For Harlan Kane . . .
A related word in this journal: Irvine.
Thursday, July 25, 2019
Saturday, July 21, 2018
For Sixers*
See "Route 6" in this journal.
From that search —
"Looking for what was, where it used to be"
— Wallace Stevens
"‘It’s like going backwards in time to the late 1950s."
— Norma Jean Thompson
Related material (click to enlarge) —
* Term from a recent Steven Spielberg film.
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Building-Block Theory
(A sequel to yesterday’s Geometry for Jews)
From this journal on the above UCI posting date — April 6, 2018 —
From this journal on the above lecture date — April 26, 2018 —
illustrations in a post titled Defining Form —
For the relevance of the above material to building blocks,
see Eightfold Cube in this journal.
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Friday, July 20, 2018
Geometry for Jews
Click image to enlarge —
A portrait from the home page of David Eppstein,
a professor at the University of California, Irvine
“… how can an image with 8 points and 8 lines
possibly represent a space with 7 points and 7 lines???“
— David Eppstein, 21 December 2015
See ” Projective spaces as ‘collapsed vector spaces,’ ”
page 203 in Geometry and Symmetry by Paul B. Yale,
published by Holden-Day in 1968.
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Monday, December 21, 2015
The Eppstein Edit
A Wikipedia edit today by David Eppstein, a professor
at the University of California, Irvine:
See the Fano-plane page before and after the Eppstein edit.
Eppstein deleted my Dec. 6 Fano 3-space image as well as
today's Fano-plane image. He apparently failed to read the
explanatory notes for both the 3-space model and the
2-space model. The research he refers to was original
(in 1979) but has been published for some time now in the
online Encyclopedia of Mathematics, as he could have
discovered by following a link in the notes for the 3-space
model.
For a related recent display of ignorance, see Hint of Reality.
Happy darkest night.
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Thursday, January 27, 2011
Mathematics and Narrative, continued…
Indiana Jones and the Magical Oracle
Mathematician Ken Ono in the December 2010 American Mathematical Society Notices—
The "dying genius" here is Ramanujan, not Galois. The story now continues at the AMS website—
(Excerpt from Jan. 27 screenshot;
the partitions story has been the top
news item at the site all week.)
From a Jan. 20, 2011, Emory University press release —
"Finite formula found for partition numbers" —
"We found a function, that we call P, that is like a magical oracle," Ono says. "I can take any number, plug it into P, and instantly calculate the partitions of that number. P does not return gruesome numbers with infinitely many decimal places. It's the finite, algebraic formula that we have all been looking for."
For an introduction to the magical oracle, see a preprint, "Bruinier-Ono," at the American Institute of Mathematics website.
Ono also discussed the oracle in a video (see minute 25) recorded Jan. 21 and placed online today.
See as well "Exact formulas for the partition function?" at mathoverflow.net.
A Nov. 29, 2010, remark by Thomas Bloom on that page leads to a 2006 preprint by Ono and Kathrin Bringmann, "An Arithmetic Formula for the Partition Function*," that seems not unrelated to Ono's new "magical oracle" formula—
The Bruinier-Ono paper does not mention the earlier Bringmann-Ono work.
(Both the 2011 Bruinier-Ono paper and the 2006 Bringmann-Ono paper mention their debt to a 2002 work by Zagier— Don Zagier, "Traces of singular moduli," in Motives, Polylogarithms and Hodge theory, Part II (Irvine, CA, 1998), International Press Lecture Series 3 (International Press, Somerville, MA, 2002), pages 211-244.)
Some background for those who prefer mathematics to narrative—
The Web of Modularity: Arithmetic of the Coefficients of Modular Forms and q-Series ,
by Ken Ono, American Mathematical Society CBMS Series, 2004.
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Friday, October 28, 2005
Friday October 28, 2005
Skeptics’ Anniversary
From AP’s “Today in History” for Oct. 28:
In 1636, Harvard College was founded in Massachusetts.”
In the spring of 1960, Harvard sent to all incoming freshmen a reading list consisting, as I recall, of two books:
1. Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science, by Martin Gardner (Dover, 1957), and
2. A book on evolution, whose title I do not recall. Perhaps it was Apes, Angels, and Victorians, by William Irvine (McGraw-Hill, 1955).
I found in later years that Gardner was not to be trusted (certainly not on the subject of mathematics– he never had even one college course in the subject). Darwin, however, still seems eminently reasonable.
For my own views on the religion of Scientism advocated by many at Harvard and by those who admire Gardner, see
For a musical version of some related views, see
For an update on the religion of Scientism, see yesterday’s Newsday:
Skeptics converge to take on religion and morality
“The congress coincides with the 25th anniversary of the Council for Secular Humanism, the arm of the center dedicated to promoting a nonreligious philosophy.”
The word “nonreligious” here should, since Scientism itself amounts to a religion, be viewed with a great deal of skepticism.
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Friday, June 27, 2003
Friday June 27, 2003
For Fred Sandback:
Time's a Round
The following entry of Feb. 25, 2003, was written for painter Mark Rothko, and may serve as well for minimalist artist Fred Sandback, also connected to the de Menil family of art patrons, who, like Rothko, has killed himself.
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Plagued in life by depression — what Styron, quoting Milton, called "darkness visible" — Rothko took his own life on this date [Feb. 25] in 1970. As a sequel to the previous note, "Song of Not-Self," here are the more cheerful thoughts of the song "Time's a Round," the first of Shiva Dancing: The Rothko Chapel Songs, by C. K. Latham. See also my comment on the previous entry (7:59 PM).
Time’s a round, time’s a round, — C. K. Latham
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The following is from the cover of
"Finnegans Wake: a Symposium,"
a reprint of
Our Exagmination Round His Factification
for Incamination of Work in Progress,
Paris, Shakespeare and Company, 1929.
As well as being a memorial to Rothko and Sandback, the above picture may serve to mark the diamond anniversary of a dinner party at Shakespeare and Company on this date in 1928. (See previous entry.)
A quotation from aaparis.org also seems relevant on this, the date usually given for the death of author Malcolm Lowry, in some of whose footsteps I have walked:
"We are not saints."
— Chapter V, Alcoholics Anonymous
Thursday, June 26, 2003
Thursday June 26, 2003
ART WARS:
Art at the Vanishing Point
From the web page Art Wars:
"For more on the 'vanishing point,'
or 'point at infinity,' see
Midsummer Eve's Dream."
On Midsummer Eve, June 23, 2003, minimalist artist Fred Sandback killed himself.
Sandback is discussed in The Dia Generation, an April 6, 2003, New York Times Magazine article that is itself discussed at the Art Wars page.
Sandback, who majored in philosophy at Yale, once said that
"Fact and illusion are equivalents."
Two other references that may be relevant:
The Medium is
the Rear View Mirror,
which deals with McLuhan's book Through the Vanishing Point, and a work I cited on Midsummer Eve 
…
Chapter 5 of Through the Looking Glass:
" 'What is it you want to buy?' the Sheep said at last, looking up for a moment from her knitting.
'I don't quite know yet,' Alice said very gently. 'I should like to look all round me first, if I might.'
'You may look in front of you, and on both sides, if you like,' said the Sheep; 'but you ca'n't look all round you — unless you've got eyes at the back of your head.'
But these, as it happened, Alice had not got: so she contented herself with turning round, looking at the shelves as she came to them.
The shop seemed to be full of all manner of curious things — but the oddest part of it all was that, whenever she looked hard at any shelf, to make out exactly what it had on it, that particular shelf was always quite, empty, though the others round it were crowded as full as they could hold.
'Things flow about so here!' she said at last in a plaintive tone…."