot, forgetting to instill a sense of place and of history, that you’re watching something that doesn’t just exist in a vacuum but rather is part of some larger ecosystem. Not since Lost  can I remember a TV show so committed to immersing its audience into the physical space it inhabits. (Indeed, Westworld  can also be viewed as a meta commentary on the art of screenwriting itself: brainstorming narratives, building characters, all for the amusement of other people.)

Westworld  is especially impressive because it builds two worlds at once: the Western theme park and the futuristic workplace. The Western half of Westworld  might be the more purely entertaining of the two, with its shootouts and heists and chases through sublime desert vistas. Behind the scenes, the theme park’s workers show how the robot sausage is made. And as a dystopian office drama, the show does something truly original.

Adam Epstein at QUARTZ, October 1, 2016

"… committed to immersing its audience
  into the physical space it inhabits…."

See also, in this journal, the Mimsy Cube

"Mimsy Were the Borogoves,"
classic science fiction story:

"… he lifted a square, transparent crystal block, small enough to cup in his palm– much too small to contain the maze of apparatus within it. In a moment Scott had solved that problem. The crystal was a sort of magnifying glass, vastly enlarging the things inside the block. Strange things they were, too. Miniature people, for example– They moved. Like clockwork automatons, though much more smoothly. It was rather like watching a play."

A Crystal Block —

Cube, 4x4x4

Saturday, May 14, 2016

The Hourglass Code

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 1:28 pm

version of the I Ching’s Hexagram 19:

I Ching Hexagram 19, 'Approach,' the box-style version

From Katherine Neville's The Eight , a book on the significance
of the date April 4 — the author's birthday —

Axe image from Katherine Neville's 'The Eight'

The Eight  by Katherine Neville —

    “What does this have to do with why we’re here?”
    “I saw it in a chess book Mordecai showed me.  The most ancient chess service ever discovered was found at the palace of King Minos on Crete– the place where the famous Labyrinth was built, named after this sacred axe.  The chess service dates to 2000 B.C.  It was made of gold and silver and jewels…. And in the center was carved a labrys.”
… “But I thought chess wasn’t even invented until six or seven hundred A.D.,” I added.  “They always say it came from Persia or India.  How could this Minoan chess service be so old?”
    “Mordecai’s written a lot himself on the history of chess,” said Lily…. “He thinks that chess set in Crete was designed by the same guy who built the Labyrinth– the sculptor Daedalus….”
    Now things were beginning to click into place….
    “Why was this axe carved on the chessboard?” I asked Lily, knowing the answer in my heart before she spoke.  “What did Mordecai say was the connection?”….
    “That’s what it’s all about,” she said quietly.  “To kill the King.”
 
     The sacred axe was used to kill the King.  The ritual had been the same since the beginning of time. The game of chess was merely a reenactment.  Why hadn’t I recognized it before?

Related material:  Posts now tagged Hourglass Code.

See also the hourglass in a search for Pilgrim's Progress Illustration.

Tuesday, May 3, 2016

Symmetry

A note related to the diamond theorem and to the site
Finite Geometry of the Square and Cube —

The last link in the previous post leads to a post of last October whose
final link leads, in turn, to a 2009 post titled Summa Mythologica .

Webpage demonstrating symmetries of 'Solomon's Cube'

Some may view the above web page as illustrating the
Glasperlenspiel  passage quoted here in Summa Mythologica 

“"I suddenly realized that in the language, or at any rate
in the spirit of the Glass Bead Game, everything actually
was all-meaningful, that every symbol and combination of
symbols led not hither and yon, not to single examples,
experiments, and proofs, but into the center, the mystery
and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge.
Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every
transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical
or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment,
if seen with a truly meditative mind, nothing but a direct route
into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation
between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth,
between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created.”

A less poetic meditation on the above web page* —

"I saw that in the alternation between front and back,
between top and bottom, between left and right,
symmetry is forever being created."

Update of Sept. 5, 2016 — See also a related remark
by Lévi-Strauss in 1955:  "…three different readings
become possible: left to right, top to bottom, front
to back."

* For the underlying mathematics, see a June 21, 1983, research note.

Thursday, April 21, 2016

The Alchemist’s Chessboard

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 12:25 pm

Material related to the previous post and to Alfred Bester's
1981 followup to The Stars My Destination  titled The Deceivers

The Lapis Philosophorum :

"The lapis  was thought of as a unity and therefore often stands for the prima materia  in general."
— Aion , by C. G. Jung

"Its discoverer was of the opinion that he had produced the equivalent of the primordial protomatter which exploded into the Universe."
— The Stars My Destination , by Alfred Bester

And from Bester's The Deceivers :

Meta  Physics

"'… Think of a match.  You've got a chemical head of potash, antimony, and stuff, full of energy waiting to be released.  Friction does it.  But when Meta  excites and releases energy, it's like a stick of dynamite compared to a match.  It's the chess legend for real.'

'I don't know it.'

'Oh, the story goes that a philosopher invented chess for the amusement of an Indian rajah.  The king was so delighted that he told the inventor to name his reward and he'd get it, no matter what.  The philosopher asked that one grain of rice be placed on the first square of the chessboard, two on the second, four on the third, and so on to the sixty-fourth.'

'That doesn't sound like much.'"

Related material :

Geometry of the I Ching

Tuesday, December 15, 2015

Square Triangles

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 3:57 pm

Click image for some background.

Exercise:  Note that, modulo color-interchange, the set of 15 two-color
patterns above is invariant under the group of six symmetries of the
equilateral triangle. Are there any other such sets of 15 two-color triangular
patterns that are closed as sets , modulo color-interchange, under the six
triangle symmetries and  under the 322,560 permutations of the 16
subtriangles induced by actions of the affine group AGL(4,2)
on the 16 subtriangles' centers , given a suitable coordinatization?

Thursday, July 2, 2015

Deepening the Spielraum

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

(A sequel to Expanding the Spielraum (Feb. 3, 2015))

"Knowledge, wisdom even, lies in depth, not extension."

Tim Parks in The New York Review of Books ,
     5 PM ET on June 26, 2015

See also Log24 posts on the following figure —

Diamond Theory version of 'The Square Inch Space' with yin-yang symbol for comparison

Thursday, June 11, 2015

Omega

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

Omega is a Greek letter, Ω , used in mathematics to denote
a set on which a group acts. 

For instance, the affine group AGL(3,2) is a group of 1,344
actions on the eight elements of the vector 3-space over the
two-element Galois field GF(2), or, if you prefer, on the Galois
field  Ω = GF(8).

Related fiction:  The Eight , by Katherine Neville.

Related non-fiction:  A remark by Werner Heisenberg
in this journal on Saturday, June 6, 2015, the eightfold cube ,
and the illustrations below —

Mathematics

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11A/110505-WikipediaFanoPlane.jpg

The Fano plane block design

Magic

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11A/110505-DeathlyHallows.jpg

The Deathly Hallows symbol—
Two blocks short of  a design.

Friday, May 8, 2015

Spielraum

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:30 am

Review:

Illustrating the Spiegel-Spiel des Gevierts

"At the point of convergence
the play of similarities and differences
cancels itself out in order that 
identity alone may shine forth. 
The illusion of motionlessness,
the play of mirrors of the one: 
identity is completely empty;
it is a crystallization and
in its transparent core
the movement of analogy 
begins all over once again."

— The Monkey Grammarian 

by Octavio Paz, translated by
Helen Lane 

 

Friday December 5, 2008

m759 @ 1:06 PM
 
Mirror-Play of
the Fourfold

For an excellent commentary
 on this concept of Heidegger,

View selected pages
from the book

Dionysus Reborn:

Play and the Aesthetic Dimension
in Modern Philosophical and
Scientific Discourse

(Mihai I. Spariosu,
Cornell U. Press, 1989)

Related material:
the logo for a
web page

Logo for 'Elements of Finite Geometry'

– and Theme and Variations.

Saturday, April 25, 2015

Ghosts and Shadows

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 5:31 pm

For Poetry Month

From the home page of Alexandre Borovik:

Book in progress: Shadows of the Truth

This book (to be published soon) can be viewed
as a sequel to Mathematics under the Microscope ,
but with focus shifted on mathematics as it was
experienced by children (well, by children who
became mathematicians). The cover is designed
by Edmund Harriss.

See also Harriss's weblog post of Dec. 27, 2008, on the death
of Harold Pinter: "The Search for the Truth Can Never Stop."

This suggests a review of my own post of Dec. 3, 2012,
"The Revisiting." A figure from that post:

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

Thursday, February 26, 2015

A Simple Group

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 7:59 pm
The Eightfold Cube

The previous post's
illustration was 
rather complicated.

This is a simpler
algebraic figure.

Wednesday, December 3, 2014

Pyramid Dance

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 10:00 am

Oslo artist Josefine Lyche has a new Instagram post,
this time on pyramids (the monumental kind).

My response —

Wikipedia's definition of a tetrahedron as a
"triangle-based pyramid"

and remarks from a Log24 post of August 14, 2013 :

Norway dance (as interpreted by an American)

IMAGE- 'The geometry of the dance' is that of a tetrahedron, according to Peter Pesic

I prefer a different, Norwegian, interpretation of "the dance of four."

Related material:
The clash between square and tetrahedral versions of PG(3,2).

See also some of Burkard Polster's triangle-based pyramids
and a 1983 triangle-based pyramid in a paper that Polster cites —

(Click image below to enlarge.)

Some other illustrations that are particularly relevant
for Lyche, an enthusiast of magic :

From On Art and Magic (May 5, 2011) —

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11A/110505-ThemeAndVariations-Hofstadter.jpg

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11A/110505-BlockDesignTheory.jpg

Mathematics

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11A/110505-WikipediaFanoPlane.jpg

The Fano plane block design

Magic

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11A/110505-DeathlyHallows.jpg

The Deathly Hallows  symbol—
Two blocks short of  a design.

 

(Updated at about 7 PM ET on Dec. 3.)

Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Art as a Tool

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 12:35 pm

Two news items on art as a tool:

Two Log24 posts related to the 3×3 grid, the underlying structure for China’s
ancient Lo Shu “magic” square:

Finally, leftist art theorist Rosalind Krauss in this journal
on AntiChristmas, 2010:

Which is the tool here, the grid or Krauss?

Tools

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

(Night at the Museum continues.)

"Strategies for making or acquiring tools

While the creation of new tools marked the route to developing the social sciences,
the question remained: how best to acquire or produce those tools?"

— Jamie Cohen-Cole, “Instituting the Science of Mind: Intellectual Economies
and Disciplinary Exchange at Harvard’s Center for Cognitive Studies,”
British Journal for the History of Science  vol. 40, no. 4 (2007): 567-597.

Obituary of a co-founder, in 1960, of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard:

"Disciplinary Exchange" —

In exchange for the free Web tools of HTML and JavaScript,
some free tools for illustrating elementary Galois geometry —

The Kaleidoscope Puzzle,  The Diamond 16 Puzzle
The 2x2x2 Cube, and The 4x4x4 Cube

"Intellectual Economies" —

In exchange for a $10 per month subscription, an excellent
"Quilt Design Tool" —

This illustrates not geometry, but rather creative capitalism.

Related material from the date of the above Harvard death:  Art Wars.

Tuesday, July 15, 2014

Photo Opportunity

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 2:02 pm

"I need a photo opportunity, I want a shot at redemption.
Don't want to end up a cartoon in a cartoon graveyard."
– Paul Simon

Pinocchio: 'Multiplane Technicolor'

"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)

For background on the planes illustrated above,
see Diamond theory in 1937.

Thursday, June 26, 2014

Study This Example, Part II

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 11:06 am

(Continued from 10:09 AM today)

The quotation below is from a webpage on media magnate
Walter Annenberg.

Annenberg Hall at Harvard, originally constructed to honor
the Civil War dead, was renamed in 1996 for his son Roger,
Harvard Class of ’62.

www.broadcastpioneers.com/
walterannenberg.html

“It was said that Roger was ‘moody and sullen’
spending large parts of his time reading poetry
and playing classical music piano. It had been
reported that Roger attempted suicide at the
age of eleven by slitting his wrists. He recovered
and was graduated Magna Cum Laude from
Episcopal Academy in our area. For awhile,
Roger attended Harvard, but he was removed
from the school’s rolls after Roger stopped doing
his school work and spent almost all his time
reading poetry in his room. He then was sent to
an exclusive and expensive treatment center
in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. At that facility,
Roger became more remote. It was said that he
often didn’t recognize or acknowledge his father.
On August 7, 1962, Roger Annenberg died from
an overdose of sleeping pills.”

A more appropriate Annenberg memorial, an article
in The Atlantic  magazine on June 25, notes that…

“Among those who ended up losing their battles
with mental illness through suicide are
Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Vincent van Gogh,
John Berryman, Hart Crane, Mark Rothko, Diane Arbus,
Anne Sexton, and Arshile Gorky.”

Thursday, June 5, 2014

Twisty Quaternion Symmetry

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 9:11 pm

The previous post told how user58512 at math.stackexchange.com
sought in 2013 a geometric representation of Q, the quaternion group.
He ended up displaying an illustration that very possibly was drawn,
without any acknowledgement of its source, from my own work.

On the date that user58512 published that illustration, he further
pursued his March 1, 2013, goal of a “twisty” quaternion model.

On March 12, 2013,  he suggested that the quaternion group might be
the symmetry group of the following twisty-cube coloring:

IMAGE- Twisty-cube coloring illustrated by Jim Belk

Illustration by Jim Belk

Here is part of a reply by Jim Belk from Nov. 11, 2013, elaborating on
that suggestion:

IMAGE- Jim Belk's proposed GAP construction of a 2x2x2 twisty-cube model of the quaternion group 

Belk argues that the colored cube is preserved under the group
of actions he describes. It is, however, also preserved under a
larger group.  (Consider, say, rotation of the entire cube by 180
degrees about the center of any one of its checkered faces.)  The
group Belk describes seems therefore to be a  symmetry group,
not the  symmetry group, of the colored cube.

I do not know if any combination puzzle has a coloring with
precisely  the quaternion group as its symmetry group.

(Updated at 12:15 AM June 6 to point out the larger symmetry group
and delete a comment about an arXiv paper on quaternion group models.)

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

Mystery Box II

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 4:07 pm

Continued from previous post and from Sept. 8, 2009.

Box containing Froebel's Third Gift-- The Eightfold Cube

Examination of the box's contents does not solve
the contents' real mystery. That requires knowledge
of the non-Euclidean geometry of Galois space.

In this case, without that knowledge, prattle (as in
today's online New York Times ) about creativity and
"thinking outside the box" is pointless.

Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Entertainment Theory

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

From "Entertainment," a 1981 story by M. A. Foster—

"For some time, Cormen had enjoyed a peculiar suspicion, which he had learned from his wanderings around the city, and cultivated with a little notebook, in which he had made a detailed series of notes and jottings, as well as crude, but effective, charts and maps of certain districts. 'Cormen's Problem,' as it was known, was familiar to the members of the circle in which he moved; in fact, if he had not been so effective with his productions and so engaging in his personality, they might have considered him a bore.

It seemed, so the suspicion went, that the city was slowly shrinking, as evidenced by abandoned districts along the city edges. Beyond the empty houses were ruins, and beyond that, traces of foundations and street lines. Moreover, it had recently dawned on him that there were no roads out of the city, although there were no restraints. One hardly noticed this—it was the norm. But like many an easy assumption, once broken it became increasingly obvious.

Cormen's acquaintances were tolerant of his aberration, but generally unsympathetic. What he needed was proof, something he could demonstrate in black and white—and color if required. But the city was reluctant, so it appeared, to give up its realities so easily. The Master Entertainment Center, MEC, would not answer direct queries about this, even though it would obediently show him presentations, pictorial or symbolic as he required, of the areas in question. But it was tiresome detail work, in which he had to proceed completely on his own."

Lily Collins in City of Bones  (2013)—

American Folk Art (see August 23, 2011) —

IMAGE- Four Winds quilt block

Art Theory —

IMAGE- The eight Galois quaternions

See as well Ballet Blanc .

Tuesday, August 20, 2013

The 20

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

In memory of author Elmore Leonard

A graphic symbol and a search for "Nowhere"*
in this journal yield

Box symbol

Pictorial version
of Hexagram 20,
Contemplation (View)

"Cotton Mather died
when I was a boy.
The books/ He read,
all day, all night
and all the nights,/
Had got him nowhere."

— Wallace Stevens,
"The Blue Buildings
in the Summer Air"

* See previous post.

Saturday, May 11, 2013

Core

Promotional description of a new book:

“Like Gödel, Escher, Bach  before it, Surfaces and Essences  will profoundly enrich our understanding of our own minds. By plunging the reader into an extraordinary variety of colorful situations involving language, thought, and memory, by revealing bit by bit the constantly churning cognitive mechanisms normally completely hidden from view, and by discovering in them one central, invariant core— the incessant, unconscious quest for strong analogical links to past experiences— this book puts forth a radical and deeply surprising new vision of the act of thinking.”

“Like Gödel, Escher, Bach  before it….”

Or like Metamagical Themas .

Rubik core:

Swarthmore Cube Project, 2008

Non- Rubik cores:

Of the odd  nxnxn cube:

Of the even  nxnxn cube:

The image “http://www.log24.com/theory/images/cube2x2x2.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Related material: The Eightfold Cube and

“A core component in the construction
is a 3-dimensional vector space  over F.”

—  Page 29 of “A twist in the M24 moonshine story,”
by Anne Taormina and Katrin Wendland.
(Submitted to the arXiv on 13 Mar 2013.)

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Mathematics and Narrative (continued)

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 10:18 am

Angels & Demons meet Hudson Hawk

Dan Brown's four-elements diamond in Angels & Demons :

IMAGE- Illuminati Diamond, pp. 359-360 in 'Angels & Demons,' Simon & Schuster Pocket Books 2005, 448 pages, ISBN 0743412397

The Leonardo Crystal from Hudson Hawk :

Hudson:

Mathematics may be used to relate (very loosely)
Dan Brown's fanciful diamond figure to the fanciful
Leonardo Crystal from Hudson Hawk 

"Giving himself a head rub, Hawk bears down on
the three oddly malleable objects. He TANGLES 
and BENDS and with a loud SNAP, puts them together,
forming the Crystal from the opening scene."

— A screenplay of Hudson Hawk

Happy birthday to Bruce Willis.

Thursday, March 7, 2013

Ten Years After

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

Rock guitarist Alvin Lee, a founder of
the band Ten Years After , died
on March 6, 2013 (Michelangelo's
birthday). In his memory, a figure
from a post Ten Years Before —

Plato's reported motto for his Academy:
"Let no one ignorant of geometry enter."

For visual commentary by an artist ignorant
of geometry, see a work by Sol LeWitt.

For verbal commentary by an art critic  ignorant
of geometry, see a review of LeWitt by
Robert Hughes—

"A Beauty Really Bare" (TIME, Feb. 6, 2001).

See also Ten Years Group and Four Gods.

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Configurations

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:24 pm

Yesterday's post Permanence dealt with the cube
as a symmetric model of the finite projective plane
PG(2,3), which has 13 points and 13 lines. The points
and lines of the finite geometry occur in the cube as
the 13 axes of symmetry and the 13 planes through
the center perpendicular to those axes. If the three
axes lying in  a plane that cuts the cube in a hexagon
are supplemented by the axis perpendicular  to that
plane, each plane is associated with four axes and,
dually, each axis is associated with four planes.

My web page on this topic, Cubist Geometries, was
written on February 27, 2010, and first saved to the
Internet Archive on Oct. 4, 2010

For a more recent treatment of this topic that makes
exactly the same points as the 2010 page, see p. 218
of Configurations from a Graphical Viewpoint , by
Tomaž Pisanski and Brigitte Servatius, published by
Springer on Sept. 23, 2012 (date from both Google
Books
and Amazon.com):

For a similar 1998 treatment of the topic, see Burkard Polster's 
A Geometrical Picture Book  (Springer, 1998), pp. 103-104.

The Pisanski-Servatius book reinforces my argument of Jan. 13, 2013,
that the 13 planes through the cube's center that are perpendicular
to the 13 axes of symmetry of the cube should be called the cube's 
symmetry planes , contradicting the usual use of of that term.

That argument concerns the interplay  between Euclidean and
Galois geometry. Pisanski and Servatius (and, in 1998, Polster)
emphasize the Euclidean square and cube as guides* to
describing the structure of a Galois space. My Jan. 13 argument
uses Galois  structures as a guide to re-describing those of Euclid .
(For a similar strategy at a much more sophisticated level,
see a recent Harvard Math Table.)

Related material:  Remarks on configurations in this journal
during the month that saw publication of the Pisanski-Servatius book.

* Earlier guides: the diamond theorem (1978), similar theorems for
  2x2x2 (1984) and 4x4x4 cubes (1983), and Visualizing GL(2,p)
  (1985). See also Spaces as Hypercubes (2012).

Friday, January 18, 2013

Solomon’s Rep-tiles

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 1:04 pm

"Rep-tiles Revisited," by Viorel Nitica, in MASS Selecta: Teaching and Learning Advanced Undergraduate Mathematics ,  American Mathematical Society, 2003—

"The goal of this note is to take a new look at some of the most amazing objects discovered in recreational mathematics. These objects, having the curious property of making larger copies of themselves, were introduced in 1962 by Solomon W. Golomb [2], and soon afterwards were popularized by Martin Gardner [3] in Scientific American…."

2.  S. W. Golomb: "Replicating Figures in the Plane," Mathematical Gazette  48, 1964, 403-412

3.  M. Gardner: "On 'Rep-tiles,' Polygons That Can Make Larger and Smaller Copies of Themselves," Scientific American  208, 1963, 154-157

Two such "amazing objects"—

Triangle

Square

For a different approach to the replicating properties of these objects, see the square-triangle theorem.

For related earlier material citing Golomb, see Not Quite Obvious (July 8, 2012; scroll down to see the update of July 15.).

Golomb's 1964 Gazette  article may now be purchased at JSTOR for $14.

Thursday, January 17, 2013

Brazil Revisited

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

Yesterday's post Treasure Hunt, on a Brazilian weblog,
suggests a review of Brazil  in this journal.  The post
most relevant to yesterday's remarks is from
August 15, 2003, with a link, now broken, to the work
of Brazilian artist Nicole Sigaud* that also uses the
four half-square tiles used in 1704 by Sebastien Truchet 
and somewhat later by myself in Diamond Theory 
(see a 1977 version).

A more recent link that works:

http://vismath9.tripod.com/sigaud/e-index.html

ANACOM PROJECT

 

APPLICATIONS
HISTORY
THE FONT
ALGORITHMS
FAMILY I
FAMILY 2
EXAMPLES
EXAMPLES II
DOWNLOADS
INTERACTIVE PROGRAM (JAVASCRIPT)
 
VisMathHOME

 

© 1997 – 2002 Nicole Sigaud

* Sigaud shares the interests of her fellow Brazilian
   whose weblog was the subject of yesterday's
   Treasure Hunt.—

   "For many years I have dedicated myself to the study
    of medieval magic, demonology, Kabbalah, Astrology,
    Alchemy, Tarot and divination in general."

     — Nicole Sigaud (translated by Google) in a self-profile: 
     http://www.recantodasletras.com.br/autor.php?id=78359.

    I do not share the interest of these authors in such matters,
    except as they are reflected in the works of authors like
    Charles Williams and Umberto Eco.

Saturday, December 29, 2012

Mapping Problem

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 1:06 am

A mapping problem posed (informally) in 1985
and solved 27 years later,  in 2012:

See also Finite Relativity and Finite Relativity: The Triangular Version.

(A note for fans of the recent film Looper  (see previous post)—

Hunter S. Thompson in this journal on February 22, 2005 

IMAGE- Hunter S. Thompson, the old and the young
           Hunter S. Thompson, photos from The New York Times

and on March 3, 2009.)

Monday, December 24, 2012

All Over Again

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

Octavio Paz —

"… the movement of analogy
begins all over once again."

See A Reappearing Number in this journal.

Illustrations:

Figure 1 —

Background: MOG in this journal.

Figure 2 —

Image-- 'Then a miracle occurs' cartoon
Cartoon by S.Harris

Background —

Image-- Google search on 'miracle octad'-- top 3 results

Sunday, December 9, 2012

Eve’s Menorah

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:00 pm

"Now the serpent was more subtle
than any beast of the field…."
Genesis 3:1

"“The serpent’s eyes shine
As he wraps around the vine….”
Don Henley

"Nine is a vine."
Folk rhyme

Part I

Part II

Part III

Halloween 2005

The image “http://log24.com/log/pix03/030109-gridsmall.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Click images for some background.

Thursday, November 29, 2012

Conceptual Art

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 12:09 pm

Quotes from the Bremen site
http://dada.compart-bremen.de/ 
 

IMAGE- Steven H. Cullinane, diamond theorem, from 'Diamond Theory,' Computer Graphics and Art, Vol. 2 No. 1, Feb. 1977, pp. 5-7

" 'compArt | center of excellence digital art' is a project
at the University of Bremen, Germany. It is dedicated
to research and development in computing, design,
and teaching. It is supported by Rudolf Augstein Stiftung,
the University of Bremen, and Karin und Uwe Hollweg Stiftung."

See also Stiftung in this journal.

Monday, November 19, 2012

Poetry and Truth

From today's noon post

"In all his poems with all their enchantments
for the poet himself, there is the final enchantment
that they are true. The significance of the poetic act
then is that it is evidence. It is instance and illustration.
It is an illumination of a surface,
the movement of a self in the rock.
Above all it is a new engagement with life.
It is that miracle to which the true faith of the poet
attaches itself."

— Wallace Stevens at Bard College, March 30, 1951

Stevens also said at Bard that

"When Joan of Arc said: 

Have no fear: what I do, I do by command.
My brothers of Paradise tell me what I have to do.

these words were the words of an hallucination.
No matter what her brothers of Paradise drove her to do,
what she did was never a poetic act of faith in reality
because it could not be."

There are those who would dispute this.

Some related material:

"Ageometretos me eisito."—
"Let no one ignorant of geometry enter."—
Said to be a saying of Plato, part of the
seal of the American Mathematical Society—

A poetic approach to geometry—

"A surface" and "the rock," from All Saints' Day, 2012

Spaces as Hypercubes

— and from 1981—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix09/090217-SolidSymmetry.jpg

Some mathematical background for poets in Purgatory—

"… the Klein correspondence underlies Conwell's discussion 
of eight heptads. These play an important role in another
correspondence, illustrated in the Miracle Octad Generator
of R. T. Curtis, that may be used to picture actions
of the large Mathieu group M24."

Sunday, November 18, 2012

Sermon

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 11:00 am

Happy birthday to

IMAGE- Margaret Atwood, Kim Wilde, Peta Wilson

Today's sermon, by Marie-Louise von Franz

Number and Time, by Marie-Louise von Franz

For more on the modern physicist analyzed by von Franz,
see The Innermost Kernel , by Suzanne Gieser.

Another modern physicist, Niels Bohr, died
on this date in 1962

Diamond Theory version of 'The Square Inch Space' with yin-yang symbol for comparison

The circle above is marked with a version
of the classic Chinese symbol
adopted as a personal emblem
by Danish physicist Niels Bohr,
leader of the Copenhagen School.

For the square, see the diamond theorem.

"Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On one another, as a man depends
On a woman, day on night, the imagined
On the real. This is the origin of change.
Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace
And forth the particulars of rapture come."

— Wallace Stevens,
  "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,"
  Canto IV of "It Must Change"

Sunday, July 8, 2012

Not Quite Obvious

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:00 am

"That n 2 points fall naturally into a triangular array
is a not-quite-obvious fact which may have applications…
and seems worth stating more formally."

— Steven H. Cullinane, letter in the
American Mathematical Monthly  1985 June-July issue

If the ancient Greeks had not been distracted by
investigations of triangular  (as opposed to square )
numbers, they might have done something with this fact.

A search for occurrences of the phrase

"n2 [i.e., n 2 ] congruent triangles" 

indicates only fairly recent (i.e., later than 1984) results.*

Some related material, updated this morning—

This suggests a problem
 

What mappings of a square  array of n 2 points to
a triangular  array of n 2 points are "natural"?

http://www.log24.com/log/pix12B/120708-SquareAndTriangle.jpg

In the figure above, whether
the 322,560 natural permutations
of the square's 16 points
map in any natural way to
  permutations of the triangle's 16 points
is not immediately apparent.

 

* Update of July 15, 2012 (11:07 PM ET)—

Theorem on " rep-" (Golomb's terminology)
triangles from a 1982 book—

IMAGE- Theorem (12.3) on Golomb and 'rep-k^2' triangles in book published in 1982-- 'Transformation Geometry,' by George Edward Martin

Saturday, May 26, 2012

Harriot’s Cubes

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:28 pm

See also Finite Geometry and Physical Space.

Related material from MacTutor

Harriot and binary numbers

The paper by J. W. Shirley, Binary numeration before Leibniz, Amer. J. Physics 19 (8) (1951), 452-454, contains an interesting look at some mathematics which appears in the hand written papers of Thomas Harriot [1560-1621]. Using the photographs of the two original Harriot manuscript pages reproduced in Shirley’s paper, we explain how Harriot was doing arithmetic with binary numbers.

Leibniz [1646-1716] is credited with the invention [1679-1703] of binary arithmetic, that is arithmetic using base 2. Laplace wrote:-

Leibniz saw in his binary arithmetic the image of Creation. … He imagined the Unity represented God, and Zero the void; that the Supreme Being drew all beings from the void, just as unity and zero express all numbers in his system of numeration. This conception was so pleasing to Leibniz that he communicated it to the Jesuit, Grimaldi, president of the Chinese tribunal for mathematics, in the hope that this emblem of creation would convert the Emperor of China, who was very fond of the sciences …

However, Leibniz was certainly not the first person to think of doing arithmetic using numbers to base 2. Many years earlier Harriot had experimented with the idea of different number bases….

For a discussion of Harriot on the discrete-vs.-continuous question,
see Katherine Neal, From Discrete to Continuous: The Broadening
of Number Concepts in Early Modern England  (Springer, 2002),
pages 69-71.

Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Included Middle

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 2:01 pm

Wikipedia— 

"In logic, the law of excluded middle (or the principle of excluded middle) is the third of the so-called three classic laws of thought. It states that for any proposition, either that proposition is true, or its negation is.

The law is also known as the law (or principleof the excluded third (or of the excluded middle), or, in Latinprincipium tertii exclusi. Yet another Latin designation for this law is tertium non datur: 'no third (possibility) is given.'"

"Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right"

 — Songwriter who died on January 4, 2011.

Online NY Times  on the date of the songwriter's death—

"A version of this review appeared in print
on January 4, 2011, on page C6 of the New York edition." 

REVIEW

"The philosopher Hubert Dreyfus and his former student
Sean Dorrance Kelly have a story to tell, and it is not
a pretty tale for us moderns. Ours is an age of nihilism,
they say, meaning not so much that we have nothing
in which to believe, but that we don’t know how to choose
among the various things to which we might commit
ourselves. Looking down from their perches at Berkeley
and Harvard, they see the 'human indecision that
plagues us all.'"

For an application of the excluded-middle law, see
Non-Euclidean Blocks and Deep Play.

Violators of the law may have trouble* distinguishing
between "Euclidean" and "non-Euclidean" phenomena
because their definition of the latter is too narrow,
based only on examples that are historically well known.

See the Non-Euclidean Blocks  footnote.

* Followers  of the excluded-middle law will avoid such
trouble by noting that "non-Euclidean" should mean
simply "not  Euclidean in some  way "— not  necessarily
in a way contradicting Euclid's parallel postulate.

But see Wikipedia's defense of the standard, illogical,
usage of the phrase "non-Euclidean."

Postscript—

Tertium Datur

Froebel's Third Gift

"Here I am, stuck in the middle with you."

Saturday, May 19, 2012

G8

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 8:00 pm

"The  group of 8" is a phrase from politics, not mathematics.
Of the five groups of order 8 (see today's noon post),

the one pictured* in the center, Z2 × Z2 × Z2 , is of particular
interest. See The Eightfold Cube. For a connection of this 
group of 8 to the last of the five pictured at noon, the
quaternion group, see Finite Geometry and Physical Space.

* The picture is of the group's cycle graph.

Thursday, May 3, 2012

Everybody Comes to Rick’s

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 11:30 am

(Continued)

Bogart and Lorre in 'Casablanca' with chessboard and cocktail

The key is the cocktail that begins the proceedings.”

– Brian Harley, Mate in Two Moves

See also yesterday's Endgame , as well as Play and Interplay
from April 28…  and, as a key, the following passage from
an earlier April 28 post

Euclidean geometry has long been applied
to physics; Galois geometry has not.
The cited webpage describes the interplay
of both  sorts of geometry— Euclidean
and Galois, continuous and discrete—
within physical space— if not within
the space of physics .

Friday, March 23, 2012

Embedding the Stone

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

"Imbedding the God character in a holy book's very detailed narrative
and building an entire culture around this narrative
seems by itself to confer a kind of existence on Him."

John Allen Paulos in the philosophy column "The Stone,"
     New York Times  online, Oct. 24, 2010

A related post from Log24 later that year—

Sunday, November 28, 2010

The Embedding

 — m759 @ 6:00 AM

The New York Times Magazine  this morning on a seminar on film theory at Columbia University—

"When the seminar reconvened after the break, Schamus said, 'Let’s dive into the Meno,' a dialogue in which Plato and Socrates consider virtue. 'The heart of it is the mathematical proof.' He rose from his seat and went to the whiteboard, where he drew figures and scribbled numbers as he worked through the geometry. 'You can only get the proof visually,' he concluded, stepping back and gazing at it. Plato may be skeptical about the category of the visual, he said, but 'you are confronted with a visual proof that gets you back to the idea embedded in visuality.'"

The Meno Embedding

Plato's Diamond embedded in The Matrix

See also Plato's Code and
 Plato Thanks the Academy.

 

 

"Next come the crown of thorns and Jesus' agonized crawl across the stage,
bearing the weight of his own crucifix. And at last, after making
yet another entrance, Mr. Nolan strikes the pose immortalized
in centuries of art, clad in a demure loincloth, arms held out to his sides,
one leg artfully bent in front of the other, head hanging down
in tortured exhaustion. Gently spotlighted, he rises from the stage
as if by magic, while a giant cross, pulsing with hot gold lights,
descends from above to meet him. Mr. Lloyd Webber's churning guitar rock
hits a climactic note, and the audience erupts in excited applause."

— Charles Isherwood, review of "Jesus Christ Superstar" in today's  New York Times

Other remarks on embedding —

Part I

Review of a new book on linguistics, embedding, and a South American tribe—

"Imagine a linguist from Mars lands on Earth to survey the planet's languages…."
Chronicle of Higher Education , March 20, 2012

Part II

The Embedding , by Ian Watson (Review of a 1973 novel from Shakespeare's birthday, 2006)

Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Square-Triangle Theorem

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 10:30 pm

(Continued from March 18, 2012)

Found in a search this evening—

How Does One Cut a Triangle?  by Alexander Soifer

(Second edition, Springer, 2009. First edition published
by Soifer's Center for Excellence in Mathematical Education,
Colorado Springs, CO, in 1990.)

This book, of xxx + 174 pages, covers questions closely related
to the "square-triangle" result I published in a letter to the 
editor of the June-July 1985 American Mathematical Monthly
(Vol. 92, No. 6, p. 443).  See Square-Triangle Theorem.

Soifer's four pages of references include neither that letter
nor the Monthly  item, "Miscellaneum 129: Triangles are square"
of a year earlier that prompted the letter.

Sunday, March 18, 2012

Square-Triangle Diamond

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 5:01 am

The diamond shape of yesterday's noon post
is not wholly without mathematical interest …

The square-triangle theorem

"Every triangle is an n -replica" is true
if and only if n  is a square.

IMAGE- Square-to-diamond (rhombus) shear in proof of square-triangle theorem

The 16 subdiamonds of the above figure clearly
may be mapped by an affine transformation
to 16 subsquares of a square array.

(See the diamond lattice  in Weyl's Symmetry .)

Similarly for any square n , not just 16.

There is a group of 322,560 natural transformations
that permute the centers  of the 16 subsquares
in a 16-part square array. The same group may be
viewed as permuting the centers  of the 16 subtriangles
in a 16-part triangular array.

(Updated March 29, 2012, to correct wording and add Weyl link.)

Saturday, March 17, 2012

The Purloined Diamond

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

(Continued)

The diamond from the Chi-rho page
of the Book of Kells —

The diamond at the center of Euclid's
Proposition I, according to James Joyce
(i.e., the Diamond in the Mandorla) —

Geometry lesson: the vesica piscis in Finnegans Wake

The Diamond in the Football

Football-mandorla

“He pointed at the football
  on his desk. ‘There it is.’”
         – Glory Road
   

Tuesday, January 31, 2012

Tesseract

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:21 pm
 

"… a finite set with  elements
is sometimes called an n-set …."

Tesseract formed from a 4-set—

IMAGE- Tesseract.


The same 16 subsets or points can
be arranged in a 4×4 array that has,
when the array's opposite edges are
joined together, the same adjacencies
as those of the above tesseract.

"There is  such a thing as a 4-set."
— Saying adapted from a novel   

Update of August 12, 2012:

Figures like the above, with adjacent vertices differing in only one coordinate,
appear in a 1950 paper of H. S. M. Coxeter—

Saturday, January 14, 2012

Defining Form (continued)

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

Detail of Sylvie Donmoyer picture discussed
here on January 10

http://www.log24.com/log/pix12/120114-Donmoyer-Still-Life-CubeDetail.jpg

The "13" tile may refer to the 13 symmetry axes
in the 3x3x3 Galois cube, or the corresponding
13 planes through the center in that cube. (See
this morning's post and Cubist Geometries.)

Sunday, January 1, 2012

Sunday Shul

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 9:00 am

"… myths are stories, and like all narratives
they unravel through time, whereas grids
are not only spatial to start with,
they are visual structures that explicitly reject
a narrative or sequential reading of any kind."

— Rosalind Krauss in "Grids,"
October  (Summer 1979), 9: 50-64.

Counterexample—

The image “http://www.log24.com/theory/images/grid3x3.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

The Ninefold Square

See Coxeter and the Aleph and Ayn Sof

Mathematics and Narrative, Illustrated
http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110107-The1950Aleph-Sm.jpg

Mathematics
http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110107-ScriptAlephSm.jpg
Narrative

Saturday, November 12, 2011

Professor Dodge

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 11:30 pm

From today's previous post, a fragmentary thought—

"Professor Dodge and the underground artists
whose work he helped save are the subjects of a book…"

Jim Dodge, Stone Junction

(a novel first published in 1989)

From pages 206-208, Kindle Edition

`Have you seen it?'

Volta hesitated. `Well, I've dreamed  it.'

Daniel shook his head. `I'm getting lost. You want me to vanish into your dreams?'

`Good Lord, no,' Volta blanched. `That's exactly what I don't  want you to do.'

`So, what is it exactly you do  want me to do?'

`Steal the diamond.'

`So, it's a diamond?'

`Yes, though it's a bit like saying the ocean is water. The diamond is perfectly spherical,* perfectly clear— though it seems to glow— and it's about two-thirds the size of a bowling ball. I think of it as the Diamond. Capital D.'

`Who owns it?'

`No one. The United States government has it at the moment. We want it. And to be honest with you, Daniel, I particularly want it, want it dearly. I want to look at it, into it, hold it in my hands. I had a vision involving a spherical diamond, a vision that changed my life, and I want to confirm that it was a vision of something real, the spirit embodied, the circuit complete.'

Daniel was smiling. `You're going to love this. That dream I wanted to talk to you about, my first since the explosion? It just happened to feature a raven with a spherical diamond in its beak. Obviously, it wasn't as big as a bowling ball, and there was a thin spiral flame running edge to edge through its center, which made it seem more coldly brilliant than warmly glowing, but it sounds like the same basic diamond to me.'

`And what do you think it is?'

`I think it's beautiful.'

Volta gave him a thin smile. `If I were more perverse than I already lamentably am, I would say it is the Eye of the Beholder. In fact, I don't know what it is.'

`It might be a dream,' Daniel said.

`Very possibly,' Volta agreed, `but I don't think so. I think— feel , to be exact— that the Diamond is an interior force given exterior density, the transfigured metaphor of the prima materia , the primordial mass, the Spiritus Mundi . I'm assuming you're familiar with the widely held supposition that the entire universe was created from a tiny ball of dense matter which exploded, sending pieces hurtling into space, expanding from the center. The spherical diamond is the memory, the echo, the ghost of that generative cataclysm; the emblematic point of origin. Or if, as some astrophysicists believe, the universe will reach some entropic point in its expansion and begin to collapse back into itself, in that case the Diamond may be a homing point, the seed crystal, to which it will all come hurtling back together— and perhaps through itself, into another dimension entirely. Or it might be the literal Philosopher's Stone we alchemists speak of so fondly. Or I might be completely wrong. That's why I want to see it. If I could actually stand in its presence, I'm convinced I'd know what it is. I would even venture to say, at the risk of rabid projection, that it wants  to be seen and known.'

`But you're not even sure it exists,' Daniel said. `Right? And hey, it's tough to steal something that doesn't  exist, even if you can be invisible. The more I think about this the less sense it makes.'

* Here Dodge's mystical vision seems akin to that of Anthony Judge in "Embodying the Sphere of Change" (St. Stephen's Day, 2001). Actually, the cube, not the sphere, is the best embodiment of Judge's vision.

See also Tuesday's "Stoned" and the 47 references
to the term "bowling" in the Kindle Stone Junction .

Furthermore… Live from New York, it's Saturday Night!

Friday, October 28, 2011

The Soul’s Code

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 7:20 am

James Hillman, NYT obituary on Feast of St. Jude, 2011

James Hillman reportedly died on Thursday, October 27, 2011.

For some commentary, see Wednesday's link to 779

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11C/111028-SoulsCode.JPG

Daimon
  Theory

Diamond Theory

Thursday, September 8, 2011

Starring the Diamond

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 2:02 pm

"In any geometry satisfying Pappus's Theorem,
the four pairs of opposite points of 83
are joined by four concurrent lines.
"
— H. S. M. Coxeter (see below)

Continued from Tuesday, Sept. 6

The Diamond Star

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/110905-StellaOctangulaView.jpg

The above is a version of a figure from Configurations and Squares.

Yesterday's post related the the Pappus configuration to this figure.

Coxeter, in "Self-Dual Configurations and Regular Graphs," also relates Pappus to the figure.

Some excerpts from Coxeter—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/110908-Coxeter83.jpg

The relabeling uses the 8 superscripts
from the first picture above (plus 0).
The order of the superscripts is from
an 8-cycle in the Galois field GF(9).

The relabeled configuration is used in a discussion of Pappus—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/110908-Coxeter83part2.jpg

(Update of Sept. 10, 2011—
Coxeter here has a note referring to page 335 of
G. A. Miller, H. F. Blichfeldt, and L. E. Dickson,
Theory and Applications of Finite Groups , New York, 1916.)

Coxeter later uses the the 3×3 array (with center omitted) again to illustrate the Desargues  configuration—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/110908-Coxeter103.jpg

The Desargues configuration is discussed by Gian-Carlo Rota on pp. 145-146 of Indiscrete Thoughts

"The value  of Desargues' theorem and the reason  why the statement of this theorem has survived through the centuries, while other equally striking geometrical theorems have been forgotten, is in the realization that Desargues' theorem opened a horizon of possibilities  that relate geometry and algebra in unexpected ways."

Monday, August 8, 2011

Diamond Theory vs. Story Theory (continued)

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 5:01 pm

Some background

Richard J. Trudeau, a mathematics professor and Unitarian minister, published in 1987 a book, The Non-Euclidean Revolution , that opposes what he calls the Story Theory of truth [i.e., Quine, nominalism, postmodernism] to what he calls the traditional Diamond Theory of truth [i.e., Plato, realism, the Roman Catholic Church]. This opposition goes back to the medieval "problem of universals" debated by scholastic philosophers.

(Trudeau may never have heard of, and at any rate did not mention, an earlier 1976 monograph on geometry, "Diamond Theory," whose subject and title are relevant.)

From yesterday's Sunday morning New York Times

"Stories were the primary way our ancestors transmitted knowledge and values. Today we seek movies, novels and 'news stories' that put the events of the day in a form that our brains evolved to find compelling and memorable. Children crave bedtime stories…."

Drew Westen, professor at Emory University

From May 22, 2009

Poster for 'Diamonds' miniseries on ABC starting May 24, 2009

The above ad is by
  Diane Robertson Design—

Credit for 'Diamonds' miniseries poster: Diane Robertson Design, London

Diamond from last night’s
Log24 entry, with
four colored pencils from
Diane Robertson Design:

Diamond-shaped face of Durer's 'Melencolia I' solid, with  four colored pencils from Diane Robertson Design
 
See also
A Four-Color Theorem.

For further details, see Saturday's correspondences
and a diamond-related story from this afternoon's
online New York Times.

Saturday, August 6, 2011

Correspondences

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

Comme de longs échos qui de loin se confondent
Dans une ténébreuse et profonde unité….

— Baudelaire, “Correspondances

From “A Four-Color Theorem”

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/110806-Four_Color_Correspondence.gif

Figure 1

Note that this illustrates a natural correspondence
between

(A) the seven highly symmetrical four-colorings
of the 4×2 array at the left of Fig. 1, and

(B) the seven points of the smallest
projective plane at the right of Fig. 1.

To see the correspondence, add, in binary
fashion, the pairs of projective points from the
“points” section that correspond to like-colored
squares in a four-coloring from the left of Fig. 1.
(The correspondence can, of course, be described
in terms of cosets rather than of colorings.)

A different correspondence between these 7 four-coloring
structures and these 7 projective-line structures appears in
a structural analysis of the Miracle Octad Generator
(MOG) of R.T. Curtis—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/110806-Analysis_of_Structure.gif

Figure 2

Here the correspondence between the 7 four-coloring structures (left section) and the 7 projective-line structures (center section) is less obvious, but more fruitful.  It yields, as shown, all of the 35 partitions of an 8-element set  (an 8-set ) into two 4-sets. The 7 four-colorings in Fig. 2 also appear in the 35 4×4 parts of the MOG that correspond, in a way indicated by Fig. 2, to the 35 8-set paritions. This larger correspondence— of 35 4×2 arrays with 35 4×4 arrays— is  the MOG, at least as it was originally defined. See The MOG, Generating the Octad Generator, and Eightfold Geometry

For some applications of the Curtis MOG, see
(for instance) Griess’s Twelve Sporadic Groups .

Sunday, June 26, 2011

Paradigms Lost

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 7:20 am

Continued from March 10, 2011 — A post that says

"If Galois geometry is thought of as a paradigm shift
from Euclidean geometry, both… the Kuhn cover
and the nine-point affine plane may be viewed…
as illustrating the shift."

Yesterday's posts The Fano Entity and Theology for Antichristmas,
together with this morning's New York Times  obituaries (below)—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11A/110626-NYTobits.jpg

—suggest a Sunday School review from last year's
    Devil's Night (October 30-31, 2010)

Sunday, October 31, 2010

ART WARS

m759 @ 2:00 AM

                                …    There is a Cave
Within the Mount of God, fast by his Throne,
Where light and darkness in perpetual round
Lodge and dislodge by turns, which makes through Heav'n
Grateful vicissitude, like Day and Night….

Paradise Lost , by John Milton

http://www.log24.com/log/pix09A/091024-RayFigure.jpg

Click on figure for details.

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101031-Pacino.jpg

Al Pacino in Devil's Advocate
as attorney John Milton

See also Ash Wednesday Surprise and Geometry for Jews.

Wednesday, June 8, 2011

For Saint Peter

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 10:30 am

… and Arthur Koestler

The theme of the January 2010 issue of the
Notices of the American Mathematical Society
was “Mathematics and the Arts.”

 

Related material:

Adam and God (Sistine Chapel), with Jungian Self-Symbol and Ojo de Dios (The Diamond Puzzle)

 

See also two posts from the day Peter Jennings died—

Presbyterian Justice and Religious Symbolism at Harvard.

Monday, May 23, 2011

The Stoner Series

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 9:00 am

A reader comments on yesterday afternoon's New York Times
"The Stone" column by Justin E.H. Smith—

"I did indeed appreciate Mr. Smith’s essay.
And I’m curious as to what future contributions of his,
to the Stoner series, that we can look forward to."

From August 24, 2010

Der Einsatz

Motto of Plato's Academy: 'Let no one ignorant of geometry enter'

The Ninefold Square (a 3x3 grid)

Nichts ist wie es scheint.

See also the film
"23— Nichts ist so wie es scheint."

Happy day 23 of Mental Health Month.

Sunday, May 22, 2011

Asterisk*

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 10:30 am

A year ago today—

2:02 AM EDT

   Art Space

Box symbol

Pictorial version
of Hexagram 20,
Contemplation (View)

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10A/100522-Clouseau.gif

Space: what you damn well have to see.
– James Joyce, Ulysses

10:31 AM EDT

Image-- The Case of the Lyche Gate Asterisk

* See Vonnegut.

Sunday, May 8, 2011

Matrix

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 7:59 am

For Mother's Day

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100121-Trigrams.jpg

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11A/110508-Trigrams.jpg

From Thomas Mann, "Schopenhauer," 1938, in Essays of Three Decades , translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter, Alfred A. Knopf, 1947, pp. 372-410—

Page 372: THE PLEASURE we take in a metaphysical system, the gratification purveyed by the intellectual organization of the world into a closely reasoned, complete, and balanced structure of thought, is always of a pre-eminently aesthetic kind. It flows from the same source as the joy, the high and ever happy satisfaction we get from art, with its power to shape and order its material, to sort out life's manifold confusions so as to give us a clear and general view.

Truth and beauty must always be referred the one to the other. Each by itself, without the support given by the other, remains a very fluctuating value. Beauty that has not truth on its side and cannot have reference to it, does not live in it and through it, would be an empty chimera— and "What is truth?"

Sunday, May 1, 2011

Delos

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 6:00 pm

The late translator Helen Lane in Translation Review , Vol. 5, 1980—

"Among the awards, I submit, should be one for the entire oeuvre  of a lifetime "senior" translator— and  one for the best first  translation…. Similar organization, cooperation, and fund-finding for a first-rate replacement for the sorely missed Delos ."

This leads to one of the founders of Delos , the late Donald Carne-Ross, who died on January 9, 2010.

For one meditation on the date January 9, see Bridal Birthday (last Thursday).

Another meditation, from the date of Carne-Ross's death—

Saturday, January 9, 2010

 

1982 Again

m759 @ 1:00 PM

Rock's top 40 on Jan. 9, 1982

Positional Meaning

m759 @ 11:32 AM

"The positional meaning of a symbol derives from its relationship to other symbols in a totality, a Gestalt, whose elements acquire their significance from the system as a whole."

– Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols , Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press, 1967, p. 51, quoted by Beth Barrie in "Victor Turner."

To everything, turn, turn, turn …
– Peter Seeger

The Galois Quaternion:

The Galois Quaternion

Click for context.

See also Delos in this journal.

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Block That Metaphor–

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 4:00 am

A Note on Galois Geometry

 Simple groups as the
"building blocks of group theory"

(Click image to enlarge.)

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11A/110427-BlocksOfGroupTheory-Sm.jpg

 Points,  lines,  etc., as the
"building blocks of geometry"

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11A/110427-BlocksOfGeometry-Sm.jpg

Related material —

(Click images for some background.)

Building blocks and
a simple group—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11A/110427-genrefl3.jpg

 

Building blocks and
geometry—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11A/110427-CubesPlane1.gif

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Unity and Multiplicity

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 5:48 pm

Today's earlier post mentions one approach to the concepts of unity and multiplicity. Here is another.

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11A/110427-Cube27.jpg
Unity:
The 3×3×3 Galois Cube

Ed Pegg Jr.'s program at Wolfram demonstrating concepts of a 1985 note by Cullinane

Multiplicity:

One of a group, GL(3,3), of 11,232
natural transformations of the 3×3×3 Cube

See also the earlier 1985 3×3 version by Cullinane.

Friday, April 22, 2011

Romancing the Hyperspace

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 7:59 pm

For the title, see Palm Sunday.

"There is a pleasantly discursive treatment of
Pontius Pilate's unanswered question 'What is truth?'" — H. S. M. Coxeter, 1987

From this date (April 22) last year—

Image-- examples from Galois affine geometry

Richard J. Trudeau in The Non-Euclidean Revolution , chapter on "Geometry and the Diamond Theory of Truth"–

"… Plato and Kant, and most of the philosophers and scientists in the 2200-year interval between them, did share the following general presumptions:

(1) Diamonds– informative, certain truths about the world– exist.
(2) The theorems of Euclidean geometry are diamonds.

Presumption (1) is what I referred to earlier as the 'Diamond Theory' of truth. It is far, far older than deductive geometry."

Trudeau's book was published in 1987. The non-Euclidean* figures above illustrate concepts from a 1976 monograph, also called "Diamond Theory."

Although non-Euclidean,* the theorems of the 1976 "Diamond Theory" are also, in Trudeau's terminology, diamonds.

* "Non-Euclidean" here means merely "other than  Euclidean." No violation of Euclid's parallel postulate is implied.

Trudeau comes to reject what he calls the "Diamond Theory" of truth. The trouble with his argument is the phrase "about the world."

Geometry, a part of pure mathematics, is not  about the world. See G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology .

Friday, April 8, 2011

Concepts of Space

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

Part I — Roberta Smith in today's New York Times

"… the argument that painting may ultimately be about
little more than the communication of some quality of
light and space, however abstract or indirect."

– Review of "Rooms With a View" at the Met

Box symbol

Pictorial version
of Hexagram 20,
Contemplation (View)

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10A/100522-Clouseau.gif

Space: what you damn well have to see.
– James Joyce, Ulysses

Part II — Window from A Crooked House

"Teal lifted the blind a few inches. He saw nothing, and raised it a little more—still nothing. Slowly he raised it until the window was fully exposed. They gazed out at—nothing.

Nothing, nothing at all. What color is nothing? Don't be silly! What shape is it? Shape is an attribute of something . It had neither depth nor form. It had not even blackness. It was nothing ."

Part III — Not So Crooked: The Cabinet of Dr. Montessori

An April 5 Wall Street Journal  article on Montessori schools, and…

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110408-MontessoriCabinet.jpg

A cabinet from Dr. Montessori's own
explanation of her method

Part IV — Pilate Goes to Kindergarten and The Seven

Tuesday, March 29, 2011

Diamond Star

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 4:03 pm

From last night's note on finite geometry—

"The (83, 83) Möbius-Kantor configuration here described by Coxeter is of course part of the larger (94, 123) Hesse configuration. Simply add the center point of the 3×3 Galois affine plane and the four lines (1 horizontal, 1 vertical, 2 diagonal) through the center point." An illustration—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110329-DiamondStar.jpg
This suggests a search for "diamond+star."

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Time and Chance (continued)

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 8:25 pm

Accidental Time and Space

New York Lottery today— midday 987, evening 522.

Time

The midday 987 may be interpreted as "…nine, eight, seven, …."—

"The countdown as we know it, 10-9-8-u.s.w.,
was invented by Fritz Lang in 1929 for
the Ufa film Die Frau im Mond . He put it into
the launch scene to heighten the suspense.
'It is another of my damned "touches,"' Fritz Lang said."

Gravity's Rainbow

Space

The evening 522 suggests the date 5/22. From that date last year

Art Space (2:02 AM EDT)

Box symbol

Pictorial version
of Hexagram 20,
Contemplation (View)

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10A/100522-Clouseau.gif

Space: what you damn well have to see.
– James Joyce, Ulysses

Monday, March 7, 2011

Point Taken

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 4:00 pm

Recommended— An essay (part 1 of 5 parts) in today's New York TImes—

THE ULTIMATUM

I don’t want to die in
a language I can’t understand.
— Jorge Luis Borges

Comment 71

"I agree with one of the earlier commenters that this is a piece of fine literary work. And in response to some of those who have wondered 'WHAT IS THE POINT?!' of this essay, I would like to say: Must literature always answer that question for us (and as quickly and efficiently as possible)?"

For an excellent survey of the essay's historical context, see The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article

"The Incommensurability of Scientific Theories,"
First published Wed., Feb. 25, 2009,
by Eric Oberheim and Paul Hoyningen-Huene.

Related material from this journal—

Paradigms, Paradigms Lost, and a search for "mere geometry." This last includes remarks contrasting Euclid's definition of a point ("that which has no parts") with a later notion useful in finite geometry.

See also (in the spirit of The Abacus Conundrum )…

The Monolith Epiphany

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110307-Monolith.jpg

(Note the Borges epigraph above.)

Monday, February 28, 2011

His Kind of Diamond

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 9:00 pm

In memory of Jane Russell

H.S.M. Coxeter's classic
Introduction to Geometry  (2nd ed.):

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070523-Coxeter62.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Note the resemblance of the central part to
a magical counterpart
the Ojo de Dios
of Mexico's Sierra Madre.

Related material page 55 of Polly and the Aunt ,
by Mary E. Blatchford.

Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Soul and Spirit

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 9:29 pm

This morning's post, "Shining," gave James Hillman's 1976 remarks
on the distinction between soul  and spirit .

The following images may help illustrate these concepts.

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110111-BlockDesignsAndGeometry.jpg

The distinction as illustrated by Jeff Bridges —

Soul

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110110-CrazyHeart225.jpg

Spirit

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110111-BridgesObadiahSm.jpg

The mirror has two faces (at least).

Postscript from a story, "The Zahir," in the Borges manner,
  by Mark Jason Dominus (programmer of the quilt designs above)—

"I  left that madhouse gratefully."

Dominus is also the author of…

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110111-HigherOrderPerl.gif

Click for details.

Saturday, January 8, 2011

True Grid (continued)

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

"Rosetta Stone" as a Metaphor
  in Mathematical Narratives

For some backgound, see Mathematics and Narrative from 2005.

Yesterday's posts on mathematics and narrative discussed some properties
of the 3×3 grid (also known as the ninefold square ).

For some other properties, see (at the college-undergraduate, or MAA, level)–
Ezra Brown, 2001, "Magic Squares, Finite Planes, and Points of Inflection on Elliptic Curves."

His conclusion:

When you are done, you will be able to arrange the points into [a] 3×3 magic square,
which resembles the one in the book [5] I was reading on elliptic curves….

This result ties together threads from finite geometry, recreational mathematics,
combinatorics, calculus, algebra, and number theory. Quite a feat!

5. Viktor Prasolov and Yuri Solvyev, Elliptic Functions and Elliptic Integrals ,
    American Mathematical Society, 1997.

Brown fails to give an important clue to the historical background of this topic —
the word Hessian . (See, however, this word in the book on elliptic functions that he cites.)

Investigation of this word yields a related essay at the graduate-student, or AMS, level–
Igor Dolgachev and Michela Artebani, 2009, "The Hesse Pencil of Plane Cubic Curves ."

From the Dolgachev-Artebani introduction–

In this paper we discuss some old and new results about the widely known Hesse
configuration
  of 9 points and 12 lines in the projective plane P2(k ): each point lies
on 4 lines and each line contains 3 points, giving an abstract configuration (123, 94).

PlanetMath.org on the Hesse configuration

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110108-PlanetMath.jpg

A picture of the Hesse configuration–

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05B/grid3x3med.bmp” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

(See Visualizing GL(2,p), a note from 1985).

Related notes from this journal —

From last November —

Saturday, November 13, 2010

Story

m759 @ 10:12 PM

From the December 2010 American Mathematical Society Notices

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101113-Ono.gif

Related material from this  journal—

Mathematics and Narrative and

Consolation Prize (August 19, 2010)

From 2006 —

Sunday December 10, 2006

 

 m759 @ 9:00 PM

A Miniature Rosetta Stone:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix05B/grid3x3med.bmp” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

“Function defined form, expressed in a pure geometry
that the eye could easily grasp in its entirety.”

– J. G. Ballard on Modernism
(The Guardian , March 20, 2006)

“The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance –
it is the illusion of knowledge.”

— Daniel J. Boorstin,
Librarian of Congress, quoted in Beyond Geometry

Also from 2006 —

Sunday November 26, 2006

 

m759 @ 7:26 AM

Rosalind Krauss
in "Grids," 1979:

"If we open any tract– Plastic Art and Pure Plastic Art  or The Non-Objective World , for instance– we will find that Mondrian and Malevich are not discussing canvas or pigment or graphite or any other form of matter.  They are talking about Being or Mind or Spirit.  From their point of view, the grid is a staircase to the Universal, and they are not interested in what happens below in the Concrete.

Or, to take a more up-to-date example…."

"He was looking at the nine engravings and at the circle,
checking strange correspondences between them."
The Club Dumas ,1993

"And it's whispered that soon if we all call the tune
Then the piper will lead us to reason."
Robert Plant ,1971

The nine engravings of The Club Dumas
(filmed as "The Ninth Gate") are perhaps more
an example of the concrete than of the universal.

An example of the universal*– or, according to Krauss,
a "staircase" to the universal– is the ninefold square:

The image “http://www.log24.com/theory/images/grid3x3.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

"This is the garden of Apollo, the field of Reason…."
John Outram, architect    

For more on the field of reason, see
Log24, Oct. 9, 2006.

A reasonable set of "strange correspondences"
in the garden of Apollo has been provided by
Ezra Brown in a mathematical essay (pdf).

Unreason is, of course, more popular.

* The ninefold square is perhaps a "concrete universal" in the sense of Hegel:

"Two determinations found in all philosophy are the concretion of the Idea and the presence of the spirit in the same; my content must at the same time be something concrete, present. This concrete was termed Reason, and for it the more noble of those men contended with the greatest enthusiasm and warmth. Thought was raised like a standard among the nations, liberty of conviction and of conscience in me. They said to mankind, 'In this sign thou shalt conquer,' for they had before their eyes what had been done in the name of the cross alone, what had been made a matter of faith and law and religion– they saw how the sign of the cross had been degraded."

– Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy ,
   "Idea of a Concrete Universal Unity"

"For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross."
– Thomas Pynchon   

And from last October —

Friday, October 8, 2010

 

m759 @ 12:00 PM
 

Starting Out in the Evening
… and Finishing Up at Noon

This post was suggested by last evening's post on mathematics and narrative and by Michiko Kakutani on Vargas Llosa in this morning's New York Times .

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101008-StartingOut.jpg

 

Above: Frank Langella in
"Starting Out in the Evening"

Right: Johnny Depp in
"The Ninth Gate"

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101008-NinthGate.jpg

"One must proceed cautiously, for this road— of truth and falsehood in the realm of fiction— is riddled with traps and any enticing oasis is usually a mirage."

– "Is Fiction the Art of Lying?"* by Mario Vargas Llosa,
    New York Times  essay of October 7, 1984

* The Web version's title has a misprint—
   "living" instead of "lying."

"You've got to pick up every stitch…"

Tuesday, December 28, 2010

Insane Symmetry

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 11:02 am

Continued from yesterday's Church Diamond and from Dec. 17's Fare Thee Well —

The San Francisco Examiner  last year
on New Year's Eve —
 
Entertainment

Discover the modern art of Amish quilts

By: Leslie Katz 12/31/09 1:00 AM

Arts editor

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101228-AmishQuilt.jpg

Quilts made by Amish women in Pennsylvania,
such as this traditional center diamond,
reveal the makers’ keen sense of color and design.

Household handicrafts and heirlooms made by American women seen as precursors to modern art is one underlying thesis of “Amish Abstractions: Quilts from the Collection of Faith and Stephen Brown,” a provocative exhibit on view at the de Young Museum through June.

Curated by Jill D’Alessandro of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the show features about 50 full-size and crib quilts made between 1880 and 1940 in Pennsylvania and the Midwest during what experts consider the apex of Amish quilt-making production.

Faith and Stephen Brown, Bay Area residents who began collecting quilts in the 1970s after seeing one in a shop window in Chicago and being bowled over by its bold design, say their continued passion for the quilts as art is in part because they’re so reminiscent of paintings by modern masters like Mark Rothko, Josef Albers, Sol LeWitt and Ellsworth Kelly — but the fabric masterpieces came first.

“A happy visual coincidence” is how the Browns and D’Alessandro define the connection, pointing to the brilliance in color theory, sophisticated palettes and complex geometry that characterize both the quilts and paintings.

“There’s an insane symmetry  to these quilts,” says D’Alessandro….

Read more at the San Francisco Examiner .

The festive nature of the date of the above item, New Year's Eve, suggests Stephen King's

All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

and also a (mis)quotation from a photographer's weblog— 

"Art, being bartender, is never drunk."

— Quotation from Peter Viereck misattributed to Randall Jarrell in
   Art as Bartender and the Golden Gate.

By a different photographer —

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101228-ShiningJack.jpg

See also…

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101228-NurserySchool.jpg

We may imagine the bartender above played by Louis Sullivan.

Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Reflections

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

Published on November 10, 2009

IMAGE- Borovik and Borovik, 'Mirrors and Reflections: The Geometry of Finite Reflection Groups'

The above book may be regarded as an ironic answer to a question posed here on that date

“Public commentators assumed the air of kindergarten teachers who had to protect their children from thinking certain impermissible and intolerant thoughts.”

– David Brooks in the Nov. 10, 2009, New York Times

What else is new?

For related kindergarten thoughts, see Finite Geometry and Physical Space.

For the connection of the kindergarten thoughts to reflections, see A Simple Reflection Group of Order 168.

Friday, December 17, 2010

Fare Thee Well

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 4:01 am

Excerpt from a post of 8 AM May 26, 2006

A Living Church
continued from March 27, 2006

"The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast."

– G. K. Chesterton

The Eightfold Cube

Platonic Solid

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/060526-JackInTheBox.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Shakespearean Fool
© 2004 Natasha Wescoat

A related scene from the opening of Blake Edwards's "S.O.B." —

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101217-SOBintro.jpg

Click for Julie Andrews in the full video.

Friday, December 10, 2010

Cruel Star, Part II

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

Symmetry, Duality, and Cinema

— Title of a Paris conference held June 17, 2010

From that conference, Edward Frenkel on symmetry and duality

"Symmetry plays an important role in geometry, number theory, and quantum physics. I will discuss the links between these areas from the vantage point of the Langlands Program. In this context 'duality' means that the same theory, or category, may be described in two radically different ways. This leads to many surprising consequences."

Related material —

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101210-CruelStarPartII.jpg

See also  "Black Swan" in this journal, Ingmar Bergman's production of Yukio Mishima's "Madame de Sade," and Duality and Symmetry, 2001.

This journal on the date of the Paris conference
had a post, "Nighttown," with some remarks about
the duality of darkness and light. Its conclusion—

"By groping toward the light we are made to realize
 how deep the darkness is around us."
  — Arthur Koestler, The Call Girls: A Tragi-Comedy,
      Random House, 1973, page 118

Sunday, December 5, 2010

Hanukkah Continues —

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 9:29 am

Dan Brown Meets
The Exorcist
in…

The 973 Code

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101205-PendantSm.jpg

Baphomet with Ouroboros Pendant

$140  Code: 973

____________________________________

Meanwhile, our hero…

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101205-IndependenceDay.jpg

goes to the movies.

In this production, Jeff Goldblum is played by
David Ben-Zvi of the University of Texas at Austin
Geometry Research Group

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101205-Ben-Zvi.jpg

Click Ben-Zvi for further narrative.

Monday, November 29, 2010

Philosopher’s Stone

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 3:30 pm

Happy Ending

Part I —
Plato's
Tombstone

Star and Diamond: A Tombstone for Plato

Part II
Star and Diamond
United

IMAGE- The Diamond Star

(See previous post and
a note on design.)

Sunday, November 28, 2010

The Embedding

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 6:00 am

The New York Times Magazine  this morning on a seminar on film theory at Columbia University—

"When the seminar reconvened after the break, Schamus said, 'Let’s dive into the Meno,' a dialogue in which Plato and Socrates consider virtue. 'The heart of it is the mathematical proof.' He rose from his seat and went to the whiteboard, where he drew figures and scribbled numbers as he worked through the geometry. 'You can only get the proof visually,' he concluded, stepping back and gazing at it. Plato may be skeptical about the category of the visual, he said, but 'you are confronted with a visual proof that gets you back to the idea embedded in visuality.'"

The Meno Embedding

Plato's Diamond embedded in The Matrix

See also Plato's Code and
 Plato Thanks the Academy.

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Art Object

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

There is more than one way
to look at a cube.

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101123-plain_cube_200x227.gif

 From Cambridge U. Press on Feb. 20, 2006 —

IMAGE- 'Cambridge Tracts in Mathematics 168: The Cube'

and from this journal on June 30, 2010 —

In memory of Wu Guanzhong, Chinese artist
who died in Beijing on June 25, 2010

Image-- The Dream of the Expanded Field

See also this journal on Feb. 20, 2006
(the day The Cube  was published).

Monday, November 8, 2010

Study of O

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 7:20 pm

Today's previous entry discussed a musical offering by Coltrane, with a link to some spiritual background on a mathematician from India who died on October 16, 1983. Here is a pictorial  offering, more in the spirit of Bach than of Coltrane, from the day of that death—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101108-StudyOfO.jpg

Click on the image for some context.

Sunday, November 7, 2010

The Seven

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


Fano plane with cubes as points
 
Those who prefer magic
may consult The Deathly Hallows.

Tuesday, November 2, 2010

A Dozen Pairs of Opposites —

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 5:24 am

24 graphic patterns arranged in space
as 12 pairs of opposites

IMAGE- 'Permutahedron of Opposites'-- 24 graphic patterns arranged in space as 12 pairs of opposites

Click image for an illustration of how the above labeling was derived.

For further background, see Cases of the Diamond Theorem
and recent art by Josefine Lyche of Norway.

Monday, October 25, 2010

The Embedding*

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 4:04 pm

A New York Times  "The Stone" post from yesterday (5:15 PM, by John Allen Paulos) was titled—

Stories vs. Statistics

Related Google searches—

"How to lie with statistics"— about 148,000 results

"How to lie with stories"— 2 results

What does this tell us?

Consider also Paulos's phrase "imbedding the God character."  A less controversial topic might be (with the spelling I prefer) "embedding the miraculous." For an example, see this journal's "Mathematics and Narrative" entry on 5/15 (a date suggested, coincidentally, by the time of Paulos's post)—

Image-- 'Then a miracle occurs' cartoon
Cartoon by S.Harris

Image-- Google search on 'miracle octad'-- top 3 results

 

* Not directly  related to the novel The Embedding  discussed at Tenser, said the Tensor  on April 23, 2006 ("Quasimodo Sunday"). An academic discussion of that novel furnishes an example of narrative as more than mere entertainment. See Timothy J. Reiss, "How can 'New' Meaning Be Thought? Fictions of Science, Science Fictions," Canadian Review of Comparative Literature , Vol. 12, No. 1, March 1985, pp. 88-126. Consider also on this, Picasso's birthday, his saying that "Art is a lie that makes us realize truth…."

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Savage Logic…

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:22 am

and the New York Lottery

IMAGE-- NY Lottery Oct. 18, 2010-- Midday 069, Evening 359

A search in this journal for yesterday's evening number in the New York Lottery, 359, leads to…

The Cerebral Savage: 
On the Work of Claude Lévi-Strauss

by Clifford Geertz

Shown below is 359, the final page of Chapter 13 in
The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays by Clifford Geertz,
New York, 1973: Basic Books, pp. 345-359 —

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101019-Geertz359.gif

This page number 359 also appears in this journal in an excerpt from Dan Brown's novel Angels & Demons

See this journal's entries for March 1-15, 2009, especially…

Sunday, March 15, 2009  5:24 PM

Philosophy and Poetry:

The Origin of Change

A note on the figure
from this morning's sermon:

Diamond Theory version of 'The Square Inch Space' with yin-yang symbol for comparison

"Two things of opposite natures seem to depend
On one another, as a man depends
On a woman, day on night, the imagined

On the real. This is the origin of change.
Winter and spring, cold copulars, embrace
And forth the particulars of rapture come."

-- Wallace Stevens,
  "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,"
   Canto IV of "It Must Change"

Sunday, March 15, 2009  11:00 AM

Ides of March Sermon:

Angels, Demons,
"Symbology"

"On Monday morning, 9 March, after visiting the Mayor of Rome and the Municipal Council on the Capitoline Hill, the Holy Father spoke to the Romans who gathered in the square outside the Senatorial Palace…

'… a verse by Ovid, the great Latin poet, springs to mind. In one of his elegies he encouraged the Romans of his time with these words:

"Perfer et obdura: multo graviora tulisti."

 "Hold out and persist:
  you have got through
  far more difficult situations."

 (Tristia, Liber  V, Elegia  XI, verse 7).'"
 

This journal
on 9 March:

Diamond Theory version of 'The Square Inch Space' with yin-yang symbol for comparison

Note the color-interchange
symmetry
of each symbol
under 180-degree rotation.

Related material:
The Illuminati Diamond:

IMAGE- Illuminati Diamond, pp. 359-360 in 'Angels & Demons,' Simon & Schuster Pocket Books 2005, 448 pages, ISBN 0743412397

The symmetry of the yin-yang symbol, of the diamond-theorem symbol, and of Brown's Illuminati Diamond is also apparent in yesterday's midday New York lottery number (see above).

"Savage logic works like a kaleidoscope…." — Clifford Geertz on Lévi-Strauss

Tuesday, October 12, 2010

King Solomon’s Mind

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

"Always keep a diamond in your mind."

Tom Waits/Kathleen Brennan song performed by Solomon Burke at the Paradiso in Amsterdam

The Galois Quaternion

The Galois Quaternion

"The text is a two-way mirror
that allows me to look into
the life and times of the reader.
Who knows, someday i  may rise
to a text that will compel me
to push through to the other side."

The French Mathematician
   (Galois), by Tom Petsinis

 

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101012-KingSolomonAlbum.jpg

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Magnificent Load

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

From Doonesbury today—

"What a magnificent load"

From this journal (September 20, 2009)—

scheinen
German verb:

  1. to shine; to gleam     
  2. to seem; to appear….

Quine, Pursuit of Truth,
Harvard U. Press, 1990, epigraphs:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix09A/090920-QuineEpigraph.jpg

Google search:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix09A/090920-SozeinChi.jpg

Der Einsatz

Motto of Plato's Academy: 'Let no one ignorant of geometry enter'

The 3x3 grid

Nichts ist wie es scheint.

See also the film
"23— Nichts ist so wie es scheint."

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