A Google search for "four color decomposition" yields an AI Overview —
My "four-color decomposition" theorem supplies some background
for last New Year's Eve's post on the Klein Correspondence.
Thursday, February 20, 2025
Coloring the Klein Correspondence
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Thursday, January 9, 2025
Grok 2 on the MOG and the Klein Correspondence
Related illustration —
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— Transcription —
Grok 2 on Klein correspondence and MOG — 9 Jan. 2025 Prompt: How is the Klein correspondence related to the Miracle Octad Generator? Grok 2 response (with citations and links removed): The Klein correspondence is closely related to the Miracle Octad Generator (MOG) through the mathematical structure they both engage with, particularly in the context of finite geometry and combinatorics. Klein Correspondence: This refers to a mathematical framework that establishes a correspondence between points and lines in a projective space. Specifically, in the context of the MOG, it relates to the geometry of PG(3,2), the three-dimensional projective space over the field with two elements. The Klein correspondence, in this context, essentially connects the combinatorial aspects of partitions of an 8-set to the geometric structure of lines in PG(3,2). Miracle Octad Generator (MOG): Introduced by R.T. Curtis, the MOG is a tool used in the study of the Mathieu group M24, the binary Golay code, and related structures like the Steiner system S(5,8,24). It consists of a 4×6 array where the positions are used to construct octads (sets of 8 elements) from given sets of 5 elements, reflecting the structure of the Steiner system. Relation Between Klein Correspondence and MOG: Combinatorial and Geometric Link: The MOG uses the Klein correspondence to map partitions of an 8-set (into two 4-sets) to 4 parallel affine planes within PG(3,2). This mapping is natural and symmetrical, which is crucial for the MOG's functionality. The 35 partitions of an 8-set correspond to the 35 lines in PG(3,2), and this correspondence helps in understanding how to generate and visualize octads within the MOG framework. Structural Insight: The Klein correspondence provides a way to see how the MOG's method of generating octads can be understood geometrically. This insight is vital for exploring the symmetry and subgroup structure of M24, as the MOG's layout preserves these symmetries. Thus, the Klein correspondence serves as a foundational link that allows the MOG to operate by translating combinatorial problems into geometric ones, facilitating the study of complex mathematical structures like the Mathieu groups and Steiner systems. |
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Thursday, October 10, 2013
Klein Correspondence
(Continued from June 2, 2013)
John Bamberg continues his previous post on this subject.
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Wednesday, March 5, 2025
Welcome to Klein Space*
"You meet people on their plane of reality"
— White Lotus posture teacher, 2025
* For a rather different Klein space, click here.
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Sunday, February 9, 2025
An AI Overview of Klein Quadric and MOG
See also a more accurate AI report from January 9, 2025 —
Grok 2 on the MOG and the Klein Correspondence:
HTML version, with corrections, of the above 9 January Grok 2 report —
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Grok 2: Klein Correspondence and MOG, 9 Jan. 2025 . . . The Klein correspondence is closely related to the Miracle Octad Generator (MOG) through the mathematical structure they both engage with, particularly in the context of finite geometry and combinatorics.
Klein Correspondence: This refers to a mathematical framework that establishes a correspondence between Miracle Octad Generator (MOG): Introduced by R.T. Curtis, the MOG is a tool used in the study of the Mathieu group M24, the binary Golay code, and related structures like the Steiner system S(5,8,24). It consists of a 4×6 array where the positions are used to construct octads (sets of 8 elements) from given sets of 5 elements, reflecting the structure of the Steiner system. Relation Between Klein Correspondence and MOG:
Thus, the Klein correspondence serves as a foundational link that allows the MOG to operate by translating combinatorial problems into geometric ones, facilitating the study of complex mathematical structures like the Mathieu groups and Steiner systems. * Correction: Should be "a correspondence between points in a five-dimensional projective space and lines in a three-dimensional projective space." |
Update of ca. 9 AM ET Monday, Feb. 10, 2024 —
Neither AI report above mentions the Cullinane model of the five-
dimensional projective space PG(5,2) as a brick space — a space
whose points are the 2×4 bricks used in thte MOG. This is
understandable, as the notion of using bricks to model both PG(5,2)
and PG(3,2) has appeared so far only in this journal. See an
illustration from New Year's Eve . . . Dec. 31, 2024 —
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Monday, February 10, 2025
Brick Space: Points with Parts
This post's "Points with Parts" title may serve as an introduction to
what has been called "the most powerful diagram in mathematics" —
the "Miracle Octad Generator" (MOG) of Robert T. Curtis.
Curtis himself has apparently not written on the geometric background
of his diagram — the finite projective spaces PG(5,2) and PG(3,2), of
five and of three dimensions over the two-element Galois field GF(2).
The component parts of the MOG diagram, the 2×4 Curtis "bricks,"
may be regarded* as forming both PG(5,2) and PG(3,2) . . .
Pace Euclid, points with parts. For more on the MOG's geometric
background, see the Klein correspondence in the previous post.
For a simpler example of "points with parts, see
http://m759.net/wordpress/?s=200229.
* Use the notions of Galois (XOR, or "symmetric-difference") addition
of even subsets, and such addition "modulo complementation," to
decrease the number of dimensions of the spaces involved.
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Tuesday, January 14, 2025
Proofs
A phrase by Aitchison at Hiroshima . . .
"The proof of the above is a relabelling of the Klein quartic . . . ."
Related art — A relabelling of the Klein quadric by Curtis bricks:
Update of 12:26 PM EST Wednesday, January 15, 2025 —
Here is a large (17.5 MB) PDF file containing all posts touching upon
the concept underlying the above illustration — the Klein correspondence.
(A PDF reader such as Foxit is recommended for such large files.)
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Monday, December 23, 2024
A Projective-Space Home for the Miracle Octad Generator
The natural geometric setting for the "bricks" in the Miracle Octad Generator
(MOG) of Robert T. Curtis is PG(5,2), the projective 5-space over GF(2).
The Klein correspondence mirrors the 35 lines of PG(3,2) — and hence, via the
graphic approach below, the 35 "heavy bricks" of the MOG that match those
lines — in PG(5,2), where the bricks may be studied with geometric methods,
as an alternative to Curtis's original MOG combinatorial construction methods.
The construction below of a PG(5,2) brick space is analogous to the
"line diagrams" construction of a PG(3,2) in Cullinane's diamond theorem.
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Saturday, December 21, 2024
Coordinatizing Brick Space
Exercise: The eight-part diagrams in the graphic "brick space"
model of PG(5,2) below need to be suitably labeled with six-part
GF(2) coordinates to help illustrate the Klein correspondence that
underlies the large Mathieu group M24.
.gif)
A possible approach: The lines separating dark squares from light
(i.e., blue from white or yellow) in the figure above may be added
in XOR fashion (as if they were diamond theorem line diagrams)
to form a six dimensional vector space, which, after a suitable basis
is chosen, may be represented by six-tuples of 0's and 1's.
Related reading —
log24.com/log24/241221-'Brick Space « Log24' – m759.net.pdf .
This is a large (15.1 MB) file. The Foxit PDF reader is recommended.
The PDF is from a search for Brick Space in this journal.
Some context: http://m759.net/wordpress/?s=Weyl+Coordinatization.
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Thursday, December 19, 2024
Different Angles
"Drawing the same face from different angles sounds fun,
but let me tell you – it’s not. It’s not fun at all. It’s HARD!!"
— Loisvb on Instagram, Dec. 18, 2024
Likewise for PG(5,2).
Exercise: The eight-part diagrams in the graphic "brick space"
model of PG(5,2) below need to be suitably labeled with six-part
GF(2) coordinates to help illustrate the Klein correspondence that
underlies the large Mathieu group M24.
-coordinates.gif)
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Tuesday, August 27, 2024
For Rubik Worshippers
The above is six-dimensional as an affine space, but only five-dimensional
as a projective space . . . the space PG(5, 2).
As the domain of the smallest model of the Klein correspondence and the
Klein quadric, PG (5,2) is not without mathematical importance.
See Chess Bricks and Ovid.group.
This post was suggested by the date July 6, 2024 in a Warren, PA obituary
and by that date in this journal.
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Wednesday, July 3, 2024
The Nutshell Miracle
From a search in this journal for nocciolo —
From a search in this journal for PG(5,2) —
From a search in this journal for Curtis MOG —
Shown above is a rearranged version of the
Miracle Octad Generator (MOG) of R. T. Curtis
("A new combinatorial approach to M24,"
Math. Proc. Camb. Phil. Soc., 79 (1976), 25-42.)
From a search in this journal for Klein Correspondence —
The picture of PG(5,2) above as an expanded nocciolo
shows that the Miracle Octad Generator illustrates
the Klein correspondence.
Update of 10:33 PM ET Friday, July 5, 2024 —
See the July 5 post "De Bruyn on the Klein Quadric."
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Saturday, September 3, 2022
1984 Revisited
Note the three quadruplets of parallel edges in the 1984 figure above.
The above Gates article appeared earlier, in the June 2010 issue of
Physics World , with bigger illustrations. For instance —
Exercise: Describe, without seeing the rest of the article,
the rule used for connecting the balls above.
Wikipedia offers a much clearer picture of a (non-adinkra) tesseract —
And then, more simply, there is the Galois tesseract —
For parts of my own world in June 2010, see this journal for that month.
The above Galois tesseract appears there as follows:
See also the Klein correspondence in a paper from 1968
in yesterday's 2:54 PM ET post.
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Tuesday, June 21, 2022
For the Church of Synchronology*
See also this journal on the above Cambridge U. Press date.
"There are many places one can read about twistors
and the mathematics that underlies them. One that
I can especially recommend is the book Twistor Geometry
and Field Theory, by Ward and Wells."
— Peter Woit, "Not Even Wrong" weblog post, March 6, 2020.
* A fictional entity. See Synchronology in this journal.
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Wednesday, February 9, 2022
8!
Conwell, 1910 —
(In modern notation, Conwell is showing that the complete
projective group of collineations and dualities of the finite
3-space PG (3,2) is of order 8 factorial, i.e. "8!" —
In other words, that any permutation of eight things may be
regarded as a geometric transformation of PG (3,2).)
Later discussion of this same "Klein correspondence"
between Conwell's 3-space and 5-space . . .
A somewhat simpler toy model —
Related fiction — "The Bulk Beings" of the film "Interstellar."
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Sunday, October 11, 2020
Saniga on Einstein
See “Einstein on Acid” by Stephen Battersby
(New Scientist , Vol. 180, issue 2426 — 20 Dec. 2003, 40-43).
That 2003 article is about some speculations of Metod Saniga.
“Saniga is not a professional mystic or
a peddler of drugs, he is an astrophysicist
at the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava.
It seems unlikely that studying stars led him to
such a way-out view of space and time. Has he
undergone a drug-induced epiphany, or a period
of mental instability? ‘No, no, no,’ Saniga says,
‘I am a perfectly sane person.'”
Some more recent and much less speculative remarks by Saniga
are related to the Klein correspondence —
arXiv.org > math > arXiv:1409.5691:
Mathematics > Combinatorics
[Submitted on 17 Sep 2014]
The Complement of Binary Klein Quadric
as a Combinatorial Grassmannian
By Metod Saniga
“Given a hyperbolic quadric of PG(5,2), there are 28 points
off this quadric and 56 lines skew to it. It is shown that the
(286,563)-configuration formed by these points and lines
is isomorphic to the combinatorial Grassmannian of type
G2(8). It is also pointed out that a set of seven points of
G2(8) whose labels share a mark corresponds to a
Conwell heptad of PG(5,2). Gradual removal of Conwell
heptads from the (286,563)-configuration yields a nested
sequence of binomial configurations identical with part of
that found to be associated with Cayley-Dickson algebras
(arXiv:1405.6888).”
Related entertainment —
See Log24 on the date, 17 Sept. 2014, of Saniga’s Klein-quadric article:
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Wednesday, September 16, 2020
Critical Invisibility
Synchronology check —
This journal on the above dates —
8 January 2019 (“For the Church of Synchronology“)
and 24 April 2019 (“Critical Visibility“).
Related mathematics: Klein Correspondence posts.
Related entertainment: “The Bulk Beings.”
The above Physical Review remarks were found in a search
for a purely mathematical concept —
“35 points” + projective space . . .
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Wednesday, May 25, 2016
Kummer and Dirac
From "Projective Geometry and PT-Symmetric Dirac Hamiltonian,"
Y. Jack Ng and H. van Dam,
Physics Letters B , Volume 673, Issue 3,
23 March 2009, Pages 237–239
(http://arxiv.org/abs/0901.2579v2, last revised Feb. 20, 2009)
" Studies of spin-½ theories in the framework of projective geometry
have been undertaken before. See, e.g., Ref. [4]. 1 "
" 1 These papers are rather mathematical and technical.
The authors of the first two papers discuss the Dirac equation
in terms of the Plucker-Klein correspondence between lines of
a three-dimensional projective space and points of a quadric
in a five-dimensional projective space. The last paper shows
that the Dirac equation bears a certain relation to Kummer’s
surface, viz., the structure of the Dirac ring of matrices is
related to that of Kummer’s 166 configuration . . . ."
[4]
O. Veblen
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA , 19 (1933), p. 503
Full Text via CrossRef
E.M. Bruins
Proc. Nederl. Akad. Wetensch. , 52 (1949), p. 1135
F.C. Taylor Jr., Master thesis, University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill (1968), unpublished
A remark of my own on the structure of Kummer’s 166 configuration . . . .
See as well yesterday morning's post.
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Friday, March 21, 2014
Three Constructions of the Miracle Octad Generator
See also a Log24 post on this subject from Dec. 14, 2013,
especially (scroll down) the update of March 9, 2014.
Related material on the Turyn-Curtis construction
from the University of Cambridge —
— Slide by "Dr. Parker" — Apparently Richard A. Parker —
Lecture 4, "Discovering M24," in slides for lectures 1-8 from lectures
at Cambridge in 2010-2011 on "Sporadic and Related Groups."
See also the Parker lectures of 2012-2013 on the same topic.
A third construction of Curtis's 35 4×6 1976 MOG arrays would use
Cullinane's analysis of the 4×4 subarrays' affine and projective structure,
and point out the fact that Conwell's 1910 correspondence of the 35
4+4-partitions of an 8-set with the 35 lines of the projective 3-space
over the 2-element field, PG(3, 2), is essentially the same correspondence
as that constituting Curtis's 1976 MOG.
See The Diamond Theorem, Finite Relativity, Galois Space,
Generating the Octad Generator, and The Klein Correspondence.
Update of March 22-March 23 —
Adding together as (0,1)-matrices over GF(2) the black parts (black
squares as 1's, all other squares as 0's) of the 35 4×6 arrays of the 1976
Curtis MOG would then reveal* the symmetric role played in octads
by what Curtis called the heavy brick , and so reveal also the action of
S3 on the three Curtis bricks that leaves invariant the set of all 759
octads of the S(5, 8, 24) constructed from the 35 MOG arrays. For more
details of this "by-hand" construction, see Geometry of the 4×4 Square.
For the mathematical properties of the S(5, 8, 24), it is convenient to
have a separate construction (such as Turyn's), not by hand, of the
extended binary Golay code. See the Brouwer preprint quoted above.
* "Then a miracle occurs," as in the classic 1977 Sidney Harris cartoon.
Illustration of array addition from March 23 —
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Saturday, March 8, 2014
Conwell Heptads in Eastern Europe
“Charting the Real Four-Qubit Pauli Group
via Ovoids of a Hyperbolic Quadric of PG(7,2),”
by Metod Saniga, Péter Lévay and Petr Pracna,
arXiv:1202.2973v2 [math-ph] 26 Jun 2012 —
P. 4— “It was found that Q +(5,2) (the Klein quadric)
has, up to isomorphism, a unique one — also known,
after its discoverer, as a Conwell heptad [18].
The set of 28 points lying off Q +(5,2) comprises
eight such heptads, any two having exactly one
point in common.”
P. 11— “This split reminds us of a similar split of
63 points of PG(5,2) into 35/28 points lying on/off
a Klein quadric Q +(5,2).”
[18] G. M. Conwell, Ann. Math. 11 (1910) 60–76
A similar split occurs in yesterday’s Kummer Varieties post.
See the 63 = 28 + 35 vectors of R8 discussed there.
For more about Conwell heptads, see The Klein Correspondence,
Penrose Space-Time, and a Finite Model.
For my own remarks on the date of the above arXiv paper
by Saniga et. al., click on the image below —
Walter Gropius
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Sunday, June 2, 2013
Sunday School
See the Klein correspondence at SymOmega today and in this journal.
"The casual passerby may wonder about the name SymOmega.
This comes from the notation Sym(Ω) referring to the symmetric group
of all permutations of a set Ω, which is something all of us have
both written and read many times over."
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Wednesday, February 13, 2013
Form:
Story, Structure, and the Galois Tesseract
Recent Log24 posts have referred to the
"Penrose diamond" and Minkowski space.
The Penrose diamond has nothing whatever
to do with my 1976 monograph "Diamond Theory,"
except for the diamond shape and the connection
of the Penrose diamond to the Klein quadric—
The Klein quadric occurs in the five-dimensional projective space
over a field. If the field is the two-element Galois field GF(2), the
quadric helps explain certain remarkable symmetry properties
of the R. T. Curtis Miracle Octad Generator (MOG), hence of
the large Mathieu group M24. These properties are also
relevant to the 1976 "Diamond Theory" monograph.
For some background on the quadric, see (for instance)…
See also The Klein Correspondence,
Penrose Space-Time, and a Finite Model.
Related material:
|
"… one might crudely distinguish between philosophical – J. M. E. Hyland. "Proof Theory in the Abstract." (pdf) |
Those who prefer story to structure may consult
- today's previous post on the Penrose diamond
- the remarks of Scott Aaronson on August 17, 2012
- the remarks in this journal on that same date
- the geometry of the 4×4 array in the context of M24.
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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—
— and from 1981—
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."
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Sunday, April 1, 2012
The Palpatine Dimension
A physics quote relayed at Peter Woit's weblog today—
"The relation between 4D N=4 SYM and the 6D (2, 0) theory
is just like that between Darth Vader and the Emperor.
You see Darth Vader and you think 'Isn’t he just great?
How can anyone be greater than that? No way.'
Then you meet the Emperor."
Some related material from this weblog—
(See Big Apple and Columbia Film Theory)
The Meno Embedding:
Some related material from the Web—
See also uses of the word triality in mathematics. For instance…
A discussion of triality by Edward Witten—
Triality is in some sense the last of the exceptional isomorphisms,
and the role of triality for n = 6 thus makes it plausible that n = 6
is the maximum dimension for superconformal symmetry,
though I will not give a proof here.
— "Conformal Field Theory in Four and Six Dimensions"
and a discussion by Peter J. Cameron—
There are exactly two non-isomorphic ways
to partition the 4-subsets of a 9-set
into nine copies of AG( 3,2).
Both admit 2-transitive groups.
— "The Klein Quadric and Triality"
Exercise: Is Witten's triality related to Cameron's?
(For some historical background, see the triality link from above
and Cameron's Klein Correspondence and Triality.)
Cameron applies his triality to the pure geometry of a 9-set.
For a 9-set viewed in the context of physics, see A Beginning—
|
From MIT Commencement Day, 2011— A symbol related to Apollo, to nine, and to "nothing"— A minimalist favicon—
This miniature 3×3 square— |
Happy April 1.
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Friday, June 25, 2010
ART WARS continued
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Thursday, October 22, 2009
Chinese Cubes
From the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, Jan. 26, 2005:
What is known about unit cubes
by Chuanming Zong, Peking University
Abstract: Unit cubes, from any point of view, are among the simplest and the most important objects in n-dimensional Euclidean space. In fact, as one will see from this survey, they are not simple at all….
From Log24, now:
What is known about the 4×4×4 cube
by Steven H. Cullinane, unaffiliated
Abstract: The 4×4×4 cube, from one point of view, is among the simplest and the most important objects in n-dimensional binary space. In fact, as one will see from the links below, it is not simple at all.
The Klein Correspondence, Penrose Space-Time, and a Finite Model
Related material:
Monday's entry Just Say NO and a poem by Stevens,
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Friday, October 2, 2009
Friday October 2, 2009
| Edge on Heptads
Part I: Dye on Edge “Introduction: — “Partitions and Their Stabilizers for Line Complexes and Quadrics,” by R.H. Dye, Annali di Matematica Pura ed Applicata, Volume 114, Number 1, December 1977, pp. 173-194 Part II: Edge on Heptads “The Geometry of the Linear Fractional Group LF(4,2),” by W.L. Edge, Proc. London Math Soc., Volume s3-4, No. 1, 1954, pp. 317-342. See the historical remarks on the first page. Note added by Edge in proof: |
Some context:
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Thursday, July 23, 2009
Thursday July 23, 2009
A Tangled Tale
Proposed task for a quantum computer:
"Using Twistor Theory to determine the plotline of Bob Dylan's 'Tangled up in Blue'"
One approach to a solution:
"In this scheme the structure of spacetime is intrinsically quantum mechanical…. We shall demonstrate that the breaking of symmetry in a QST [quantum space-time] is intimately linked to the notion of quantum entanglement."
— "Theory of Quantum Space-Time," by Dorje C. Brody and Lane P. Hughston, Royal Society of London Proceedings Series A, Vol. 461, Issue 2061, August 2005, pp. 2679-2699
(See also The Klein Correspondence, Penrose Space-Time, and a Finite Model.)
For some less technical examples of broken symmetries, see yesterday's entry, "Alphabet vs. Goddess."
That entry displays a painting in 16 parts by Kimberly Brooks (daughter of Leonard Shlain– author of The Alphabet Versus the Goddess— and wife of comedian Albert Brooks (real name: Albert Einstein)). Kimberly Brooks is shown below with another of her paintings, titled "Blue."
"She was workin' in a topless place And I stopped in for a beer, I just kept lookin' at the side of her face In the spotlight so clear. And later on as the crowd thinned out I's just about to do the same, She was standing there in back of my chair Said to me, 'Don't I know your name?' I muttered somethin' underneath my breath, She studied the lines on my face. I must admit I felt a little uneasy When she bent down to tie the laces of my shoe, Tangled up in blue." -- Bob Dylan
Further entanglement with blue:
The website of the Los Angeles Police Department, designed by Kimberly Brooks's firm, Lightray Productions.
Further entanglement with shoelaces:
"Entanglement can be transmitted through chains of cause and effect– and if you speak, and another hears, that too is cause and effect. When you say 'My shoelaces are untied' over a cellphone, you're sharing your entanglement with your shoelaces with a friend."
— "What is Evidence?," by Eliezer Yudkowsky
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Tuesday, February 24, 2009
Tuesday February 24, 2009
Hollywood Nihilism
Meets
Pantheistic Solipsism
Meets
Pantheistic Solipsism
Tina Fey to Steve Martin
at the Oscars:
"Oh, Steve, no one wants
to hear about our religion
… that we made up."
|
From Wallace Stevens: A World of Transforming Shapes, by Alan D. Perlis, Bucknell University Press, 1976, p. 117:
… in 'The Pediment of Appearance,' a slight narrative poem in Transport to Summer… A group of young men enter some woods 'Hunting for the great ornament, The pediment of appearance.' Though moving through the natural world, the young men seek the artificial, or pure form, believing that in discovering this pediment, this distillation of the real, they will also discover the 'savage transparence,' the rude source of human life. In Stevens's world, such a search is futile, since it is only through observing nature that one reaches beyond it to pure form. As if to demonstrate the degree to which the young men's search is misaligned, Stevens says of them that 'they go crying/The world is myself, life is myself,' believing that what surrounds them is immaterial. Such a proclamation is a cardinal violation of Stevens's principles of the imagination. |
Superficially the young men's philosophy seems to resemble what Wikipedia calls "pantheistic solipsism"– noting, however, that "This article has multiple issues."
As, indeed, does pantheistic solipsism– a philosophy (properly called "eschatological pantheistic multiple-ego solipsism") devised, with tongue in cheek, by science-fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein.
Despite their preoccupation with solipsism, Heinlein and Stevens point, each in his own poetic way, to a highly non-solipsistic topic from pure mathematics that is, unlike the religion of Martin and Fey, not made up– namely, the properties of space.
"Sharpie, we have condensed six dimensions into four, then we either work by analogy into six, or we have to use math that apparently nobody but Jake and my cousin Ed understands. Unless you can think of some way to project six dimensions into three– you seem to be smart at such projections."
I closed my eyes and thought hard. "Zebbie, I don't think it can be done. Maybe Escher could have done it."
|
A discussion of Stevens's late poem "The Rock" (1954) in Wallace Stevens: A World of Transforming Shapes, by Alan D. Perlis, Bucknell University Press, 1976, p. 120:
For Stevens, the poem "makes meanings of the rock." In the mind, "its barrenness becomes a thousand things/And so exists no more." In fact, in a peculiar irony that only a poet with Stevens's particular notion of the imagination's function could develop, the rock becomes the mind itself, shattered into such diamond-faceted brilliance that it encompasses all possibilities for human thought:
The rock is the gray particular of man's life,
The stone from which he rises, up—and—ho,
The step to the bleaker depths of his descents ...
The rock is the stern particular of the air,
The mirror of the planets, one by one,
But through man's eye, their silent rhapsodist,
Turquoise the rock, at odious evening bright
With redness that sticks fast to evil dreams;
The difficult rightness of half-risen day.
The rock is the habitation of the whole,
Its strength and measure, that which is near,
point A
In a perspective that begins again
At B: the origin of the mango's rind.
(Collected Poems, 528)
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Stevens's rock is associated with empty space, a concept that suggests "nothingness" to one literary critic:
B. J. Leggett, "Stevens's Late Poetry" in The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens— On the poem "The Rock":
"… the barren rock of the title is Stevens's symbol for the nothingness that underlies all existence, 'That in which space itself is contained'…. Its subject is its speaker's sense of nothingness and his need to be cured of it."
This interpretation might appeal to Joan Didion, who, as author of the classic novel Play It As It Lays, is perhaps the world's leading expert on Hollywood nihilism.
More positively…
Space is, of course, also a topic
in pure mathematics…
For instance, the 6-dimensional
affine space (or the corresponding
5-dimensional projective space)
over the two-element Galois field
can be viewed as an illustration of
Stevens's metaphor in "The Rock."
Heinlein should perhaps have had in mind the Klein correspondence when he discussed "some way to project six dimensions into three." While such a projection is of course trivial for anyone who has taken an undergraduate course in linear algebra, the following remarks by Philippe Cara present a much more meaningful mapping, using the Klein correspondence, of structures in six (affine) dimensions to structures in three.
Cara:
Here the 6-dimensional affine
space contains the 63 points
of PG(5, 2), plus the origin, and
the 3-dimensional affine
space contains as its 8 points
Conwell's eight "heptads," as in
Generating the Octad Generator.
Comments Off on Tuesday February 24, 2009
Monday, April 28, 2008
Monday April 28, 2008
Religious Art
The black monolith of
Kubrick's 2001 is, in
its way, an example
of religious art.
One artistic shortcoming
(or strength– it is, after
all, monolithic) of
that artifact is its
resistance to being
analyzed as a whole
consisting of parts, as
in a Joycean epiphany.
The following
figure does
allow such
an epiphany.
One approach to
the epiphany:
"Transformations play
a major role in
modern mathematics."
– A biography of
Felix Christian Klein
The above 2×4 array
(2 columns, 4 rows)
furnishes an example of
a transformation acting
on the parts of
an organized whole:
For other transformations
acting on the eight parts,
hence on the 35 partitions, see
"Geometry of the 4×4 Square,"
as well as Peter J. Cameron's
"The Klein Quadric
and Triality" (pdf),
and (for added context)
"The Klein Correspondence,
Penrose Space-Time, and
a Finite Model."
For a related structure–
not rectangle but cube–
see Epiphany 2008.
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Monday, July 23, 2007
Monday July 23, 2007
Daniel Radcliffe
is 18 today.
is 18 today.
Greetings.
“The greatest sorcerer (writes Novalis memorably)
would be the one who bewitched himself to the point of
taking his own phantasmagorias for autonomous apparitions.
Would not this be true of us?”
–Jorge Luis Borges, “Avatars of the Tortoise”
“El mayor hechicero (escribe memorablemente Novalis)
sería el que se hechizara hasta el punto de
tomar sus propias fantasmagorías por apariciones autónomas.
¿No sería este nuestro caso?”
–Jorge Luis Borges, “Los Avatares de la Tortuga“
Autonomous Apparition
At Midsummer Noon:
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It is not enough to cover the rock with leaves. We must be cured of it by a cure of the ground Or a cure of ourselves, that is equal to a cure
Of the ground, a cure beyond forgetfulness.
And if we ate the incipient colorings – Wallace Stevens, “The Rock” |
See also
“… I realized that to me,
Gödel and Escher and Bach
were only shadows
cast in different directions by
some central solid essence.
I tried to reconstruct
the central object, and
came up with this book.”
Gödel and Escher and Bach
were only shadows
cast in different directions by
some central solid essence.
I tried to reconstruct
the central object, and
came up with this book.”
Hofstadter’s cover.
Here are three patterns,
“shadows” of a sort,
derived from a different
“central object”:
“shadows” of a sort,
derived from a different
“central object”:
Click on image for details.
Comments Off on Monday July 23, 2007
Sunday, June 24, 2007
Sunday June 24, 2007
Raiders of
the Lost Stone
the Lost Stone
(Continued from June 23)
Charles Williams:
"In Many Dimensions (1931)
Williams sets before his reader the
mysterious Stone of King Solomon,
an image he probably drew
from a brief description in Waite's
The Holy Kabbalah (1929)
of a supernatural cubic stone
on which was inscribed
'the Divine Name.'"
Related material:
The Klein Correspondence,
Penrose Space-Time,
and a Finite Model
Comments Off on Sunday June 24, 2007
Monday, May 28, 2007
Monday May 28, 2007
and a Finite Model
Notes by Steven H. Cullinane
May 28, 2007
Part I: A Model of Space-Time
The following paper includes a figure illustrating Penrose’s model of “complexified, compactified Minkowski space-time as the Klein quadric in complex projective 5-space.”
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Click on picture to enlarge.
For some background on the Klein quadric and space-time, see Roger Penrose, “On the Origins of Twistor Theory,” from Gravitation and Geometry: A Volume in Honor of Ivor Robinson, Bibliopolis, 1987.
Part II: A Corresponding Finite Model
The Klein quadric also occurs in a finite model of projective 5-space. See a 1910 paper:
G. M. Conwell, The 3-space PG(3,2) and its group, Ann. of Math. 11, 60-76.
Conwell discusses the quadric, and the related Klein correspondence, in detail. This is noted in a more recent paper by Philippe Cara:
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As Cara goes on to explain, 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.
Related material:
The projective space PG(5,2), home of the Klein quadric in the finite model, may be viewed as the set of 64 points of the affine space AG(6,2), minus the origin.
The 64 points of this affine space may in turn be viewed as the 64 hexagrams of the Classic of Transformation, China’s I Ching.
There is a natural correspondence between the 64 hexagrams and the 64 subcubes of a 4x4x4 cube. This correspondence leads to a natural way to generate the affine group AGL(6,2). This may in turn be viewed as a group of over a trillion natural transformations of the 64 hexagrams.
“Once Knecht confessed to his teacher that he wished to learn enough to be able to incorporate the system of the I Ching into the Glass Bead Game. Elder Brother laughed. ‘Go ahead and try,’ he exclaimed. ‘You’ll see how it turns out. Anyone can create a pretty little bamboo garden in the world. But I doubt that the gardener would succeed in incorporating the world in his bamboo grove.'”
— Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game,
translated by Richard and Clara Winston
Sunday, December 22, 2019
M24 from the Eightfold Cube
Exercise: Use the Guitart 7-cycles below to relate the 56 triples
in an 8-set (such as the eightfold cube) to the 56 triangles in
a well-known Klein-quartic hyperbolic-plane tiling. Then use
the correspondence of the triples with the 56 spreads of PG(3,2)
to construct M24.
Click image below to download a Guitart PowerPoint presentation.
See as well earlier posts also tagged Triangles, Spreads, Mathieu.
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Thursday, October 10, 2013
Continued
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"… the walkway between here and there would be colder than a witch’s belt buckle. Or a well-digger’s tit. Or whatever the saying was. Vera had been hanging by a thread for a week now, comatose, in and out of Cheyne-Stokes respiration, and this was exactly the sort of night the frail ones picked to go out on. Usually at 4 a.m. He checked his watch. Only 3:20, but that was close enough for government work."
— King, Stephen (2013-09-24). |
From Space.com, the death of an astronaut this morning —
"Carpenter passed at 5:30 a.m. MDT (7:30 a.m. EDT; 1130 GMT)."
A link, "Continued," in this journal at 3:26 a.m. EDT today led to…
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