Omega is a Greek letter, Ω , used in
mathematics to denote a set on which
a group acts.
Monday, July 13, 2015
The Omega Cube
Monday, March 28, 2022
The Omega Oracle
"Design is how it works ." — Steve Jobs. See interality.org.
Thursday, June 11, 2015
Omega
Omega is a Greek letter, Ω , used in mathematics to denote
a set on which a group acts.
For instance, the affine group AGL(3,2) is a group of 1,344
actions on the eight elements of the vector 3-space over the
two-element Galois field GF(2), or, if you prefer, on the Galois
field Ω = GF(8).
Related fiction: The Eight , by Katherine Neville.
Related non-fiction: A remark by Werner Heisenberg
in this journal on Saturday, June 6, 2015, the eightfold cube ,
and the illustrations below —
Mathematics
The Fano plane block design |
Magic
The Deathly Hallows symbol— |
Friday, December 28, 2012
Cube Koan
From Don DeLillo's novel Point Omega — I knew what he was, or what he was supposed to be, a defense intellectual, without the usual credentials, and when I used the term it made him tense his jaw with a proud longing for the early weeks and months, before he began to understand that he was occupying an empty seat. "There were times when no map existed to match the reality we were trying to create." "What reality?" "This is something we do with every eyeblink. Human perception is a saga of created reality. But we were devising entities beyond the agreed-upon limits of recognition or interpretation. Lying is necessary. The state has to lie. There is no lie in war or in preparation for war that can't be defended. We went beyond this. We tried to create new realities overnight, careful sets of words that resemble advertising slogans in memorability and repeatability. These were words that would yield pictures eventually and then become three-dimensional. The reality stands, it walks, it squats. Except when it doesn't." He didn't smoke but his voice had a sandlike texture, maybe just raspy with age, sometimes slipping inward, becoming nearly inaudible. We sat for some time. He was slouched in the middle of the sofa, looking off toward some point in a high corner of the room. He had scotch and water in a coffee mug secured to his midsection. Finally he said, "Haiku." I nodded thoughtfully, idiotically, a slow series of gestures meant to indicate that I understood completely. "Haiku means nothing beyond what it is. A pond in summer, a leaf in the wind. It's human consciousness located in nature. It's the answer to everything in a set number of lines, a prescribed syllable count. I wanted a haiku war," he said. "I wanted a war in three lines. This was not a matter of force levels or logistics. What I wanted was a set of ideas linked to transient things. This is the soul of haiku. Bare everything to plain sight. See what's there. Things in war are transient. See what's there and then be prepared to watch it disappear." |
What's there—
This view of a die's faces 3, 6, and 5, in counter-
clockwise order (see previous post) suggests a way
of labeling the eight corners of a die (or cube):
123, 135, 142, 154, 246, 263, 365, 456.
Here opposite faces of the die sum to 7, and the
three faces meeting at each corner are listed
in counter-clockwise order. (This corresponds
to a labeling of one of MacMahon's* 30 colored cubes.)
A similar vertex-labeling may be used in describing
the automorphisms of the order-8 quaternion group.
For a more literary approach to quaternions, see
Pynchon's novel Against the Day .
* From Peter J. Cameron's weblog:
"The big name associated with this is Major MacMahon,
an associate of Hardy, Littlewood and Ramanujan,
of whom Robert Kanigel said,
His expertise lay in combinatorics, a sort of
glorified dice-throwing, and in it he had made
contributions original enough to be named
a Fellow of the Royal Society.
Glorified dice-throwing, indeed…"
Saturday, April 4, 2020
Devising Entities…
The previous post displayed a photo from November 2014.
Remarks quoted here in November 2014 —
“Before time began, there was the Cube.”
— Optimus Prime
Wednesday, October 9, 2019
Philosophical Infanticide
From Wallace Stevens —
"Reality is the beginning not the end,
Naked Alpha, not the hierophant Omega,
Of dense investiture, with luminous vassals."
— “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” VI
From The Point magazine yesterday, October 8, 2019 —
Parricide: On Irad Kimhi's Thinking and Being .
Book review by Steven Methven.
The conclusion:
"Parricide is nothing that the philosopher need fear . . . .
What sustains can be no threat. Perhaps what the
unique genesis of this extraordinary work suggests is that
the true threat to philosophy is infanticide."
This remark suggests revisiting a post from Monday —
Monday, October 7, 2019
Berlekamp Garden vs. Kinder Garten
|
Monday, October 7, 2019
Berlekamp Garden vs. Kinder Garten
Stevens's Omega and Alpha (see previous post) suggest a review.
Omega — The Berlekamp Garden. See Misère Play (April 8, 2019).
Alpha — The Kinder Garten. See Eighfold Cube.
Illustrations —
The sculpture above illustrates Klein's order-168 simple group.
So does the sculpture below.
Cube Bricks 1984 —
Sunday, August 6, 2017
Dark Tower Theology
In memory of a TV gunslinger who reportedly died Thursday, August 3, 2017 . . .
From this journal on that day (posts now tagged Dark Tower Theology) —
"The concept under review is that of the Holy Trinity.
See also, in this journal, Cube Trinity.
For a simpler Trinity model, see the three-point line …"
Thursday, August 3, 2017
Poetic Theology at the New York Times
Or: Trinity Test Site
From the New York Times Book Review of
next Sunday, August 6, 2017 —
"In a more conventional narrative sequence,
even a sequence of poems,
this interpenetration would acquire
sequence and evolution." [Link added.]
The concept under review is that of the Holy Trinity.
See also, in this journal, Cube Trinity.
For a simpler Trinity model, see the three-point line …
Saturday, July 29, 2017
MSRI Program
"The field of geometric group theory emerged from Gromov’s insight
that even mathematical objects such as groups, which are defined
completely in algebraic terms, can be profitably viewed as geometric
objects and studied with geometric techniques."
— Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, 2016:
See also some writings of Gromov from 2015-16:
- Memorandum Ergo (October 29, 2015)
- Great Circle of Mysteries (November 15, 2015)
- Quotations and Ideas (April 15, 2016)
For a simpler example than those discussed at MSRI
of both algebraic and geometric techniques applied to
the same group, see a post of May 19, 2017,
"From Algebra to Geometry." That post reviews
an earlier illustration —
For greater depth, see "Eightfold Cube" in this journal.
Thursday, April 20, 2017
Stone Logic
See also "Romancing the Omega" —
Related mathematics — Guitart in this journal —
See also Weyl + Palermo in this journal —
Friday, January 16, 2015
A versus PA
"Reality is the beginning not the end,
Naked Alpha, not the hierophant Omega,
of dense investiture, with luminous vassals."
— “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven” VI
From the series of posts tagged "Defining Form" —
The 4-point affine plane A and
the 7-point projective plane PA —
The circle-in-triangle of Yale's Figure 30b (PA ) may,
if one likes, be seen as having an occult meaning.
For the mathematical meaning of the circle in PA
see a search for "line at infinity."
A different, cubic, model of PA is perhaps more perspicuous.