The tesseract in last night's post Game Theory
suggests a search in Log24 for "Jewel of Odin."
See also Trinkets.
Wednesday, May 11, 2016
Jewel of Odin
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Saturday, August 19, 2023
Speak, Memory: The Jewel in Ray Houchins’s Lotus
"Does the name 'Coulter' mean anything to you?"
See as well this journal on 07/19/2021, the Lotus-page date above.
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Wednesday, September 19, 2012
For Odin’s Day*
(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—
Truth—
An art gallery in Oslo is exhibiting a tesseract.
Story—
The Jewel of Odin's Treasure Room
* I.e., Wednesday. For some apt Nordic spirit,
see Odin's Day 2012 Trailer.
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Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Odin’s Day
Today is Wednesday.
O.E. Wodnesdæg "Woden's day," a Gmc. loan-translation of L. dies Mercurii "day of Mercury" (cf. O.N. Oðinsdagr , Swed. Onsdag , O.Fris. Wonsdei , M.Du. Wudensdach ). For Woden , see Odin . — Online Etymology Dictionary
Above: Anthony Hopkins as Odin in the 2011 film "Thor"
Hugo Weaving as Johann Schmidt in the related 2011 film "Captain America"—
"The Tesseract* was the jewel of Odin's treasure room."
Weaving also played Agent Smith in The Matrix Trilogy.
The figure at the top in the circle of 13** "Thor" characters above is Agent Coulson.
"I think I'm lucky that they found out they need somebody who's connected to the real world to help bring these characters all together."
— Clark Gregg, who plays Agent Coulson in "Thor," at UGO.com
For another circle of 13, see the Crystal Skull film implicitly referenced in the Bright Star link from Abel Prize (Friday, Aug. 26, 2011)—
Today's New York Times has a quote about a former mathematician who died on that day (Friday, Aug. 26, 2011)—
"He treated it like a puzzle."
Sometimes that's the best you can do.
* See also tesseract in this journal.
** For a different arrangement of 13 things, see the cube's 13 axes in this journal.
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Thursday, February 15, 2024
The Isotropic Die
Related material: Theodore Sturgeon's novel The Dreaming Jewels
and his story "What Dead Men Tell" . . .
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Wednesday, November 22, 2023
For E. Lily Yu* — Devs Setting
Friday, July 11, 2014
|
* Author of Jewel Box: Stories ( Erewhon Books, Oct. 24, 2023).
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Saturday, October 21, 2023
“Proof of Concept” at The New York Times
About the author of the above —
A related questionable "proof of concept" :
Aitchison at Hiroshima in this journal — a scholar's 2018 investigation
of M24 actions on a cuboctahedon — and . . .
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Saturday, October 14, 2023
Review
|
Robert Stone " 'That old Jew gave me this here.' Egan looked at the diamond. 'I ain't giving this to you, understand? The old man gave it to me for my boy. It's worth a whole lot of money– you can tell that just by looking– but it means something, I think. It's got a meaning, like.' 'Let's see,' Egan said, 'what would it mean?' He took hold of Pablo's hand cupping the stone and held his own hand under it. '"The jewel is in the lotus," perhaps that's what it means. The eternal in the temporal. The Boddhisattva declining nirvana out of compassion. Contemplating the ignorance of you and me, eh? That's a metaphor of our Buddhist friends.' Pablo's eyes glazed over. 'Holy shit,' he said. 'Santa Maria.' He stared at the diamond in his palm with passion. 'Hey,' he said to the priest, 'diamonds are forever! You heard of that, right? That means something, don't it?'
'I have heard it,' Egan said. 'Perhaps it has a religious meaning.' "
"We symbolize logical necessity — Keith Allen Korcz |
)
).
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Sunday, September 10, 2023
For Orson Welles and Yul Brynner
Two examples from the Wikipedia article "Archimedean solid" —
Iain Aitchison said in a 2018 talk at Hiroshima that
the Mathieu group M24 can be represented as permuting
naturally the 24 edges of the cuboctahedron.
The 24 vertices of the truncated octahedron are labeled
naturally by the 24 elements of S4 in a permutahedron —
Can M24 be represented as permuting naturally
the 24 vertices of the truncated octahedron?
Related material from the day Orson Welles and Yul Brynner died —
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Sunday, June 25, 2023
High Concept: The Dreaming Gemstones
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Saturday, June 3, 2023
Space Drama
"It seems fitting that a handsome, professional and future-minded
space drama in fine color, like 'Marooned,' should open a new
jewel box of a theater, the Ziegfeld."
— Howard Thompson in The New York Times , Dec. 19, 1969
A related film tells of a real-life April 1970 sequel
to the 1969 film "Marooned."
Then there is my own "jewel box" picture with three horses . . .
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Wednesday, March 29, 2023
An Earlier “Pretty Mama” Song, from a 1975 Album
The previous post referenced the "pretty mama" of "Cocktail" (1988).
Earlier, in 1975, there was a more serious song to a pretty mama . . .
One of these nights
One of these crazy old nights
We're gonna find out, pretty mama
What turns on your lights
See as well "Dreaming Jewels" and . . .
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Sunday, December 15, 2013
Sermon
Odin's Jewel
Jim Holt, the author of remarks in yesterday's
Saturday evening post—
"It turns out that the Kyoto school of Buddhism
makes Heidegger seem like Rush Limbaugh—
it’s so rarified, I’ve never been able to
understand it at all. I’ve been knocking my head
against it for years."
— Vanity Fair Daily , July 16, 2012
Backstory: Odin + Jewel in this journal.
See also Odin on the Kyoto school —
For another version of Odin's jewel, see Log24
on the date— July 16, 2012— that Holt's Vanity Fair
remarks were published. Scroll to the bottom of the
"Mapping Problem continued" post for an instance of
the Galois tesseract —
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Friday, January 27, 2012
Mathematics and Narrative (continued)
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—
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Sunday, September 11, 2011
First Lady
Betty Skelton, "the First Lady of Firsts," died on the last day of August.
From this journal on August thirty-first—
"The Tesseract was the jewel of Odin's treasure room."
Hugo Weaving also played Agent Smith
in The Matrix Trilogy .
For Cynthia Zarin, biographer of Madeleine L'Engle—
"There is such a thing as a tesseract."
— A Wrinkle in Time
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Thursday, September 1, 2011
Boundary (continued*)
It is now midnight. Yesterday was Odin's Day. Today is Thor's Day.
From a weblog post on Captain America and Thor—
"While all this [Captain America] is happening an SS officer, Johann Schmidt (Hugo Weaving), has found a religious artefact called the Tesseract which Schmidt describes as 'the jewel of Odin’s treasure room,' linking it in with the Thor storyline."
— That's Entertainment weblog, August 14, 2011
From Wallace Stevens, "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven," Canto III—
The point of vision and desire are the same.
It is to the hero of midnight that we pray
On a hill of stones to make beau mont thereof.
Captain America opened in the United States on Friday, July 22, 2011.
Thor opened in the United States on Friday, May 6, 2011.
"There is such a thing as a tesseract." —A Wrinkle in Time
* Continued from August 30.
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Thursday, March 6, 2008
Thursday March 6, 2008
This note is prompted by the March 4 death of Richard D. Anderson, writer on geometry, President (1981-82) of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA), and member of the MAA's Icosahedron Society.
Royal Road
"The historical road
from the Platonic solids
to the finite simple groups
is well known."
— Steven H. Cullinane,
November 2000,
Symmetry from Plato to
the Four-Color Conjecture
Euclid is said to have remarked that "there is no royal road to geometry." The road to the end of the four-color conjecture may, however, be viewed as a royal road from geometry to the wasteland of mathematical recreations.* (See, for instance, Ch. VIII, "Map-Colouring Problems," in Mathematical Recreations and Essays, by W. W. Rouse Ball and H. S. M. Coxeter.) That road ended in 1976 at the AMS-MAA summer meeting in Toronto– home of H. S. M. Coxeter, a.k.a. "the king of geometry."
A different road– from Plato to the finite simple groups– is, as I noted in November 2000, well known. But new roadside attractions continue to appear. One such attraction is the role played by a Platonic solid– the icosahedron– in design theory, coding theory, and the construction of the sporadic simple group M24.
"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))
This Steiner system is closely connected to M24 and to the extended binary Golay code. Brouwer gives an elegant construction of that code (and therefore of M24):
"Let N be the adjacency matrix of the icosahedron (points: 12 vertices, adjacent: joined by an edge). Then the rows of the 12×24 matrix
— Op. cit., p. 719
Related material:
* For a road out of this wasteland, back to geometry, see The Kaleidoscope Puzzle and Reflection Groups in Finite Geometry.
Finite Geometry of
the Square and Cube
and
Jewel in the Crown
"There is a pleasantly discursive
treatment of Pontius Pilate's
unanswered question
'What is truth?'"
— H. S. M. Coxeter, 1987,
introduction to Trudeau's
"story theory" of truth
Those who prefer stories to truth
may consult the Log24 entries
of March 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.
They may also consult
the poet Rubén Darío:
… Todo lo sé por el lucero puro
que brilla en la diadema de la Muerte.
* For a road out of this wasteland, back to geometry, see The Kaleidoscope Puzzle and Reflection Groups in Finite Geometry.
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Sunday, October 14, 2007
Sunday October 14, 2007
The Dipolar God
|
"Logos and logic, crystal hypothesis,
— Wallace Stevens, |
Yesterday's meditation ("Simon's Shema") on the interpenetration of opposites continues:
Part I: The Jewel in the Lotus
"The fundamental conception of Tantric Buddhist metaphysics, namely, yuganaddha, signifies the coincidence of opposites. It is symbolized by the conjugal embrace (maithuna or kama-kala) of a god and goddess or a Buddha and his consort (signifying karuna and sunyata or upaya and prajna, respectively), also commonly depicted in Tantric Buddhist iconography as the union of vajra (diamond sceptre) and padme (lotus flower). Thus, yuganaddha essentially means the interpenetration of opposites or dipolar fusion, and is a fundamental restatement of Hua-yen theoretic structures."
— p. 148 in "Part II: A Whiteheadian Process Critique of Hua-yen Buddhism," in Process Metaphysics and Hua-Yen Buddhism: A Critical Study of Cumulative Penetration vs. Interpenetration (SUNY Series in Systematic Philosophy), by Steve Odin, State University of New York Press, 1982
Part II: The Dipolar God
And on p. 163 of Odin, op. cit., in "Part III: Theology of the Deep Unconscious: A Reconstruction of Process Theology," in the section titled "Whitehead's Dipolar God as the Collective Unconscious"–
"An effort is made to transpose Whitehead's theory of the dipolar God into the terms of the collective unconscious, so that now the dipolar God is to be comprehended not as a transcendent deity, but the deepest dimension and highest potentiality of one's own psyche."
Part III: Piled High and Deep
Odin obtained his Ph.D. degree from the Department of Philosophy at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook in 1980. (See curriculum vitae (pdf).)
For an academic review of Odin's book, see David Applebaum, Philosophy East and West, Vol. 34 (1984), pp. 107-108.
It is perhaps worth noting, in light of the final footnote of Mark D. Brimblecombe's Ph.D. thesis "Dipolarity and God" quoted yesterday, that "tantra" is said to mean "loom." For some less-academic background on the Tantric iconography Odin describes, see the webpage "Love and Passion in Tantric Buddhist Art." For a fiction combining love and passion with the word "loom" in a religious context, see Clive Barker's Weaveworld. This fiction– which is, if not "supreme" in the Wallace Stevens sense, at least entertaining– may correspond to some aspects of the deep Jungian psychological reality discussed by Odin.
Actors portraying
Arendt and Heidegger
Arendt and Heidegger
Click on image for details.
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