Log24

Tuesday, November 21, 2023

Mathematics and Narrative: Symmetry and the Snow Queen

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 7:22 pm

The phrase "the mathematical concept of invariance of symmetry"
in the previous post suggests a Google search . . .

For those who prefer narrative to mathematics, the search result
"The Time Invariance of Snow" is not without interest.

See also "Snow Queen" in this  journal.

Wednesday, February 15, 2023

Mathematics and Narrative . . .

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:47 pm

Continues.
 

Mathematics:

From Log24 "Pyramid Game" posts —

The letter labels, but not the tetrahedron, are from Whitehead’s
The Axioms of Projective Geometry  (Cambridge U. Press, 1906), page 13.
 

Narrative:

Monday, December 19, 2022

Mathematics and Narrative, Continued . . .
“Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln . . .”

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , , — m759 @ 3:50 am

   Midrash from Philip Pullman . . .

"The 1929 Einstein-Carmichael Expedition"

    I prefer the 1929 Emch-Carmichael expedition —

This is from . . .

“By far the most important structure in design theory
is the Steiner system S(5, 8, 24).”

— “Block Designs,” by Andries E. Brouwer
(Ch. 14 (pp. 693-746) of Handbook of Combinatorics,
Vol. I, MIT Press, 1995, edited by Ronald L. Graham,
Martin Grötschel, and László Lovász, Section 16 (p. 716))

Thursday, March 24, 2022

Mathematics and Narrative: Solomon vs. the Wicked Queen

Filed under: General — m759 @ 5:19 pm

"Solomon Golomb’s classic book Shift Register Sequences,
published in 1967—based on his work in the 1950s—
went out of print long ago. But its content lives on. . . ."

For part of that content, see Stencils .

A :Log24 post from the date of Golomb's death —

See as well other posts on Mathematics and Narrative.

Thursday, September 16, 2021

Narrative* vs. Mathematics**

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:37 pm

Examples of Narrative:

Example of Mathematics:

From the month — November 1985 — in the second example above —

* Addicts of narrative might consult "Friends of Nemo."

** See Mathematics + Narrative in this journal and . . .

"As the chaos grew . . . ." —

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

Sunday, March 21, 2021

Mathematics and Narrative: The Unity

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 10:25 pm

“To conquer, three boxes* have to synchronize and join together into the Unity.”

―Wonder Woman in Zack Snyder’s Justice League

See also The Unity of Combinatorics  and The Miracle Octad Generator.

* Cf.  Aitchison’s Octads

Monday, May 25, 2020

Mathematics and Narrative

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 3:08 am

Mathematics:  This journal on September 1, 2011 —
Posts tagged September Morn.

Narrative:  Also on September 1, 2011 —

See as well  Nabokov’s Magic Carpet.

Monday, March 16, 2020

Mathematics and Narrative* Continues:

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:27 am

Expanding the Spielraum

Mathematics:  See Tetrahedron vs. Square in this journal
(Notes on two different models of schoolgirl space ).

Narrative:  Replacing the square  from the above posts by
a related cube 

… yields a merchandising inspiration

Dueling Holocrons: 

Jedi Cube vs. Sith Tetrahedron

.

* See also earlier posts on Mathematics and Narrative.

Tuesday, August 6, 2019

Mathematics and Narrative:  The Crosswicks Curse Continues.

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:03 pm

"There is  such a thing as a desktop."

— Saying adapted from a 1962 young-adult novel.

Thursday, November 15, 2018

Mathematics and Narrative

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 9:08 pm

Mathematics —

See (for instance) a research group at Ghent University.

For those who prefer narrative . . .

See also . . .

Sunday, August 26, 2018

Mathematics and Narrative: Queensland

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:56 am

Mathematics —

http://www.log24.com/log/pix18/180826-Cameron-on-U_of_Queensland-slide-500w.jpg

Narrative —

http://www.log24.com/log/pix18/180826-Huntsman-Winters-War-Billboard-Art-500w.jpg

See also other recent posts tagged Queensland.

Thursday, August 16, 2018

Mathematics and Narrative

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

(Continued)

Mathematics:

Alperin, Groups and Representations, p. 61

Narrative:

The Tale of the Flux Capacitor

Wednesday, February 28, 2018

Mathematics and Narrative

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

(Continued)

Excerpts from a post of May 25, 2005 —

Above is an example I like of mathematics….

Here is an example I like of narrative:

Kate felt quite dizzy. She didn't know exactly what it was
that had just happened, but she felt pretty damn  certain  that
it  was  the  sort of experience that her mother would not have
approved of on a first date.
     "Is this all part of what we have to do to go to  Asgard?"
she said. "Or are you just fooling around?"
     "We will go to Asgard...now," he said.
     At that moment he raised his hand as if to pluck an apple,
but instead of plucking he made a tiny, sharp turning movement.
The effect  was as if he had twisted the entire world through a
billionth part of a billionth  part  of  a  degree.  Everything
shifted,  was  for  a  moment  minutely  out of focus, and then
snapped back again as a suddenly different world.

— Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

Image from a different  different world —

Hat-tip to a related Feb. 26 weblog post
at the American Mathematical Society.

Monday, February 20, 2017

Mathematics and Narrative

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 2:40 pm

Mathematics —

Hudson's parametrization of the
4×4 square, published in 1905:

A later parametrization, from this date in 1986:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110220-relativprob.jpg

A note from later in 1986 shows the equivalence of these
two parametrizations:

Narrative —

Posts tagged Memory-History-Geometry.

The mathematically challenged may prefer the narrative of the
Creation Matrix from the religion of the Transformers:

"According to religious legend, the core of the Matrix
was created from Solomus, the god of wisdom,
trapped in the form of a crystal by Mortilus, the god
of death. Following the defeat of Mortilus, Solomus
managed to transform his crystal prison into the Matrix—
a conduit for the energies of Primus, who had himself
transformed into the life-giving computer Vector Sigma."

Wednesday, June 1, 2016

Mathematics and Narrative

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:06 pm

Principles before Personalities — AA  Saying .

Principles —

See Schoolgirl Problem in Wikipedia.

Personalities — 

See Alexandra Alter in the May 26 online New York Times :

"With the proliferation of 'girl' titles,
there are signs that the trend may have peaked;
it already seems ripe for parody." 

Update of 12:40 PM ET on Wednesday, June 1, 2016 —

A note for the Church of Synchronology 
See a post from this  journal on the date of the Alter piece, May 26:

(Click image for the rest of the post .)

Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Mathematics and Narrative

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

Mathematics:  Galois-Plane Models.

Narrative: "The Dreaming Jewels."

Friday, October 17, 2014

Mathematics and Narrative, continued:

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

Raiders of the Lost Archetype

“… an unexpected development: the discovery of a lost archetype….”

— “The Lost Theorem,” by Lee Sallows, Mathematical Intelligencer, Fall 1997

Related material:

A scene from the 1954 film:

A check of this  journal on the above MetaFilter date — Jan. 24, 2012 —
yields a post tagged “in1954.”  From another post with that tag:

Medal of 9/15/06

Backstory:  Posts tagged Root Circle.

Monday, October 13, 2014

Mathematics and Narrative, continued

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:03 pm

For those who prefer drama to mathematics:

See also Magic + Flute in this journal.

Tuesday, March 25, 2014

Narrative and Mathematics

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:01 am

(Continued)

"Richard Hughes’s celebrated short novel is
a masterpiece of concentrated narrative."

New York Review of Books  on
     A High Wind in Jamaica

As perhaps were, in their way, parts of the life
of the late Patrice Wymore Flynn, who reportedly
died at 87 on Saturday.

Deep backstory:  See Colony of Santiago (Jamaica).

For the "mathematics" part of this post's title, see
Saturday's Log24 post on Kummer-surface terms
and a post of September 23, 2012.

Saturday, September 21, 2013

Mathematics and Narrative (continued)

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

Mathematics:

A review of posts from earlier this month —

Wednesday, September 4, 2013

Moonshine

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 4:00 PM

Unexpected connections between areas of mathematics
previously thought to be unrelated are sometimes referred
to as "moonshine."  An example—  the apparent connections
between parts of complex analysis and groups related to the
large Mathieu group M24. Some recent work on such apparent
connections, by Anne Taormina and Katrin Wendland, among
others (for instance, Miranda C.N. Cheng and John F.R. Duncan),
involves structures related to Kummer surfaces .
In a classic book, Kummer's Quartic Surface  (1905),
R.W.H.T. Hudson pictured a set of 140 structures, the 80
Rosenhain tetrads and the 60 Göpel tetrads, as 4-element
subsets of a 16-element 4×4 array.  It turns out that these
140 structures are the planes of the finite affine geometry
AG(4,2) of four dimensions over the two-element Galois field.
(See Diamond Theory in 1937.)

Thursday, September 5, 2013

Moonshine II

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags:  — m759 @ 10:31 AM

(Continued from yesterday)

The foreword by Wolf Barth in the 1990 Cambridge U. Press
reissue of Hudson's 1905 classic Kummer's Quartic Surface
covers some of the material in yesterday's post Moonshine.

The distinction that Barth described in 1990 was also described, and illustrated,
in my 1986 note "Picturing the smallest projective 3-space."  The affine 4-space
over the the finite Galois field GF(2) that Barth describes was earlier described—
within a 4×4 array like that pictured by Hudson in 1905— in a 1979 American
Mathematical Society abstract, "Symmetry invariance in a diamond ring."

"The distinction between Rosenhain and Goepel tetrads
is nothing but the distinction between isotropic and
non-isotropic planes in this affine space over the finite field."

The 1990 paragraph of Barth quoted above may be viewed as a summary
of these facts, and also of my March 17, 2013, note "Rosenhain and Göpel
Tetrads in PG(3,2)
."

Narrative:

Aooo.

Happy birthday to Stephen King.

Friday, July 5, 2013

Mathematics and Narrative (continued)

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 6:01 pm

Short Story — (Click image for some details.)

IMAGE- Andries Brouwer and the Galois Tesseract

Parts of a longer story —

The Galois Tesseract and Priority.

Thursday, May 9, 2013

Mathematics and Narrative (continued)

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:00 pm

"Why history?
Well, the essence of history  is story ,
and a good story is an end in itself."

— Barry Mazur, "History of Mathematics  as a tool,"
    February 17, 2013

This  journal on February 17, 2013:

FROM Christoph Waltz

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 12:12 AM 

"Currently in post-production": The Zero Theorem.

For Christoph Waltz

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 12:00 AM 

Raiders of the Lost Tesseract  continues…

SOCRATES: Is he not better off in knowing his ignorance?
MENO: I think that he is.
SOCRATES: If we have made him doubt, and given him the 'torpedo's shock,' have we done him any harm?
MENO: I think not.

Torpedo… LOS!

IMAGE- Theodore Sturgeon, 1972 reviews of Del Rey's 'Pstalemate' and Le Guin's 'Lathe of Heaven'   

See also today's previous post.

Sunday, April 28, 2013

Mathematics and Narrative (continued)

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

See Snakes on a Projective Plane  by Andrew Spann (Sept. 26, 2006):

'Snakes on a Plane' cartoon

Click image for some related posts.

"…what he was trying to get across was not that he was the Soldier of a Power that was fighting across all of time to change history, but simply that we men were creatures with imaginations and it was our highest duty to try to tell what it was really like to live in other times and places and bodies. Once he said to me, 'The growth of consciousness is everything… the seed of awareness sending its roots across space and time. But it can grow in so many ways, spinning its web from mind to mind like the spider or burrowing into the unconscious darkness like the snake. The biggest wars are the wars of thought.' "

— Fritz Leiber, Changewar , page 22

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, February 7, 2013

Mathematics and Narrative, continued…

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:01 pm

Primes Are Forever

"If diamonds are a girl's best friend,
prime numbers are a mathematician's….

A Mersenne prime is of the form 2P-1,
where the variable P is itself a prime—
making the Mersenne an elite sort of prime,
a James Bond among spies."

— Anonymous author at
    Fox News, Feb. 5, 2013

The author notes that the smaller
Mersenne primes include 7.

Related Material

April 7, 2003:

April is Math Awareness Month.

This year's theme is "mathematics and art."

Mathematics and Art: Totentanz from Seventh Seal

Update of 2:56 PM Feb. 7:

See also Paul Bateman and, in this journal, the date of Bateman's death.

For mathematics rather than narrative, see (for instance)

.

Thursday, September 27, 2012

Mathematics and Narrative (continued)

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

In diamond-narrative news today…

IMAGE- Pink Panther actor dies at 95

"Among the low points of his career was his performance
in the disastrous 1985 remake of “King Solomon’s Mines….”

— David Belcher in today's online New York Times

Friday, January 27, 2012

Mathematics and Narrative (continued)

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 1:44 am

Princeton University Press on a book it will publish in March—

Circles Disturbed: The Interplay of Mathematics and Narrative

"Circles Disturbed  brings together important thinkers in mathematics, history, and philosophy to explore the relationship between mathematics and narrative. The book's title recalls the last words of the great Greek mathematician Archimedes before he was slain by a Roman soldier— 'Don't disturb my circles'— words that seem to refer to two radically different concerns: that of the practical person living in the concrete world of reality, and that of the theoretician lost in a world of abstraction. Stories and theorems are, in a sense, the natural languages of these two worlds–stories representing the way we act and interact, and theorems giving us pure thought, distilled from the hustle and bustle of reality. Yet, though the voices of stories and theorems seem totally different, they share profound connections and similarities."

Timeline of the Marvel Cinematic Universe — Norway, March 1942

"The Red Skull finds the Tesseract, a cube of strange power,
said to be the jewel of Odin’s treasure room, in Tonsberg Norway.
 (Captain America: The First Avenger)"

Tesseracts Disturbed — (Click to enlarge)

Detail of Tesseracts Disturbed —

Narrative of the detail—

See Tesseract in this journal and Norway, May 2010

The Oslo Version and Annals of Conceptual Art.

"Oh, what a tangled web we weave…"

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Mathematics and Narrative, continued

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 11:01 pm

Mathematics —

(Some background for the Galois tesseract )

(Click to enlarge)

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11C/111213-Edge-geometry-heptads-500w.jpg

Narrative

An essay on science and philosophy in the January 2012
Notices of the American Mathematical Society .

Note particularly the narrative explanation of the double-slit experiment—

"The assertion that elementary particles have
free will and follow Quality very closely leads to
some startling consequences. For instance, the
wave-particle duality paradox, in particular the baffling
results of the famous double slit experiment,
may now be reconsidered. In that experiment, first
conducted by Thomas Young at the beginning
of the nineteenth century, a point light source
illuminated a thin plate with two adjacent parallel
slits in it. The light passing through the slits
was projected on a screen behind the plate, and a
pattern of bright and dark bands on the screen was
observed. It was precisely the interference pattern
caused by the diffraction patterns of waves passing
through adjacent holes in an obstruction. However,
when the same experiment was carried out much
later, only this time with photons being shot at
the screen one at a time—the same interference
pattern resulted! But the Metaphysics of Quality
can offer an explanation: the photons each follow
Quality in their actions, and so either individually
or en masse (i.e., from a light source) will do the
same thing, that is, create the same interference
pattern on the screen."

This is from "a Ph.D. candidate in mathematics at the University of Calgary."
His essay is titled "A Perspective on Wigner’s 'Unreasonable Effectiveness
of Mathematics.'" It might better be titled "Ineffective Metaphysics."

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Mathematics and Narrative, continued

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:56 am

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11C/111013-FrodoAndRing.jpg

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11C/111013-OxfordMurdersPoster-300w.jpg

"I've got a little story you oughta know…."

Friday, September 2, 2011

Mathematics and Narrative (continued)

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:00 am

IMAGE- Death on 10/10/10

See also this journal on October 10, 2010.

Thursday, January 27, 2011

Mathematics and Narrative, continued…

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

Indiana Jones and the Magical Oracle

Mathematician Ken Ono in the December 2010 American Mathematical Society Notices

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

The "dying genius" here is Ramanujan, not Galois. The story now continues at the AMS website—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110127-AMS-Ono-500w.jpg

      (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—

Click to enlarge

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110127-Preprints500w.jpg

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.

* Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. 135 (2007), 3507-3514.

Friday, January 14, 2011

Mathematics and Narrative continues…

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:07 pm

From 6/22, 2010 —

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10A/100622-StoryStatements.gif

    I would argue that at least sometimes, lottery numbers may be regarded,
    according to Bernstein's definition, as story statements.

From 7/02, 2010 —

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10A/100702-Mariani-TheCup.gif

Monday, December 13, 2010

Mathematics and Narrative continued…

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

Apollo's 13: A Group Theory Narrative —

I. At Wikipedia —

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101213-GroupTheory.jpg

II. Here —

See Cube Spaces and Cubist Geometries.

The 13 symmetry axes of the (Euclidean) cube–
exactly one axis for each pair of opposite
subcubes in the 27-part (Galois) 3×3×3 cube–

The 13 symmetry axes of the cube

A note from 1985 describing group actions on a 3×3 plane array—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10A/100621-VisualizingDetail.gif

Undated software by Ed Pegg Jr. displays
group actions on a 3×3×3 cube that extend the
3×3 group actions from 1985 described above—

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

Pegg gives no reference to the 1985 work on group actions.

Friday, October 15, 2010

Mathematics and Narrative, continued

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 6:29 am
 

The Story of N

http://www.log24.com/log/pix09/090109-Stories.jpg

Roberta Smith in the New York Times  of July 7, 2006

Art Review

Endgame Art? It's Borrow, Sample and Multiply in an Exhibition at Bard College

"… The show has an endgame, end-time mood, as if we are looking at the end of the end of the end of Pop, hyperrealism and appropriation art. The techniques of replication and copying have become so meticulous that they are beside the point. This is truly magic realism: the kind you can't see, that has to be explained. It is also a time when artists cultivate hybridism and multiplicity and disdain stylistic coherence, in keeping with the fashionable interest in collectivity, lack of ego, the fluidity of individual identity. But too often these avoidance tactics eliminate the thread of a personal sensibility or focus.

I would call all these strategies fear of form, which can be parsed as fear of materials, of working with the hands in an overt way and of originality. Most of all originality. Can we just say it? This far from Andy Warhol and Duchamp, the dismissal of originality is perhaps the oldest ploy in the postmodern playbook. To call yourself an artist at all is by definition to announce a faith, however unacknowledged, in some form of originality, first for yourself, second, perhaps, for the rest of us.

Fear of form above all means fear of compression— of an artistic focus that condenses experiences, ideas and feelings into something whole, committed and visually comprehensible. With a few exceptions, forms of collage and assemblage dominate this show: the putting together (or simply putting side by side) of existing images and objects prevails. The consistency of this technique in two and three dimensions should have been a red flag for the curators. Collage has driven much art since the late 1970's. Lately, and especially in this exhibition, it often seems to have become so distended and pulled apart that its components have become virtually autonomous and unrelated, which brings us back to square one. This is most obvious in the large installations of graphic works whose individual parts gain impact and meaning from juxtaposition but are in fact considered distinct artworks."

Margaret Atwood on art and the trickster

"The pleasures of fabulation, the charming and playful lie— this line of thought leads Hyde* to the last link in his subtitle, the connection of the trickster to art. Hyde reminds us that the wall between the artist and that American favourite son, the con-artist, can be a thin one indeed; that craft and crafty rub shoulders; and that the words artifice, artifact, articulation  and art  all come from the same ancient root, a word meaning 'to join,' 'to fit,' and 'to make.'  If it’s a seamless whole you want, pray to Apollo, who sets the limits within which such a work can exist.  Tricksters, however, stand where the door swings open on its hinges and the horizon expands: they operate where things are joined together, and thus can also come apart."

* Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art,  Farrar Straus & Giroux, January 1998

Smith mentions "an artistic focus that condenses experiences, ideas and feelings into something whole, committed and visually comprehensible."

Atwood mentions "a seamless whole."

For some related remarks, see "A Study in Art Education" and the central figure pictured above. (There "N" can stand for "number," "nine," or "narrative.")

Friday, August 27, 2010

Mathematics and Narrative continued…

Filed under: General — m759 @ 5:01 pm

Narrative Sequence

In today's New York Times, Michiko Kakutani reviews a summer thriller by Kevin Guilfoile.  The Thousand  is in the manner of Dan Brown's 2003 The Da Vinci Code  or of Katherine Neville's 1988 The Eight .

From the review—

What connects these disparate events, it turns out, is a sinister organization called the Thousand, made up of followers of the ancient Greek mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras (yes, the same Pythagoras associated with the triangle theorem that we learned in school).

As Mr. Guilfoile describes it, this organization is part Skull and Bones, part Masonic lodge, part something much more twisted and nefarious….

The plot involves, in part,

… an eccentric artist’s mysterious masterwork, made up of thousands of individually painted tiles that may cohere into an important message….

Not unlike the tiles in the Diamond Theory cover (see yesterday's post) or, more aptly, the entries in this journal.

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/100827-GuilfoileTiles2.jpg

Saturday, July 17, 2010

Mathematics and Narrative continued

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

"List, list, O, list!"
Hamlet's father's ghost

"Ordering and patterning are not wholly narrative activities."
James E. Giles, 1986

"See also… the true  story 0, 1, 2, 3…" 
Log24, January 9, 2009

  For some non-narrative patterning of this list, see (for instance)
         Apostol's Modular Functions and Dirichlet Series in Number Theory.

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

Mathematics and Narrative, continued

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:29 am

Image-- 'A Story to End All Stories,' by Ramanujan

     Friday, January 9, 2009

Tuesday, June 22, 2010

Mathematics and Narrative, continued

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:14 pm

"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

A 1973 review of Koestler's book—

"Koestler's 'call girls,' summoned here and there
 by this university and that foundation
 to perform their expert tricks, are the butts
 of some chilling satire."

Examples of Light—

Felix Christian Klein (1849- June 22, 1925) and Évariste Galois (1811-1832)

Klein on Galois—

"… in France just about 1830 a new star of undreamt-of brilliance— or rather a meteor, soon to be extinguished— lighted the sky of pure mathematics: Évariste Galois."

— Felix Klein, Development of Mathematics in the 19th Century, translated by Michael Ackerman. Brookline, Mass., Math Sci Press, 1979. Page 80.

"… um 1830 herum in Frankreich als ein neuer Stern von ungeahntem Glanze am Himmel der reinen Mathematik aufleuchtet, um freilich, einem Meteor gleich, sehr bald zu verlöschen: Évariste Galois."

— Felix Klein, Vorlesungen Über Die Entwicklung Der Mathematick Im 19. Jahrhundert. New York, Chelsea Publishing Co., 1967. (Vol. I, originally published in Berlin in 1926.) Page 88.

Examples of Darkness—

Martin Gardner on Galois—

"Galois was a thoroughly obnoxious nerd,
 suffering from what today would be called
 a 'personality disorder.'  His anger was
 paranoid and unremitting."

Gardner was reviewing a recent book about Galois by one Amir Alexander.

Alexander himself has written some reviews relevant to the Koestler book above.

See Alexander on—

The 2005 Mykonos conference on Mathematics and Narrative

A series of workshops at Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation between 2003 and 2006. "The meetings brought together professional mathematicians (and other mathematical scientists) with authors, poets, artists, playwrights, and film-makers to work together on mathematically-inspired literary works."

Saturday, May 15, 2010

Mathematics and Narrative continued…

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 4:16 pm

Step Two

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

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

Thursday, May 6, 2010

Mathematics and Narrative, continued…

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

The Unfolding

A post for Florencio Campomanes,
former president of the World Chess Federation.

Campomanes died at 83 in the Philippines
at 1:30 PM local time (1:30 AM Manhattan time)
on Monday, May 3, 2010.

From this journal on the date of his death —

"There is such a thing as a tesseract."
Madeleine L'Engle

Image by Christopher Thomas at Wikipedia
Unfolding of a hypercube and of a cube —

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10A/100506-Hcube_fold.gif

Image--Chess game from 'The Seventh Seal'

Related material from a story of the Philippines —

Image-- Alex Garland on how a hypercube unfolds to what he calls a tesseract

Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Mathematics and Narrative, continued

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 8:28 pm

Romancing the
Non-Euclidean Hyperspace

Backstory
Mere Geometry, Types of Ambiguity,
Dream Time, and Diamond Theory, 1937

The cast of 1937's 'King Solomon's Mines' goes back to the future

For the 1937 grid, see Diamond Theory, 1937.

The grid is, as Mere Geometry points out, a non-Euclidean hyperspace.

For the diamonds of 2010, see Galois Geometry and Solomon’s Cube.

Monday, April 12, 2010

Mathematics and Narrative, continued

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:00 pm

Saturday's post quoted a mathematical narrative with the following opening sentence–

"Let G  be a finite, primitive subgroup of GL(V) = GL(n,D),
where V  is an n-dimensional vector space over the division ring D."

If that narrative were a novel, its opening might win a Bulwer-Lytton prize.

As might the opening of another nonfiction narrative

"What are we are doing?"

A partial answer to this profound metaphysical question
for fans of the classic film "Dark City"
(which was written in part by one "Lem Dobbs")–

Part I — Fiction —

Wednesday August 4, 2004

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 12:29 AM

Shell Beach

“It was a dark and stormy night….”

– Opening of A Wrinkle in Time, a classic novel by Madeleine L’Engle.

For those who seek religious significance in the name of Hurricane Alex:

Alex Proyas directs this futuristic thriller about a man waking up to find he is wanted for brutal murders he doesn’t remember. Haunted by mysterious beings who stop time and alter reality, he seeks to unravel the riddle of his identity.”

– Description of the 1998 film Dark City

[See also June 14, 2005.]


Part II — Nonfiction —

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100412-ShellBeachInn.jpg

http://www.shellbeachinn.com/

Part III — Fiction —

"The bench on which Dobbs was sitting
was not so good."

— B. Traven, opening sentence
of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

Monday, March 8, 2010

Mathematics and Narrative continued

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:29 am

The Magic Lyre


NY Times epiphany, morning of March 8, 2010

(Click image for context.)

See also Saturday's post

Lyre illustrating a review of the novel 'Angelology' by Danielle Trussoni

as well as Solemn Dance
   and Mazur at Delphi.

(This last is apparently based on
a talk given by Barry Mazur at Delphi
in 2007 and may or may not appear in
a book, Mathematics and Narrative,
to be published in 2010.)

Suggested tune for the lyre–

"Send me the pillow
  that you dream on,"

in memory of Hank Locklin,
who died on this date last year.
 

Saturday, November 14, 2009

Mathematics and Narrative, continued:

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

A graphic novel reviewed in the current Washington Post  features Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell–

Whitehead and Russell, 'Logicomix' page 181

Related material:

Whitehead on Fano’s finite projective three-space:

“This is proved by the consideration of a three dimensional geometry in which there are only fifteen points.”

The Axioms of Projective Geometry , Cambridge University Press, 1906

A related affine six-space:

Grey cube, 4x4x4

Further reading:

See Solomon’s Cube and the link at the end of today’s previous entry, then compare and contrast the above portraits of Whitehead and Russell with Charles Williams’s portraits of Sir Giles Tumulty and Lord Arglay in the novel Many Dimensions .

It was a dark and stormy night….

Monday, July 25, 2022

Narratives in the Multiverse of Madness

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 3:53 am

Modernism, Fiction and Mathematics
by Nina Engelhardt
(Edinburgh Critical Studies in Modernist Culture)

From a review by Johann A. Makowsky in
Notices of the American Mathematical Society,
November 2020, pp. 1589-1595 —

"Engelhardt’s goal in this study is to put the interplay
between fiction and mathematical conceptualizations
of the world into its historical context. She sees her work
as a beginning for further studies on the role of mathematics,
not only modern, in fiction in the wider field of literature and
science. It is fair to say that in her book Nina Engelhardt does
succeed in giving us an inspiring tour d’horizon of this interplay."

Another such tour —


 

On the title of Westworld Season 4 Episode 5, "Zhuangzi" —

A song for Teddy: "Across my dreams, with nets of wonder . . ."

See Zhuangzi also in the 2022 Black Rock CIty manifesto, "Waking Dreams" . . . 

Saturday, March 16, 2019

Multifaceted Narrative

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 2:40 pm

"Here, modernism is defined as an autonomous body
of ideas, having little or no outward reference, placing
considerable emphasis on formal aspects of the work
and maintaining a complicated—indeed, anxious—
rather than a naïve relationship with the day-to-day
world, which is the de facto view of a coherent group
of people, such as a professional or discipline-based
group that has a high sense of the seriousness and
value of what it is trying to achieve. This brisk definition…."

— Jeremy Gray, Plato's Ghost: The Modernist
Transformation of Mathematics
 , Princeton, 2008 

"Even as the dominant modernist narrative was being written,
there were art historians who recognized that it was inaccurate.
The narrative was too focused on France . . . . Nor was it
correct to build the narrative so exclusively around formalism;
modernism was far messier, far more multifaceted than that."

— Jane Kallir, https://www.tabletmag.com/
jewish-arts-and-culture/visual-art-and-design/
269564/the-end-of-middle-class-art

quoted here on the above date — Sept. 11, 2018.
 

From some related Log24 posts

Wednesday, September 5, 2018

Multifaceted Narrative

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 8:19 pm

http://www.log24.com/log/pix18/180905-To_build_the_narrative-Galerie_St_Etienne.gif

http://www.log24.com/log/pix18/180905-Messier-Objects.gif

See also, in this  journal, 23-cycle.

Update of Sept. 6, 2018, 9:05 AM ET:  "The Cubist Method"

Multifaceted narrative by James Joyce —

http://www.log24.com/log/pix18/180819-Joyce-Possible_Permutations-Cambridge_Companion-2004-p168.gif

Multifaceted structures in pure mathematics, from Plato and R. T. Curtis  —

Counting symmetries with the orbit-stabilizer theorem

Wednesday, August 10, 2016

Narratives

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

The novel Blood on Snow , set in Oslo, was published
by Knopf on April 7, 2015.  This journal on that date —

Log24 on Tuesday, April 7, 2015

Logic

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 7:00 PM 

Seven years ago in this journal —

The above links:  the Stone,  the rules.

A related image —

Wednesday, June 8, 2016

But is it good for the narrative?

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:16 am

Jews on Style  continues

From a Washington Post  obituary  this morning —

"For the past 30 years, while teaching at New York University’s
law school, Dr. Bruner explored the idea of storytelling as a
fundamental way of understanding the nature of the world
around us. He believed that the choices we make in telling
stories 'become so habitual that they finally become recipes
for structuring experience itself, for laying down routes into
memory,' he said in 1987.

'This is a mode of cognition,' Gardner said, 'at least as
important as STEM' — the science, technology, engineering
and mathematics model of instruction that has gained
currency in recent years.

'He made narrative a form of thinking,' Gardner added.

Jerome Seymour Bruner was born Oct. 1, 1915,
in New York City to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe."

Related material —

Sunday, January 10, 2016

Sunday Morning Narrative

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:20 am

Madeleine L'Engle meets Captain America —

This is from a Jan. 27, 2012, post on mathematics and narrative.

Related literary criticism by the late Florence King —

"Given all the historical personages the author whistles in,
one more won't hurt. Nicolas Boileau, the 17th-century
French literary critic, gave writers a piece of advice that
Ms. Neville could use: 'Make not your tale of accidents
too full / too much variety will make it dull / Achilles' rage
alone, when wrought with skill /Abundantly does a whole
"Iliad" fill.' "

NY Times  review of The Eight , a novel by Katherine Neville

Friday, June 5, 2015

Narratives

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 11:09 pm

.

See also Snow White Dance.

For those who prefer mathematics to narrative:

Object of Beauty.

Thursday, May 15, 2014

Mathematics as Religion

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

On Edward Frenkel:

"Math is, for him, 'a narrative' of human endeavor
that shares much with art, music and religion.

For instance, he describes new mathematical insights
as 'revelations,' and the utterly unchanging truths of
mathematical ideas are 'nothing short of a miracle.'"

Uh-huh.

Friday, August 19, 2011

Convoluted Narrative

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

IMAGE- Chilean filmmaker Raul Ruiz died Friday, Aug. 19, 2011.  Known for 'convoluted narratives.'

Related material:  Duende meets Saturday Night Live

IMAGE- Imaginary novel, 'The Pinochet Sudoku,' from Saturday Night Live De Niro sketch

The "duende" link above leads to a post containing the following—

IMAGE- Excerpt from Dec. 11, 2006, post on Pinochet and the Escorial- where Lorca said 'geometry abuts with a dream.'

For the Sudoku part, see this afternoon's Geezer Puzzle and a comment
at Diamond Geezer's weblog this morning by combinatorialist Peter J. Cameron—

This reminds me of an incident a few years ago when Sir Michael Atiyah was interviewed by a journalist, who asked him what he thought of the Sudoku craze. Sir Michael replied that he was delighted to see so many people doing mathematics every day, and was taken to task by the journalist because "there is no mathematics in it: you don't add the numbers or anything".

 

Anyway, I consider this a mathematical puzzle; I even have some fancy words for it (a Graeco-Latin square with two disjoint diagonals and some entries prescribed). But don't let that scare anyone off trying the puzzle!

Thanks, DG: I put a link to it right away.

See also the Pope's schedule today.

Friday, March 29, 2024

Math for Tricksters: Deck Transformation

Filed under: General — m759 @ 4:13 am

From the above Baez essay

"And when the hero arrives, there should be
a little flourish of trumpets, like:

And now we come to a key player:
the group of deck transformations."

This remark and Baez's statement that

"Ideally the tricks I’m suggesting here
will be almost invisible…."

suggest a non-mathematical "deck transformation"
that some will prefer —

In the March 21 Netflix series "3 Body Problem,"
the deck of the ship Judgment Day is transformed
in a spectacular manner by an invisible  trick.

Monday, December 11, 2023

Triangular Relationship at Mykonos

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:50 pm

"The present article elaborates on a talk presented at the first
'Mathematics and Narrative' conference (Mykonos, July 12-15, 2005)."

— Leo Corry on his "Calculating the Limits of Poetic License"

"In this article I seek to clarify the role played by poetic license
in the triangular relationship involving mathematics, the history
of mathematics and mathematics in fiction."

— Leo Corry, https://www.tau.ac.il/~corry/publications/articles.html . . .


html/
pdf
"Calculating the Limits of Poetic License:
Fictional Narrative and the History of Mathematics",
Configurations 15 (3) (2007), 195-226. (German translation:
"Berechnungen zur Grenze der poetischen Freiheit:
Fiktionales Erzählen und die Geschichte der Mathematik",
in Andrea Albrecht et al (eds.) Zahlen, Zeichen und Figuren:
Mathematische Inspirationen in Kunst und Literatur
, Berlin:
De Gruyter (2011), pp. 564-599.)

See also tonight's previous post.

Friday, November 17, 2023

Classicism Continued: An Apotheosis of Modernity

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:34 pm
 

From Chapter 23, "Poetry," by Adam Parkes, in
A Companion to Modernist Literature and Culture,
edited by David Bradshaw and Kevin J. H. Dettmar,
Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture,
© 2006 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Writing in 1910–11, the English poet and critic T. E. Hulme claimed that the two major traditions in poetry, romanticism and classicism, were as different as a well and a bucket. According to the romantic party, Hulme explained, humankind is “intrinsically good, spoilt by circumstance”; that is, our nature is “a well, a reservoir full of possibilities.” For the classical party, however, human nature is “like a bucket”; it is “intrinsically limited, but disciplined by order and tradition to something fairly decent” (Hulme 1987: 117). But it was not only that romanticism and classicism were as dissimilar as a well and a bucket; their contents were different, too. To draw water from the well of romanticism was, in effect, to pour a “pot of treacle over the dinner table,” while the classical bucket was more likely to be full of little stones – or jewels, perhaps. Romanticism, in Hulme’s view, was the result of displaced religious fervor; it represented the return of religious instincts that the “perverted rhetoric of Rationalism” had suppressed, so that “concepts that are right and proper in their own sphere are spread over, and so mess up, falsify and blur the clear outlines of human experience” (Hulme 1987: 118). Classicism, by contrast, traded in dry goods – dry, hard goods, to be precise.

Hulme left little doubt as to which side he was on. “It is essential to prove,” he argued, “that beauty may be in small, dry things. The great aim is accurate, precise and definite description. . . . I prophesy that a period of dry, hard, classical verse is coming” (Hulme 1987: 131–3). If by “dry, hard, classical verse” Hulme meant poems looking like the fragments of Sappho, he didn’t have to wait long to see his prophecy fulfilled.

The hard sand breaks,
and the grains of it
are clear as wine.

Far off over the leagues of it,
the wind,

228

playing on the wide shore,
piles little ridges,
and the great waves
break over it.

So wrote Hilda Doolittle in “Hermes of the Ways,” the first poem that she signed “H. D., Imagiste” at the behest of her fellow American expatriate Ezra Pound. From Pound’s perspective, the Imagist movement that he co-founded in 1912 with H. D. and the English poet Richard Aldington was finished well before the First World War began in August 1914; throughout this war-torn decade, however, Imagism continued to spawn the poetry of “small, dry things” whose coming Hulme had predicted a few years before.

Indeed, modernist poets weren’t content merely to break down the extended heroic narratives – the “spilt religion,” as Hulme put it – of their treacly nineteenthcentury predecessors; they insisted on breaking down small things into ever-smaller particles and subparticles. This logic of disintegration is clearly at work in poems like “Hermes of the Ways,” where each line is metrically unique, creating a sense of perpetual freshness – an apotheosis of modernity, as it were.

REFERENCE

Hulme, T. E. (1987). Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art, ed. Herbert Read. London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul. First published 1924.

Compare and contrast:

Jeremy Gray,
Plato's Ghost: The Modernist Transformation of Mathematics,
Princeton University Press, first edition Sept. 22, 2008

"Here, modernism is defined as an autonomous body of ideas,
having little or no outward reference, placing considerable emphasis
on formal aspects of the work and maintaining a complicated—
indeed, anxious— rather than a naïve relationship with the
day-to-day world, which is the de facto view of a coherent group
of people, such as a professional or discipline-based group
that has a high sense of the seriousness and value of what it is
trying to achieve. This brisk definition…."

(Quoted at the webpage Solomon's Cube.)

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:

Thursday, June 2, 2022

The Separatrix: 6/2

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

    Mathematics and Narrative continues . . .

   The Mystic Equation

 "6/2 = 3" 
           as 
 Holy Seed:

Sylvester's Synthemes at Harvard

Friday, March 25, 2022

The Diamantova Logo

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:46 pm

From the "Mathematics and Narrative" link in the previous post

An image reposted here on March 12, 2022, the reported date of death
for Vera Diamantova —

Helen Mirren with plastic Gankyil .

Thursday, August 12, 2021

A Square Crystal Paperweight

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:21 am
 

Friday March 31, 2006

Filed under: GeneralGeometry —
Tags:  —
m759 @ 12:00 PM 

Women's History Month continues…
 
Ontology Alignment

"He had with him a small red book of Mao's poems, and as he talked he squared it on the table, aligned it with the table edge first vertically and then horizontally.  To understand who Michael Laski is you must have a feeling for that kind of compulsion."

— Joan Didion in the Saturday Evening Post,
Nov. 18, 1967 (reprinted in Slouching Towards Bethlehem)

"Or were you," I said.
He said nothing.
"Raised a Catholic," I said.
He aligned a square crystal paperweight with the edge of his desk blotter.

— Joan Didion in The Last Thing He Wanted, Knopf, 1996

"It was Plato who best expressed– who veritably embodied– the tension between the narrative arts and mathematics….

Plato clearly loved them both, both mathematics and poetry.  But he approved of mathematics, and heartily, if conflictedly, disapproved of poetry.  Engraved above the entrance to his Academy, the first European university, was the admonition: Oudeis ageometretos eiseto.  Let none ignorant of geometry enter.  This is an expression of high approval indeed, and the symbolism could not have been more perfect, since mathematics was, for Plato, the very gateway for all future knowledge.  Mathematics ushers one into the realm of abstraction and universality, grasped only through pure reason.  Mathematics is the threshold we cross to pass into the ideal, the truly real."

— Rebecca Goldstein, 
Mathematics and the Character of Tragedy

Friday, October 23, 2020

News from Saint Luke’s Day

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 6:58 am

Midrash for the late Harold Bloom,
author of The Daemon Knows —

It is perhaps not irrelevant that the phrase "on Saturday" in the
Los Angeles Times  of Sunday, October 18, 2020, refers to the
preceding day — October 17, 2020.  See too that date here.

Related material —

— November 2020
Notices of the American Mathematical Society

For fans of mathematics and narrative

Some may fancy Bloom as a dybbuk (cf, "A Serious Man") turning
the page in the article above to the next page, 1590

Sunday, August 2, 2020

The Sword and the Stone

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:42 pm

A post of May 26, 2005, displays, if not the sword,
a place  for it —

Drama of the Diagonal

"The beautiful in mathematics resides in contradiction.
Incommensurability, logoi alogoi, was the first splendor
in mathematics." — Simone Weil, Oeuvres Choisies,
éd. Quarto
, Gallimard, 1999, p. 100

Logos Alogos  by S. H. Cullinane

"To a mathematician, mathematical entities have their own existence,
they habitate spaces created by their intention.  They do things,
things happen to them, they relate to one another.  We can imagine
on their behalf all sorts of stories, providing they don't contradict
what we know of them.  The drama of the diagonal, of the square…"

— Dennis Guedj, abstract of "The Drama of Mathematics," a talk
to be given this July at the Mykonos conference on mathematics and
narrative. For the drama of the diagonal of the square, see

Sunday, February 2, 2020

“Krauss, Portman; Portman, Krauss.”

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 12:58 am

Prominent in the oeuvre  of art theorist Rosalind Krauss, the Klein group
is a four-element group named for Felix Christian Klein.

The Klein Four-Group, illustration by Steven H. Cullinane

It is commonly known as the four-group.
Mathematicians sometimes call this group
"V," for its German name, Vierergruppe .

For those who prefer narrative to mathematics

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.

Friday, October 11, 2019

Quest

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:45 am

John Horgan in Scientific American  magazine on October 8, 2019 —

"In the early 1990s, I came to suspect that the quest
for a unified theory is religious rather than scientific.
Physicists want to show that all things came from
one thing a force, or essence, or membrane
wriggling in eleven dimensions, or something that
manifests perfect mathematical symmetry. In their
search for this primordial symmetry, however,
physicists have gone off the deep end . . . ."

Other approaches —

See "Story Theory of Truth" in this  journal and, from the November 2019  
Notices of the American Mathematical Society . . .

Story Driven

More fundamental than the label of mathematician is that of human. And as humans, we’re hardwired to use stories to make sense of our world (story-receivers) and to share that understanding with others (storytellers) [2]. Thus, the framing of any communication answers the key question, what is the story we wish to share? Mathematics papers are not just collections of truths but narratives woven together, each participating in and adding to the great story of mathematics itself.

The first endeavor for constructing a good talk is recognizing and choosing just one storyline, tailoring it to the audience at hand. Should the focus be on a result about the underlying structures of group actions? . . . .

[2] Gottschall, J. , The Storytelling Animal ,
       Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012.

— "Giving Good Talks,"  by Satyan L. Devadoss

"Before time began, there was the Cube." — Optimus Prime

Monday, September 2, 2019

Observables

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 4:56 pm

A link, observablehq.com/demo(not functioning in my Chrome
browser at the present time but apparently OK in Firefox) in the 
previous post suggests . . .

"Physically meaningful observables must also satisfy 
transformation laws which relate observations
performed by different observers in different 
frames of reference. These transformation laws are 
automorphisms of the state space, that is 
bijective transformations which preserve certain
mathematical properties of the space in question."

— Wikipedia, Observable

Those who prefer narrative to mathematics may read
"automorphisms" as "auto morphisms."

"Before time began . . . ." — "Transformers" first line, 2007

Saturday, November 17, 2018

Representation

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 7:00 am

See as well . . .

. . . and posts tagged Alperin.

On its current homepage, the American Mathematical Society  
links to a Nov. 15 blog post illustrating the Stan Lee approach
to mathematics:

Stories: "Math needs more stories. All kinds of stories…" 

See too Mathematics and Narrative in this  journal.

Thursday, July 19, 2018

The Corrections (Continued)

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:33 pm

A search for the phrase "nonlinear Boolean algebra" yields few results.

"Nonlinear Boolean functions " seems to be the phrase intended.

On the mathematics of nonlinear Boolean functions —

A memorable death —

For those who prefer narrative to mathematics —

A related image —

Saturday, December 23, 2017

The Right Stuff

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 1:12 pm

A figure related to the general connecting theorem  of Koen Thas —

Anticommuting Dirac matrices as spreads of projective lines

Ron Shaw on the 15 lines of the classical generalized quadrangle W(2), a general linear complex in PG(3,2)

See also posts tagged Dirac and Geometry in this  journal.

Those who prefer narrative to mathematics may, if they so fancy, call
the above Thas connecting theorem a "quantum tesseract theorem ."

Thursday, November 30, 2017

The Matrix for Quantum Mystics

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 10:29 pm

Scholia on the title — See Quantum + Mystic in this journal.

The Matrix of Lévi-Strauss

"In Vol. I of Structural Anthropology , p. 209, I have shown that
this analysis alone can account for the double aspect of time
representation in all mythical systems: the narrative is both
'in time' (it consists of a succession of events) and 'beyond'
(its value is permanent)." — Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1976

I prefer the earlier, better-known, remarks on time by T. S. Eliot
in Four Quartets , and the following four quartets (from
The Matrix Meets the Grid) —

.

From a Log24 post of June 26-27, 2017:

A work of Eddington cited in 1974 by von Franz

See also Dirac and Geometry and Kummer in this journal.

Ron Shaw on Eddington's triads "associated in conjugate pairs" —

For more about hyperbolic  and isotropic  lines in PG(3,2),
see posts tagged Diamond Theorem Correlation.

For Shaw, in memoriam — See Contrapuntal Interweaving and The Fugue.

Typewriter Wars

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:45 pm

For those who prefer mathematics to narrative —

Sunday, March 26, 2017

Four-Year* Date

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

"Eigenvalues. Fixed points. Stable equilibria.
Mathematicians like things that stay put.
And if they can't stay put, the objects of study
should at least repeat themselves on a regular basis. . . ."

— Barry Cipra, "A Moveable Feast," SIAM News , Jan. 14, 2006

Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Class of 64 continues…

Uncategorized — m759 @ 12:00 PM 

Mathematician Norbert Wiener reportedly
died on this date in 1964.

“Mathematics is too arduous and uninviting a field
to appeal to those to whom it does not give great rewards.
These rewards are of exactly the same character as
those of the artist. To see a difficult uncompromising material
take living shape and meaning is to be Pygmalion,
whether the material is stone or hard, stonelike logic."
. . . .

Wednesday, March 18, 2015

Play Is Not Playing Around

Uncategorized — m759 @ 1:00 PM

(A saying of Friedrich Fröbel)


. . . .

Friday, March 18, 2016

Southwestern Noir

Uncategorized — m759 @ 2:56 PM 

Kyle Smith on April 15, 2015, in the New York Post —

"The ludicrous action thriller 'Beyond the Reach'
fails to achieve the Southwestern noir potency
of 'No Country for Old Men,' but there’s no denying
it brings to mind another Southwestern classic
about malicious pursuit: the Road Runner cartoons."
. . . .

Saturday, March 18, 2017

Back to the Past

Uncategorized — Tags:  — m759 @ 7:35 PM 

"Old men ought to be explorers" — T. S. Eliot

. . . .

* For a full  four years, see also March 18, 2013.

Thursday, February 23, 2017

Bullshit Studies

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:21 pm

Continued.

" The origin of new ways of doing things may often be
a disciplinary crisis. The definition of such a crisis
provided by Barry Mazur in Mykonos (2005) applies
equally well to literary creation. '[A crisis occurs] when
some established overarching framework, theoretical
vocabulary or procedure of thought is perceived as
inadequate in an essential way, or not meaning
what we think it means.' "

— Circles Disturbed :
The Interplay of Mathematics and Narrative

Edited by Apostolos Doxiadis & Barry Mazur
Princeton University Press, 2012. See
Chapter 14, Section 5.1, by Uri Margolin.

See also "overarching" in this journal.

Saturday, September 24, 2016

The Seven Seals

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 7:23 am

From Hermann Weyl's 1952 classic Symmetry —

"Galois' ideas, which for several decades remained
a book with seven seals  but later exerted a more
and more profound influence upon the whole
development of mathematics, are contained in
a farewell letter written to a friend on the eve of
his death, which he met in a silly duel at the age of
twenty-one. This letter, if judged by the novelty and
profundity of ideas it contains, is perhaps the most
substantial piece of writing in the whole literature
of mankind."

Some Galois geometry —

See the previous post for more narrative.

Friday, August 12, 2016

Dustbucket Physics

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

Peter Galison, a Harvard professor, is a defender of
the Vienna Circle and the religion of Scientism.

From Galison's “Structure of Crystal, Bucket of Dust,” in
Circles Disturbed: The Interplay of Mathematics and Narrative ,
edited by Apostolos Doxiadis and Barry Mazur, pp. 52-78 
(Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 2012) 

Galison's final paragraph —

"Perhaps, then, it should not surprise us too much if,
as Wheeler approaches the beginning-end of all things,
there is a bucket of Borelian dust. Out of this filth,
through the proposition machine of quantum mechanics
comes pregeometry; pregeometry makes geometry;
geometry gives rise to matter and the physical laws
and constants of the universe. At once close to and far
from the crystalline story that Bourbaki invoked,
Wheeler’s genesis puts one in mind of Genesis 3:19:
'In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou
return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken:
for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.' "

For fans of Scientism who prefer more colorful narratives —

Tuesday, May 10, 2016

Game Theory

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

The following passage appeared in this journal
on the night of May 23-24, 2015.

IMAGE- A fictional vision of resurrection within a tesseract

The afternoon  of May 23, 2015, was significant
for devotees of mathematics and narrative.

Monday, December 7, 2015

Wittgenstein Illustrated

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 1:17 pm

From "AMNESIA: VARIOUS, LUMINOUS, FIXED,"
An exhibition by Joseph Kosuth at
Sprüth Magers Gallery London,
NOVEMBER 26 2014 – FEBRUARY 14 2015 —

This journal, NOVEMBER 26 2014 –

Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Mathematics and Narrative

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 10:00 PM 

Mathematics:  Galois-Plane Models.

Narrative: "The Dreaming Jewels."

This journal, FEBRUARY 14 2015 —

Thursday, April 16, 2015

National Library Week

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

"Celebrate National Library Week 2015 (April 12-18, 2015)
with the theme "Unlimited possibilities @ your library®."

See also Library of Hell.

A page from Princeton University Press on March 18, 2012:

IMAGE- 'Circles Disturbed: The Interplay of Mathematics and Narrative,' p. xvi

… "mathematics and narrative…." (top of page xvii).

I prefer the interplay of Euclidean  and Galois  mathematics.

Monday, April 13, 2015

Unorthodox Easter

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

(A sequel to yesterday's Orthodox Easter posts)

This morning's Google News —

The New York Times  on the late Günter Grass —

"Many of Mr. Grass’s books are phantasmagorical
mixtures of fact and fantasy, some of them inviting
comparison with the Latin American style known as
magical realism. His own name for this style was
'broadened reality.'"

From p. xii of the 2005 second edition of a book discussed
in yesterday's Orthodox Easter posts —

(Click image to enlarge.)

Early editions of The Heart of Mathematics  include 
Gary Larson's legendary Hell's Library "Far Side" cartoon. 
Books in Hell's Library include Big Book of Story Problems ,
More Story Problems , and Even More Story Problems .

— Adapted from a review of the 2000 first edition

See also Mathematics and Narrative in this journal.

Tuesday, April 7, 2015

Logic

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

Seven years ago in this journal —

The above links:  the Stone,  the rules.

Thursday, February 12, 2015

Dead Reckoning

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:48 pm

Continued from yesterday.

The passage on Claude Chevalley quoted here
yesterday in the post Dead Reckoning was, it turns out,
also quoted by Peter Galison in his essay "Structure of Crystal,
Bucket of Dust" in Circles Disturbed: The Interplay of 
Mathematics and Narrative  
(Princeton University Press, 2012,
ed. by Apostolos Doxiadis and Barry Mazur).

Galison gives a reference to his source:

"From 'Claude Chevalley Described by His Daughter (1988),' 
in Michèle Chouchan, Nicolas Bourbaki: Faits et légendes
(Paris: Éditions du Choix, 1995), 36–40, translated and cited
in Marjorie Senechal, 'The Continuing Silence of Bourbaki:
An Interview with Pierre Cartier, June 18, 1997,' 
Mathematical Intelligencer  1 (1998): 22–28."

Galison's essay compares Chevalley with the physicist
John Archibald Wheeler. His final paragraph —

"Perhaps, then, it should not surprise us too much if,
as Wheeler approaches the beginning-end of all things,
there is a bucket of Borelian dust. Out of this filth,
through the proposition machine of quantum mechanics
comes pregeometry; pregeometry makes geometry;
geometry gives rise to matter and the physical laws
and constants of the universe. At once close to and far
from the crystalline story that Bourbaki invoked,
Wheeler’s genesis puts one in mind of Genesis 3:19:
'In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou
return unto the ground; for out of it wast thou taken:
for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return.'"

See also posts tagged Wheeler.

Friday, January 9, 2015

Plan 9 Continues

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:48 pm

(An episode of Mathematics and Narrative .)

Mathematician Peter J. Cameron this morning 
on a Paris anthropological exhibition subtitled 
Révélation d’un temps sans fin 

"I was reminded of Herbert Read’s
novel The Green Child ."

Related recent posts from this  journal:

Seal for the SeventhForthright, and Fourth Right.

A passage from The Green Child : 

"He watched over her until he too began to feel
overpowered by a desire to sleep. He therefore
got out on to the ledge of the trough and pulled
the Green Child after him. The rock there was
warm, smooth as jade to the flesh. They lay there
and sank into a profound slumber."

Sweet dreams, Mr. Taylor.

Green Child on the Rocks —

Thursday, September 25, 2014

Theology and Art

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

Recommended reading for Josefine Lyche:

See also Ayn Sof (Jan. 7, 2011).

Monday, June 23, 2014

Dream Palace

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:59 am

Or: Mathematics and Narrative, Continued

In memory of a Stanford Arabist who reportedly died yesterday:

From preface to Ajami's 'The Dream Palace of the Arabs'

Another dream palace, from science fiction:

From Catherine Asaro’s  The Spacetime Pool :

She couldn’t believe him. That he sounded sane made none of this more plausible. “And you have no idea how this gate works?” she challenged.

His gaze flashed. “Of course I do. It’s a branch. From here to your mountains.”

“A tree, you mean?”

“No. A branch cut to another page. Your universe is one sheet, mine is another.”

She gaped at him. “Do you mean a Riemann sheet?  A branch cut from one Riemann sheet to another?”

“That’s right.” He hesitated. “You know these words?”

She laughed unsteadily. “It’s nonsense. Not the sheets, I mean, but they’re just mathematical constructs! They don’t actually exist. You can’t physically go through  a branch cut any more than you could step into a square root sign.”

He was watching her with an expression that mirrored how she had felt when he told her about his prophecy. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Complex variable analysis.” She felt as if she were in a play where she only knew part of the script. “A branch cut is like a slit in a sheet of paper. It opens onto another sheet. I suppose you could say the sheets are alternate universes. But they aren’t real.”

“They seem quite real,” he said.

Related material: From Sunday, the day of the Stanford Arabist’s death,
a quotation from a 2013 book on “the rise of complex function theory.”

Monday, May 26, 2014

Springtime for Vishnu

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:01 pm

Continues.

A post by Margaret Soltan this morning:

Links (in blue) from the above post:
Cane and Mondo Cane.

Bagger Vance — “Time for you to see the field.”

From Pictures for Kurosawa (Sept. 6, 2003) —

“As these flowing rivers that go towards the ocean,
when they have reached the ocean, sink into it,
their name and form are broken, and people speak of
the ocean only, exactly thus these sixteen parts
of the spectator that go towards the person (purusha),
when they have reached the person, sink into him,
their name and form are broken, and people speak of
the person only, and he becomes without parts and
immortal. On this there is this verse:

‘That person who is to be known, he in whom these parts
rest, like spokes in the nave of a wheel, you know him,
lest death should hurt you.’ “

— Prasna Upanishad

Related material — Heaven’s Gate  images from Xmas 2012:

“This could be heaven or this could be hell.” — Hotel California

Those who prefer mathematics to narrative may consult Root Circle.

Saturday, February 22, 2014

Green Fields

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

Some narrative  notes in memory of a
Bowling Green State University math professor
who reportedly died at 72 on Feb. 13— 

That date in this journal and Green Fields.

See also Nine is a Vine.

Those who prefer mathematics to narrative may 
also prefer to read, instead of the notes above,
some material on the dead professor's specialty,
Diophantine equations. Recommended:
Mordell on Lang and Lang on Mordell as well as
Lang's article titled

"Mordell's Review, Siegel's Letter to Mordell,
Diophantine Geometry, and 20th Century Mathematics
."

Some background —

Sunday, November 3, 2013

The Call Girls

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:23 am

The title, that of a novel by Arthur Koestler,
has appeared before in this journal.

The title was quoted in a Log24 note of
May 29, 2002 (G.K. Chesterton's birthday).

The link in Saturday evening's post to a Chesterton
essay suggested a further search that yielded
the following quotation—

Then silence sank. And slowly
      Arose the sea-land lord
Like some vast beast for mystery,
He filled the room and porch and sky,
And from a cobwebbed nail on high
      Unhooked his heavy sword.

— G. K. Chesterton,
   The Ballad of the White Horse

This, together with some Log24 remarks 
from 2004, suggests two images—

IMAGE- Cover design by Robert Flynn of 'The Armed Vision,' a 1955 Vintage paperback by Stanley Edgar Hyman

Above: A 1955 cover design by Robert Flynn.

The arrow theme also appears in a figure from
John Sealander's Road to Nowhere in the 2004
remarks:

The remarks quoting the Sealander image, from 
March 5, 2004, were on mathematics and narrative.

Related material from a year later:

See an announcement, saved from March 16, 2005,
of a conference on mathematics and narrative that
was held in July 2005. Some context: Koestler's novel.

Thursday, August 29, 2013

An End in Itself

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:24 pm

(Mathematics and Narrative, continued from May 9, 2013)

IMAGE- Barry Mazur: 'A good story is an end in itself.'

See also Scriba's The Concept of Number and,
from the date of his death, The Zero Theorem.

Monday, August 26, 2013

Spectrum

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:30 pm

From the weblog of Dr. David Justice today :

C.S. Lewis somewhere (in time, in retirement, I might recover
the passage) surveys the spectrum of plot-outlines, and notes
that that of Orpheus retains its power to spellbind, even in a
bare-bones form, whereas that of almost all worthy modern novels,
become as dust upon such summary.

We venture now  upon that territory where words fail ….

Related material :

C. S. Lewis on Orpheus (click to enlarge) —

Lewis, according to Justice, "surveys the spectrum of plot-outlines."

A related image (see, too, today's previous post) —

C. S. Lewis on myth —

"The stories I am thinking of always have a very simple narrative shape—
a satisfactory and inevitable shape, like a good vase or a tulip."

Conceptual Art

For concepts of prism, spectrum, and tulip combined, see Sicilian Reflections.

"For every kind of vampire, there is a kind of cross."
Gravity's Rainbow

Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Snakes on a Plane

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 7:27 am

Continued.

The order-3 affine plane:

Detail from the video in the previous post:

For other permutations of points in the
order-3 affine plane—

See Quaternions in an Affine Galois Plane
and Group Actions, 1984-2009.

See, too, the Mathematics and Narrative post 
from April 28, 2013, and last night's
For Indiana Spielberg.

Sunday, April 28, 2013

Nominee

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 6:40 pm

IMAGE- Obama to nominate Foxx

Related mathematics and narrative —

Talkin' 'bout my generation.

Saturday, April 13, 2013

Princeton’s Christopher Robin

The title is that of a talk (see video) given by
George Dyson at a Princeton land preservation trust,
reportedly on March 21, 2013.  The talk's subtitle was
"Oswald Veblen and the Six-hundred-acre Woods."

Meanwhile

Thursday, March 21, 2013

Geometry of Göpel Tetrads (continued)

m759 @ 7:00 PM

An update to Rosenhain and Göpel Tetrads in PG(3,2)
supplies some background from
Notes on Groups and Geometry, 1978-1986,
and from a 2002 AMS Transactions  paper.

IMAGE- Göpel tetrads in an inscape, April 1986

Related material for those who prefer narrative
to mathematics:

Log24 on June 6, 2006:

 

The Omen:


Now we are 
 

6!

Related material for those who prefer mathematics
to narrative:

What the Omen narrative above and the mathematics of Veblen
have in common is the number 6. Veblen, who came to
Princeton in 1905 and later helped establish the Institute,
wrote extensively on projective geometry.  As the British
geometer H. F. Baker pointed out,  6 is a rather important number
in that discipline.  For the connection of 6 to the Göpel tetrads
figure above from March 21, see a note from May 1986.

See also last night's Veblen and Young in Light of Galois.

"There is  such a thing as a tesseract." — Madeleine L'Engle

Monday, November 5, 2012

Sitting Specially

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

Some webpages at finitegeometry.org discuss
group actions on Sylvester’s duads and synthemes.

Those pages are based on the square model of
PG(3,2) described in the 1980’s by Steven H. Cullinane.

A rival tetrahedral model of PG(3,2) was described
in the 1990’s by Burkard Polster.

Polster’s tetrahedral model appears, notably, in
a Mathematics Magazine  article from April 2009—

IMAGE- Figure from article by Alex Fink and Richard Guy on how the symmetric group of degree 5 'sits specially' in the symmetric group of degree 6

Click for a pdf of the article.

Related material:

The Religion of Cubism” (May 9, 2003) and “Art and Lies
(Nov. 16, 2008).

This  post was suggested by following the link in yesterday’s
Sunday School post  to High White Noon, and the link from
there to A Study in Art Education, which mentions the date of
Rudolf Arnheim‘s death, June 9, 2007. This journal
on that date

Cryptology

IMAGE- The ninefold square

— The Delphic Corporation

The Fink-Guy article was announced in a Mathematical
Association of America newsletter dated April 15, 2009.

Those who prefer narrative to mathematics may consult
a Log24 post from a few days earlier, “Where Entertainment is God”
(April 12, 2009), and, for some backstory, The Judas Seat
(February 16, 2007).

Thursday, October 25, 2012

Bunker Bingo*

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:09 am

Mathematics and Narrative continues…

IMAGE- In 'Downfall,' Hitler says that 'Steiner's assault will bring it under control.'

Steiner's version of "classical functional analysis"—

"Mein Führer Steiner"

IMAGE- Classical functional analysis according to Moscow State University

* See the story by Kilgore Trout. See also On Linguistic Creation,
   The Matrix of Abraham, and The Thoreau Foundation.

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Cube Review

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

Last Wednesday's 11 PM post mentioned the
adjacency-isomorphism relating the 4-dimensional 
hypercube over the 2-element Galois field GF(2) to
the 4×4 array made up of 16 square cells, with
opposite edges of the 4×4 array identified.

A web page illustrates this property with diagrams that
enjoy the Karnaugh property— adjacent vertices, or cells,
differ in exactly one coordinate. A brief paper by two German
authors relates the Karnaugh property to the construction
of a magic square like that of Dürer (see last Wednesday).

In a similar way (search the Web for Karnaugh + cube ),
vertex adjacency in the 6-dimensional hypercube over GF(2) 
is isomorphic to cell adjacency in the 4x4x4 cube, with
opposite faces of the 4x4x4 cube identified.

The above cube may be used to illustrate some properties
of the 64-point Galois 6-space that are more advanced
than those studied by enthusiasts of "magic" squares
and cubes.

See

Those who prefer narrative to mathematics may
consult posts in this journal containing the word "Cuber."

Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Art Wars (continued)

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

Today's previous post, "For Odin's Day," discussed 
a mathematical object, the tesseract, from a strictly
narrative point of view.

In honor of George Balanchine, Odin might yield the
floor this evening to Apollo.

From a piece in today's online New York Times  titled
"How a God Finds Art (the Abridged Version)"—

"… the newness at the heart of this story,
in which art is happening for the first time…."

Some related art

IMAGE- Figure from Plato's Meno in version by Benjamin Jowett, Master of Balliol College, Oxford

and, more recently

This more recent figure is from Ian Stewart's 1996 revision 
of a 1941 classic, What Is Mathematics? , by Richard Courant
and Herbert Robbins.

Apollo might discuss with Socrates how the confused slave boy
of Plato's Meno  would react to Stewart's remark that

"The number of copies required to double an
 object's size depends on its dimension."

Apollo might also note an application of Socrates' Meno  diagram
to the tesseract of this afternoon's Odin post

.

For Odin’s Day*

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

(Mathematics and Narrative, continued)

"My dad has a great expression,"
Steve Sabol told USA TODAY Sports
last year. "He always says, 'Tell me
a fact, and I'll learn. Tell me the truth,
and I believe. But tell me a story,
and it will live in my heart forever.' "

Fact—

Sabol died yesterday.

Truth—

An art gallery in Oslo is exhibiting a tesseract.

Story—

The Jewel of Odin's Treasure Room

(Click to enlarge.)

* I.e., Wednesday. For some apt Nordic spirit,
   see Odin's Day 2012 Trailer.

Monday, August 13, 2012

Raiders of the Lost Tesseract

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 3:33 pm

(An episode of Mathematics and Narrative )

A report on the August 9th opening of Sondheim's Into the Woods

Amy Adams… explained why she decided to take on the role of the Baker’s Wife.

“It’s the ‘Be careful what you wish’ part,” she said. “Since having a child, I’m really aware that we’re all under a social responsibility to understand the consequences of our actions.” —Amanda Gordon at businessweek.com

Related material—

Amy Adams in Sunshine Cleaning  "quickly learns the rules and ropes of her unlikely new market. (For instance, there are products out there specially formulated for cleaning up a 'decomp.')" —David Savage at Cinema Retro

Compare and contrast…

1.  The following item from Walpurgisnacht 2012

IMAGE- Excerpt from 'Unified Approach to Functional Decompositions of Switching Functions,' by Marek A. Perkowski et al., 1995

2.  The six partitions of a tesseract's 16 vertices 
       into four parallel faces in Diamond Theory in 1937

Thursday, July 26, 2012

Solomon’s Seal

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

(Mathematics and Narrative, continued)

Narrative—

The Ring and The Stone from yesterday’s post, and…

“In Medieval Jewish, Christian and Islamic legends,
the Seal of Solomon was a magical signet ring
said to have been possessed by King Solomon….”

— Wikipedia article, Seal of Solomon

Mathematics—

IMAGE- Eric Temple Bell on the mathematics of 'Solomon's Seal' (in his 'Development of Mathematics')

A fact related to the mathematical
“Solomon’s seal” described above by Bell:

IMAGE- J.W.P. Hirschfeld on the mathematics of 'Solomon's Seal', with reference to Edge on the same topic

The reference to Edge is as follows—

[3] Edge, W. L., Quadrics over GF(2) and
their relevance for the cubic surface group
,
Canadian J. Maths. 11 (1959) ….

(This reference relates Hirschfeld’s remarks
quoted above to the 64-point affine space
illustrated below (via the associated
63-point projective  space PG (5, 2)).

As for the narrative’s Stone… 

See Solomon’s Cube.

IMAGE- 'Solomon's Cube'

Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Disturbing Archimedes

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:01 pm

Princeton University Press on a book it will publish in March—

Circles Disturbed: The Interplay of
Mathematics and Narrative

"… brings together important thinkers in mathematics,
history, and philosophy to explore the relationship
between mathematics and narrative.
  The book's title recalls the last words of the great
Greek mathematician Archimedes before he was
slain by a Roman soldier— 'Don't disturb my circles' …."

Related material—

Archimedes's Vicious Circle

IMAGE- Archimedes's measurement of the area of a circle (by sharply pointed triangles)

IMAGE- The Mouth of Truth in 'Roman Holiday'

Sunday, January 22, 2012

The Presbyterian Exorcist

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:26 am

(Backstory— Presbyterian in this journal)

Princeton University Press on a book it will publish in March—

Circles Disturbed  brings together important thinkers in mathematics, history, and philosophy to explore the relationship between mathematics and narrative. The book's title recalls the last words of the great Greek mathematician Archimedes before he was slain by a Roman soldier–"Don't disturb my circles"–words that seem to refer to two radically different concerns: that of the practical person living in the concrete world of reality, and that of the theoretician lost in a world of abstraction. Stories and theorems are, in a sense, the natural languages of these two worlds–stories representing the way we act and interact, and theorems giving us pure thought, distilled from the hustle and bustle of reality. Yet, though the voices of stories and theorems seem totally different, they share profound connections and similarities.

Exercise— Discuss the above paragraph's vulgarity.

Discuss also the more robust vulgarity of Marvel Entertainment

Context— "Marvel" in this journal, and The Cosmic Cube.

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

Thursday, December 29, 2011

Crank Science

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

From Margaret Wertheim's "Outsider Physicists and the Oh-My-God Particle," New Scientist , Dec. 24, 2011—

For the past 18 years I have been collecting the works of what I have come to call "outsider physicists". I now have more than 100 such theories on my shelves. Most of them are single papers, but a number are fully fledged books, often filled with equations and technical diagrams (though I do have one that is couched as a series of poems and another that is written as a fairy tale)….

The mainstream science world has a way of dealing with people like this— dismiss them as cranks and dump their letters in the bin. While I do not believe any outsider I have encountered has done any work that challenges mainstream physics, I have come to believe that they should not be so summarily ignored.

Consider the sheer numbers. Outsider physicists have their own organisation, the Natural Philosophy Alliance, whose database lists more than 2100 theorists, 5800 papers and over 1300 books worldwide. They have annual conferences, with this year's proceedings running to 735 pages. In the time I have been observing the organisation, the NPA has grown from a tiny seed whose founder photocopied his newsletter onto pastel-coloured paper to a thriving international association with video-streamed events.

The NPA's website tells us that the group is devoted "to broad-ranging, fully open-minded criticism, at the most fundamental levels, of the often irrational and unrealistic doctrines of modern physics and cosmology; and to the ultimate replacement of these doctrines by much sounder ideas".

Very little unites this disparate group of amateurs— there are as many theories as members— except for a common belief that "something is drastically wrong in contemporary physics and cosmology, and that a new spirit of open-mindedness is desperately needed". They are unanimous in the view that mainstream physics has been hijacked by a kind of priestly caste who speak a secret language— in other words, mathematics— that is incomprehensible to most human beings. They claim that the natural world speaks a language which all of us can, or should be able to, understand.

"…a secret language— in other words, mathematics— that is incomprehensible…."

For instance, the "secret language" of Dr. Garret Sobczyk?

See a brief paper by Sobczyk in the NPA Proceedings  described above.

See also Sobczyk in the February 2012 Notices of the American Mathematical Society

"Conformal Mappings in Geometric Algebra"—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11C/111229-AMS_Notices.jpg

This AMS article, together with Sobczyk's list of previous publications,
indicates that, despite his appearance in the NPA Proceedings , he is definitely not  a crank.

Unfortunately, publication in the Notices  does not by itself guarantee respectability.

For an example, see the Mathematics and Narrative post of Dec. 13, 2011.

Thursday, November 3, 2011

Ockham’s Bubbles–

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

Mathematics and Narrative, continued

"… a vision invisible, even ineffable, as ineffable as the Angels and the Universal Souls"

— Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word , 1975, quoted here on October 30th

"… our laughable abstractions, our wryly ironic po-mo angels dancing on the heads of so many mis-imagined quantum pins."

— Dan Conover on September 1st, 2011

"Recently I happened to be talking to a prominent California geologist, and she told me: 'When I first went into geology, we all thought that in science you create a solid layer of findings, through experiment and careful investigation, and then you add a second layer, like a second layer of bricks, all very carefully, and so on. Occasionally some adventurous scientist stacks the bricks up in towers, and these towers turn out to be insubstantial and they get torn down, and you proceed again with the careful layers. But we now realize that the very first layers aren't even resting on solid ground. They are balanced on bubbles, on concepts that are full of air, and those bubbles are being burst today, one after the other.'

I suddenly had a picture of the entire astonishing edifice collapsing and modern man plunging headlong back into the primordial ooze. He's floundering, sloshing about, gulping for air, frantically treading ooze, when he feels something huge and smooth swim beneath him and boost him up, like some almighty dolphin. He can't see it, but he's much impressed. He names it God."

— Tom Wolfe, "Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died," Forbes , 1996

"… Ockham's idea implies that we probably have the ability to do something now such that if we were to do it, then the past would have been different…"

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

"Today is February 28, 2008, and we are privileged to begin a conversation with Mr. Tom Wolfe."

— Interviewer for the National Association of Scholars

From that conversation—

Wolfe : "People in academia should start insisting on objective scholarship, insisting  on it, relentlessly, driving the point home, ramming it down the gullets of the politically correct, making noise! naming names! citing egregious examples! showing contempt to the brink of brutality!"

As for "mis-imagined quantum pins"…
This 
journal on the date of the above interview— February 28, 2008

http://www.log24.com/log/pix08/080228-Wooters2.jpg

Illustration from a Perimeter Institute talk given on July 20, 2005

The date of Conover's "quantum pins" remark above (together with Ockham's remark above and the above image) suggests a story by  Conover, "The Last Epiphany," and four posts from September 1st, 2011—

BoundaryHow It WorksFor Thor's Day,  and The Galois Tesseract.

Those four posts may be viewed as either an exploration or a parody of the boundary between mathematics and narrative.

"There is  such a thing as a tesseract." —A Wrinkle in Time

Friday, October 28, 2011

Annals of Art

Filed under: General — m759 @ 5:48 pm

From The Telegraph  today—

Professor Peter Goldie,
born November 5 1946, died October 22 2011.

With co-author Elisabeth Schellekens, Goldie wrote
Who's Afraid of Conceptual Art?

In memoriam—

Two posts from the day, Nov. 14, 2009,
that that book was published in paperback—
For St. Lawrence O'Toole's Day and
Mathematics and Narrative, continued
and a post from the day of Goldie's death… Araby.

See also an excerpt from Who's Afraid? .

Thursday, October 20, 2011

The Thing Itself

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 11:29 am

Suggested by an Oct. 18 piece in the Book Bench section
of the online New Yorker  magazine—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11C/111020-Derrida.GIF

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11C/111020-Topia122.GIF

Related material suggested by the "Shouts and Murmurs" piece
in The New Yorker , issue dated Oct. 24, 2011—

"a series of e-mails from a preschool teacher planning to celebrate
the Day of the Dead instead of Halloween…"

A search for Coxeter + Graveyard in this journal yields…

Coxeter exhuming Geometry

Here the tombstone says "GEOMETRY… 600 BC — 1900 AD… R.I.P."

A related search for Plato + Tombstone yields an image from July 6, 2007…

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06A/061019-Tombstones.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Here Plato's poems to Aster suggested
the "Star and Diamond" tombstone.

The eight-rayed star is an ancient symbol of Venus
and the diamond is from Plato's Meno .

The star and diamond are combined in a figure from
12 AM on September 6th, 2011—

The Diamond Star

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

See Configurations and Squares.

That webpage explains how Coxeter
united the diamond and the star.

Those who prefer narrative to mathematics may consult
a definition of the Spanish word lucero  from March 28, 2003.

Friday, September 2, 2011

Rigged?

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 1:44 pm

Sarah Tomlin in a Nature  article on the July 12-15 2005 Mykonos meeting on Mathematics and Narrative—

"Today, Mazur says he has woken up to the power of narrative, and in Mykonos gave an example of a 20-year unsolved puzzle in number theory which he described as a cliff-hanger. 'I don’t think I personally understood the problem until I expressed it in narrative terms,' Mazur told the meeting. He argues that similar narrative devices may be especially helpful to young mathematicians…."

Michel Chaouli in "How Interactive Can Fiction Be?" (Critical Inquiry  31, Spring 2005), pages 613-614—

"…a simple thought experiment….*

… If the cliffhanger is done well, it will not simply introduce a wholly unprepared turn into the narrative (a random death, a new character, an entirely unanticipated obstacle) but rather tighten the configuration of known elements to such a degree that the next step appears both inevitable and impossible. We feel the pressure rising to a breaking point, but we simply cannot foresee where the complex narrative structure will give way. This interplay of necessity and contingency produces our anxious— and highly pleasurable— speculation about the future path of the story. But if we could determine that path even slightly, we would narrow the range of possible outcomes and thus the uncertainty in the play of necessity and contingency. The world of the fiction would feel, not open, but rigged."

* The idea of the thought experiment emerged in a conversation with Barry Mazur.

Barry Mazur in the preface to his 2003 book Imagining Numbers

"But the telltale adjective real  suggests two things: that these numbers are somehow real to us and that, in contrast, there are unreal  numbers in the offing. These are the imaginary numbers

The imaginary  numbers are well named, for there is some imaginative work to do to make them as much a part of us as the real numbers we use all the time to measure for bookshelves. 

This book began as a letter to my friend Michel Chaouli. The two of us had been musing about whether or not one could 'feel' the workings of the imagination in its various labors. Michel had also mentioned that he wanted to 'imagine imaginary numbers.' That very (rainy) evening, I tried to work up an explanation of the idea of these numbers, still in the mood of our conversation."

See also The Galois Quaternion and 2/19.

IMAGE- NY Lottery evening numbers Thursday, Sept. 1, 2011 were 144 and 0219

New York Lottery last evening

Monday, August 29, 2011

Many = Six.

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

A comment today on yesterday's New York Times  philosophy column "The Stone"
notes that "Augustine… incorporated Greek ideas of perfection into Christianity."

Yesterday's post here  for the Feast of St. Augustine discussed the 2×2×2 cube.

Today's Augustine comment in the Times  reflects (through a glass darkly)
a Log24 post  from Augustine's Day, 2006, that discusses the larger 4×4×4 cube.

For related material, those who prefer narrative to philosophy may consult
Charles Williams's 1931 novel Many Dimensions . Those who prefer mathematics
to either may consult an interpretation in which Many = Six.

Galois space of six dimensions represented in Euclidean spaces of three and of two dimensions

Click image for some background.

Friday, August 19, 2011

Crux

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

"Francis Bacon used the phrase instantia crucis,  'crucial instance,' to refer to something in an experiment that proves one of two hypotheses and disproves the other. Bacon's phrase was based on a sense of the Latin word crux,  'cross,' which had come to mean 'a guidepost that gives directions at a place where one road becomes two,' and hence was suitable for Bacon's metaphor."

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

Such a cross: St. Andrew's.  Some context—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/110819-XMarksTheSpot.JPG

X Marks the Spot  scene, "The Last Crusade"

Related symbology for Dan Brown—

Neville's Labrys and Notes on Mathematics and Narrative.

Monday, July 11, 2011

Accentuate the Positive

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

An image that may be viewed as
a cube with a + on each face—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/110711-EightfoldCube.gif

The eightfold cube

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/110711-CubeHypostases.gif

Underlying structure

For the Pope and others on St. Benedict’s Day
who prefer narrative to mathematics—

Friday, May 13, 2011

Apollo’s 13

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 6:36 am

Continued … See related previous posts.

IMAGE- The 13 symmetry axes of the cube

Those who prefer narrative to mathematics
may consult Wikipedia on The Cosmic Cube.

Sunday, April 10, 2011

Finishing Up at Noon

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

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…"

A stitch in time…

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110410-BeastFavicon.jpg

Related material—

    This journal on April 8
http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110408-HopkinsAsExorcist.jpg

See also "Putting Mental Health on the Map at Harvard"—

Harvard Crimson , Friday, April 8, 2011, 2:09 AM—

They're outside the Science Center with their signs, their cheer, and their smiles. They've been introducing themselves over House lists, and they want you to ask questions. They're here for you. They're the Student Mental Heath Liaisons.

Harvard's SMHL crewthey pronounce it smilehave recently launched a new website and recruited more members in their effort to foster an informed and understanding environment on campus….

Mental Health Services, SMHL said, are not meant for "students who are really 'crazy.'" Everyone is entitled to a little help smiling.

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110410-DrLecter.jpg

Friday, April 8, 2011

Windows

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

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

Lowry —

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101101-LowryWindow.jpg

Malcolm Lowry, author of Under the Volcano

Hollywood —

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

Related material —

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, April 5, 2011

For Ned*

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

(A sequel to last night's "For Taylor")

On Joan Tewkesbury, who wrote the script for the 1975 film "Nashville"—

She urges writers to continue to generate new ideas
and new material. "Keep writing. The hardest thing
is to sell one script and not have another to follow it with."

One script— Yesterday's link titled "An Ordinary Evening in Tennessee"

Another— "A Point of Central Arrival"

Related material 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…"

* A former governor of Tennessee who died at 80 yesterday in Nashville

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…"

Friday, January 7, 2011

Ayn Sof

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 7:26 pm

(A continuation of this morning's Coxeter and the Aleph)

"You've got to pick up every stitch… Must be the season of the witch."
Donovan song at the end of Nicole Kidman's "To Die For"

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

"As is well known, the Aleph is the first letter of the Hebrew alphabet.
Its use for the strange sphere in my story may not be accidental.
For the Kabbala, the letter stands for the En Soph ,
the pure and boundless godhead; it is also said that it takes
the shape of a man pointing to both heaven and earth, in order to show
that the lower world is the map and mirror of the higher; for Cantor's
Mengenlehre , it is the symbol of transfinite numbers,
of which any part is as great as the whole."

— Borges, "The Aleph"

From WorldLingo.com

Ein Sof

Ein Soph or Ayn Sof (Hebrew  אין סוף, literally "without end", denoting "boundlessness" and/or "nothingness"), is a Kabbalistic term that usually refers to an abstract state of existence preceding God's Creation of the limited universe. This Ein Sof , typically referred to figuratively as the "light of Ein Sof " ("Or Ein Sof "), is the most fundamental emanation manifested by God. The Ein Sof  is the material basis of Creation that, when focused, restricted, and filtered through the sefirot , results in the created, dynamic universe.
….

Cultural impact

Mathematician Georg Cantor labeled different sizes of infinity using the Aleph. The smallest size of infinity is aleph-null (0), the second size is aleph-one (1), etc. One theory about why Cantor chose to use the aleph is because it is the first letter of Ein-Sof. (See Aleph number)

"Infinite Jest… now stands as the principal contender
for what serious literature can aspire to
in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries."

All Things Shining, a work of pop philosophy published January 4th

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101231-AllThingsShining-Cover.jpg

"You're gonna need a bigger boat." — Roy Scheider in "Jaws"

"We're gonna need more holy water." — "Season of the Witch," a film opening tonight

See also, with respect to David Foster Wallace, infinity, nihilism,
and the above reading of "Ayn Sof" as "nothingness,"
the quotations compiled as "Is Nothing Sacred?"

Saturday, December 18, 2010

Logic Tale

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 2:45 pm

Tale (Nov. 23)

Graham Priest (Nov. 28)

A Geometric Merkabah (Dec. 1)

John Baez (Dec. 15, UTC)

Logica Universalis  (journal)

Preface

Universal Logic at Neuchatel

Moretti homepage

Moretti thesis, summary

Moretti thesis (pdf, 5.05 MB)

Church Logic

Church Narrative

Church

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Tale

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

A reviewer says Steve Martin finds in his new novel An Object of Beauty  "a sardonic morality tale."

From this journal on the day The Cube  was published (see today's Art Object ) —

Monday February 20, 2006

m759 @ 12:00 AM

The Past Revisited

From Log24 a year ago on this date, a quote from Many Dimensions  (1931), by Charles Williams:

“Lord Arglay had a suspicion that the Stone would be purely logical.  Yes, he thought, but what, in that sense, were the rules of its pure logic?”

For the rest of the story, see the downloadable version at Project Gutenberg of Australia.

See also a post on Mathematics and Narrative from Nov. 14, 2009.

That post compares characters in Many Dimensions  to those in Logicomix

Whitehead and Russell, 'Logicomix' page 181

Saturday, November 13, 2010

Story

Filed under: General — 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)

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…."

Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress