It was a dark and stormy night …
— Page 180, Logicomix
"There is such a thing as a tesseract."
— Saying from Crosswicks
See also March 5, 2011.
Adapted from the above passage —
"So did L'Engle understand four-dimensional geometry?"
"There is such a thing as a tesseract." —A novel from Crosswicks
Related material from a 1905 graduate of Princeton,
"The 3-Space PG(3,2) and Its Group," is now available
at Internet Archive (1 download thus far).
The 3-space paper is relevant because of the
connection of the group it describes to the
"super, overarching" group of the tesseract.
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.
"Look at what you've done
Why, you've become a grown-up girl"
See also September Morn in this journal.
"Mein Führer… Steiner…"
See Hitler Plans and Quadruple System.
"There is such a thing as a quadruple system."
— Saying adapted from a 1962 young-adult novel
See also "Quantum Tesseract Theorem" and "The Crosswicks Curse."
New and old AMS logos —
I prefer the old. Related material —
For an old Crosswicks curse, see that phrase in this journal.
For a new curse, see . . .
"Unsheathe your dagger definitions." — James Joyce.
From a review of a Joyce Carol Oates novel
at firstthings.com on August 23, 2013 —
"Though the Curse is eventually exorcised,
it is through an act of wit and guile,
not an act of repentance or reconciliation.
And so we may wonder if Oates has put this story
to rest, or if it simply lays dormant. A twenty-first
century eruption of the 'Crosswicks Curse'
would be something to behold." [Link added.]
Related material —
A film version of A Wrinkle in Time —
The Hamilton watch from "Interstellar" (2014) —
See also a post, Vacant Space, from 8/23/13 (the date
of the above review), and posts tagged Space Writer.
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.”
Related material: The Crosswicks Curse.
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."
For the Princeton Class of 1905 —
Joyce Carol Oates Meets Emily Dickinson.
Oates —
"It is an afternoon in autumn, near dusk.
The western sky is a spider’s web of translucent gold.
I am being brought by carriage—two horses—
muted thunder of their hooves—
along narrow country roads between hilly fields
touched with the sun’s slanted rays,
to the village of Princeton, New Jersey.
The urgent pace of the horses has a dreamlike air,
like the rocking motion of the carriage;
and whoever is driving the horses
his face I cannot see, only his back—
stiff, straight, in a tight-fitting dark coat."
Dickinson —
"Because I could not stop for Death—
He kindly stopped for me—
The Carriage held but just Ourselves—
And Immortality."
(Continued from yesterday evening)
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."
Related material: Mathematics as a Post-Communist Activity.
The Daily Princetonian today:
A different cover act, discussed here Saturday:
See also, in this journal, the Galois tesseract and the Crosswicks Curse.
"There is such a thing as a tesseract." — Crosswicks saying
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.
See also today’s previous post and…
“After A Wrinkle in Time was finally published, |
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).”
On Robert Giroux, who died early this morning:
For a less demanding standard, see today’s previous entry.
— T. S. Eliot,
The Family Reunion
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:
“There is such a thing
as a tesseract.”
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!”
“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.”
— Freeman Dyson,
New York Review of Books,
issue dated May 28, 1998
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