Log24

Thursday, December 26, 2013

Dicey

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

For fans of Hunger Games  and Elysium —

Roberta Smith in this evening's* online New York Times

"Especially with the gap between the wealthiest
and everyone else so wide, it is dicey
for a major museum to celebrate the often frivolous
objects on which the rich spend their ever increasing
surplus income. Such a show must be beyond reproach
in every way: transparent in organization, impeccable
in exhibition design, illuminating in catalog and labeling
and, most of all, self-evidently excellent in the quality of
the objects on display."

Da capo:  "I've heard of affairs that are strictly Platonic."

* 5:08 PM ET

Tuesday, December 31, 2013

Christmas Ornaments

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:25 am

Continued from December 25

IMAGE- Count rotational symmetries by rotating facets. Illustrated with 'Plato's Dice.'

A link from Sunday afternoon to Nov. 26, 2012,
suggests a review of one of the above structures.

The Dreaming Jewels  cover at left is taken from a review
by Jo Walton at Tor.com—

"This is a book that it’s clearly been difficult
for publishers to market. The covers have been
generally pretty awful, and also very different.
I own a 1975 Corgi SF Collectors Library
paperback that I bought new for 40p in the later
seventies. It’s purple, and it has a slightly grainy
cover, and it matches my editions of The Menace
From Earth
  and A Canticle for Leibowitz .
(Dear old Corgi SF Collectors Editions with their
very seventies fonts! How I imprinted on them at
an early age!) I mention this, however, because
the (uncredited) illustration actually represents and
illustrates the book much better than any of the other
cover pictures I’ve seen. It shows a hexagon with an
attempt at facets, a man, a woman, hands, a snake,
and stars, all in shades of green. It isn’t attractive,
but it wouldn’t put off people who’d enjoy what’s inside
either."

The "hexagon with an attempt at facets" is actually
an icosahedron, as the above diagram shows.
(The geometric part of the diagram is from a Euclid webpage.)

For Plato's dream about these jewels, see his Timaeus.

Wednesday, December 25, 2013

Rotating the Facets

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

Previous post

“… her mind rotated the facts….”

Related material— hypercube rotation,* in the context
of rotational symmetries of the Platonic solids:

IMAGE- Count rotational symmetries by rotating facets. Illustrated with 'Plato's Dice.'

“I’ve heard of affairs that are strictly Platonic”

Song lyric by Leo Robin

* Footnote added on Dec. 26, 2013 —

 See Arnold Emch, “Triple and Multiple Systems, Their Geometric
Configurations and Groups
,” Trans. Amer. Math. Soc.  31 (1929),
No. 1, 25–42.

 On page 42, Emch describes the above method of rotating a
hypercube’s 8 facets (i.e., three-dimensional cubes) to count
rotational symmetries —

See also Diamond Theory in 1937.

Also on p. 42, Emch mentions work of Carmichael on a
Steiner system with the Mathieu group M11 as automorphism
group, and poses the problem of finding such systems and
groups that are larger. This may have inspired the 1931
discovery by Carmichael of the Steiner system S(5, 8, 24),
which has as automorphisms the Mathieu group M24 .

Wednesday, March 5, 2008

Wednesday March 5, 2008

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 1:09 pm
(Context: March 2-4)

For CENTRAL
Central Intelligence:

"God does not play dice."
— Paraphrase of a remark
by Albert Einstein

Another Nobel Prize winner,
Isaac Bashevis Singer

"a God who speaks in deeds,
not in words, and whose
vocabulary is the Cosmos"

From "The Escapist:
The Reality of Fantasy Games
"–

Platonic solids as Dungeons & Dragons dice
Dungeons & Dragons Dice

 

From today's New York Times:

NY Times obituaries online, March 5, 2008: Gary Gygax, Wm. F. Buckley, Kaddish ad by Hadassah

A Kaddish for Gygax:

 

 

"I was reading Durant's section on Plato, struggling to understand his theory of the ideal Forms that lay in inviolable perfection out beyond the phantasmagoria. (That was the first, and I think the last, time that I encountered that word.)"


Related material:

For more on the word
"phantasmagoria," see
Log24 on Dec. 12, 2004
and on Sept. 23, 2006.

For phantasmagoria in action,
see Dungeons & Dragons
and Singer's (and others')
Jewish fiction.

For non-phantasmagoria,
see (for instance) the Elements
of Euclid, which culminates
in the construction of the
Platonic solids illustrated above.

See also Geometry for Jews.

Sunday, February 20, 2005

Sunday February 20, 2005

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 2:20 pm

Relativity Blues

Today, February 20, is the 19th anniversary of my note The Relativity Problem in Finite Geometry.  Here is some related material.

In 1931, the Christian writer Charles Williams grappled with the theology of time, space, free will, and the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics (anticipating by many years the discussion of this topic by physicists beginning in the 1950's).

(Some pure mathematics — untainted by physics or theology — that is nevertheless related, if only by poetic analogy, to Williams's 1931 novel, Many Dimensions, is discussed in the above-mentioned note and in a generalization, Solomon's Cube.)

On the back cover of Williams's 1931 novel, the current publisher, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company of Grand Rapids, Michigan, makes the following statement:

"Replete with rich religious imagery, Many Dimensions explores the relation between predestination and free will as it depicts different human responses to redemptive transcendence."

One possible response to such statements was recently provided in some detail by a Princeton philosophy professor.  See On Bullshit, by Harry G. Frankfurt, Princeton University Press, 2005.

A more thoughtful response would take into account the following:

1. The arguments presented in favor of philosopher John Calvin, who discussed predestination, in The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought, by Marilynne Robinson

2. The physics underlying Einstein's remarks on free will, God, and dice
 
3. The physics underlying Rebecca Goldstein's novel Properties of Light and Paul Preuss's novels  Secret Passages and Broken Symmetries

4. The physics underlying the recent so-called "free will theorem" of John Conway and Simon Kochen of Princeton University

5. The recent novel Gilead, by Marilynne Robinson, which deals not with philosophy, but with lives influenced by philosophy — indirectly, by the philosophy of the aforementioned John Calvin.

From a review of Gilead by Jane Vandenburgh:  

"In The Death of Adam, Robinson shows Jean Cauvin to be the foremost prophet of humanism whose Protestant teachings against the hierarchies of the Roman church set in motion the intellectual movements that promoted widespread literacy among the middle and lower classes, led to both the American and French revolutions, and not only freed African slaves in the United States but brought about suffrage for women. It's odd then that through our culture's reverse historicism, the term 'Calvinism' has come to mean 'moralistic repression.'"

For more on what the Calvinist publishing firm Eerdmans calls "redemptive transcendence," see various July 2003 Log24.net entries.  If these entries include a fair amount of what Princeton philosophers call bullshit, let the Princeton philosophers meditate on the summary of Harvard philosophy quoted here on November 5 of last year, as well as the remarks of November 5, 2003,  and those of November 5, 2002.

From Many Dimensions (Eerdmans paperback, 1963, page 53):

"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?"

A recent answer:

Modal Theology

"We symbolize logical necessity
with the box (box.gif (75 bytes))
and logical possibility
with the diamond (diamond.gif (82 bytes))."

Keith Allen Korcz,
(Log24.net, 1/25/05)

And what do we           
   symbolize by  The image “http://www.log24.com/theory/images/Modal-diamondbox.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors. ?

"The possibilia that exist,
and out of which
the Universe arose,
are located in
     a necessary being…."

Michael Sudduth,
Notes on
God, Chance, and Necessity
by Keith Ward,
Regius Professor of Divinity
at Christ Church College, Oxford
(the home of Lewis Carroll)

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