Log24

Thursday, February 27, 2014

The Crosswicks Curse

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

(Continued)

"There is  such a thing as a tesseract."

— Saying from Crosswicks

IMAGE- From Dmitri Tymoczko's 'Geometry of Music,' Chopin and a tesseract

See also March 5, 2011.

Adapted from the above passage —

"So did L'Engle understand four-dimensional geometry?"

No and Yes.

Saturday, March 16, 2013

The Crosswicks Curse

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

Continues.

From the prologue to the new Joyce Carol Oates
novel Accursed

"This journey I undertake with such anticipation
is not one of geographical space but one of Time—
for it is the year 1905 that is my destination.

1905!—the very year of the Curse."

Today's previous post supplied a fanciful link
between the Crosswicks Curse of Oates and
the Crosswicks tesseract  of Madeleine L'Engle.

The Crosswicks Curse according to L'Engle
in her classic 1962 novel A Wrinkle in Time —

"There is  such a thing as a tesseract."

A tesseract is a 4-dimensional hypercube that
(as pointed out by Coxeter in 1950) may also 
be viewed as a 4×4 array (with opposite edges
identified).

Meanwhile, back in 1905

For more details, see how the Rosenhain and Göpel tetrads occur naturally
in the diamond theorem model of the 35 lines of the 15-point projective
Galois space PG(3,2).

See also Conwell in this journal and George Macfeely Conwell in the
honors list of the Princeton Class of 1905.

Friday, July 7, 2017

Psycho History

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 6:00 pm

The title was suggested by the term “psychohistory” in
the Foundation  novels of Isaac Asimov. See the previous post.

See also a 2010 New York Times  review of
DeLillo’s novel Point Omega . The review is titled,
without any other reference to L’Engle’s classic tale
of the same name, “A Wrinkle in Time.”

IMAGE- NY Times headline 'A Wrinkle in Time' with 24 Hour Psycho and Point Omega scene

Related material: The Crosswicks Curse.

Friday, March 14, 2014

The Search for Charles Wallace

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:19 pm

The search in the previous post for the source of a quotation from Poincaré yielded, as a serendipitous benefit, information on an interesting psychoanalyst named Wilfred Bion (see the Poincaré  quotation at a webpage on Bion). This in turn suggested a search for the source of the name of author Madeleine L'Engle's son Bion, who may have partly inspired L'Engle's fictional character Charles Wallace.  Cynthia Zarin wrote about Bion in The New Yorker  of April 12, 2004 that

"According to the family, he is the person for whom L’Engle’s insistence on blurring fiction and reality had the most disastrous consequences."

Also from that article, material related to the name Bion and to what this journal has called "the Crosswicks Curse"*—

"Madeleine L’Engle Camp was born in 1918 in New York City, the only child of Madeleine Hall Barnett, of Jacksonville, Florida, and Charles Wadsworth Camp, a Princeton man and First World War veteran, whose family had a big country place in New Jersey, called Crosswicks. In Jacksonville society, the Barnett family was legendary: Madeleine’s grandfather, Bion Barnett, the chairman of the board of Jacksonville’s Barnett Bank, had run off with a woman to the South of France, leaving behind a note on the mantel. Her grandmother, Caroline Hallows L’Engle, never recovered from the blow. ….

… The summer after Hugh and Madeleine were married, they bought a dilapidated farmhouse in Goshen, in northwest Connecticut. Josephine, born in 1947, was three years old when they moved permanently to the house, which they called Crosswicks. Bion was born just over a year later."

* "There is  such a thing as a tesseract."

Thursday, November 22, 2012

Putting the “I” in “IT”

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

Jennifer Scott at IT Pro , Feb. 16, 2012, on Autonomy

Mike Lynch, founder of Autonomy  and vice president
of information management at HP, took to the stage
at his new parent company’s global partner conference
to impart his philosophy to the 3,000 partners gathered.

‘It is no longer about the data but about the meaning
of that data,’ he said. ‘There is a fundamental revolution
going on in information and the industry is now about
the “I” not the “T” in IT.'”

Click on the logo below for the source.

Putting the I in IT

See also today’s previous post and…

Madeleine L’Engle in
The Irrational Season
(1977), Chapter 9:

“After A Wrinkle in Time  was finally published,
it was pointed out to me that the villain,
a naked disembodied brain, was called ‘It’
because It stands for Intellectual truth
as opposed to a truth which involves the whole of us,
heart as well as mind.  That acronym had never
occurred to me.  I chose the name It intuitively,
because an IT does not have a heart or soul.
And I did not understand consciously
at the time of writing that the intellect,
when it is not informed by the heart, is evil.”

Friday, September 5, 2008

Friday September 5, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:23 pm
Adult Books
 

On author Madeleine L’Engle:

“Madeleine’s adult books– including the autobiographical titles that eventually would be grouped together as the Crosswicks Journals– A Circle of Quiet (1971), The Summer of the Great-Grandmother (1974), The Irrational Season (1976), and Two-Part Invention (1988)– were edited by Robert Giroux. If Roger Straus was FSG’s [Farrar, Straus & Giroux’s] worldly sophisticate presiding over editorial meetings, Bob Giroux was the white-haired, rosy-cheeked favorite uncle (if you happened to have an erudite uncle who had edited T. S. Eliot, Robert Lowell, Isaac Bashevitz Singer, Elizabeth Bishop, Flannery O’Connor, and Walker Percy).”

Sandra Jordan, School Library Journal, November 1, 2007

On Robert Giroux, who died early this morning:

the gold standard of literary taste.”

For a less demanding standard, see today’s previous entry.

Sunday, March 2, 2008

Sunday March 2, 2008

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:31 pm
Practical Magic

Halloween 2005:

“They don’t understand
what it is to be awake,
To be living
on several planes at once
Though one cannot speak
with several voices at once.”

— T. S. Eliot,
The Family Reunion

Margaret Wertheim with fellow tesseract authors

Several voices:

Margaret Wertheim in today’s
Los Angeles Times and at
The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace
,

Linda Dalrymple Henderson, and

Madeleine L’Engle and husband.

From Wertheim’s Pearly Gates:

Wertheim's 'Pearly Gates of Cyberspace,' page 200
“There is such a thing
as a tesseract.”

Madeleine L’Engle   

Tuesday, April 3, 2007

Tuesday April 3, 2007

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 1:00 am

Mathematics Awareness Month

Related material:

“But what is it?”
Calvin demanded.
“We know that it’s evil,
but what is it?”

“Yyouu hhave ssaidd itt!”
Mrs. Which’s voice rang out.
“Itt iss Eevill. Itt iss thee
Ppowers of Ddarrkknesss!”

A Wrinkle in Time

AMS Notices cover, April 2007

“After A Wrinkle in Time was finally published, it was pointed out to me that the villain, a naked disembodied brain, was called ‘It’ because It stands for Intellectual truth as opposed to a truth which involves the whole of us, heart as well as mind.  That acronym had never occurred to me.  I chose the name It intuitively, because an IT does not have a heart or soul.  And I did not understand consciously at the time of writing that the intellect, when it is not informed by the heart, is evil.”

See also
“Darkness Visible”
in ART WARS.

“When all is said and done,
science is about things and
theology is about words.”

— Freeman Dyson,
New York Review of Books,
issue dated May 28, 1998

Does the word ‘tesseract’
mean anything to you?

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