An illustration from posts tagged Holy Field GF(3) —
See also a Log24 search for "Four Gods."
Monday, April 18, 2022
Sunday, April 17, 2022
Annals of Iconic Simplicity
The New York Times today has an obituary for
Kevin Lippert, the founder and publisher of
Princeton Architectural Press, who reportedly
died at 63 on March 29, 2022.
“'There was a space between the academic,
theory-heavy M.I.T. Press and the coffeetableism
of Rizzoli,' Mr. Lamster wrote, adding that
Princeton Architectural Press would fill the gap
with 'the voice of the young practitioner.'
Mr. Lippert championed emerging architects.
He published Steven Holl’s seminal architectural
manifesto, 'Anchoring,' in 1989, and wrote the
introduction to the book of the same name.
Mr. Holl, in a tribute to Mr. Lippert on his website,
called him 'a committed intellectual and impresario
for the culture of architecture.'”
— Katharine Q. Seelye, April 17, 2022, 2:21 p.m. ET
From the cited tribute to Lippert on Holl's website —
"An excerpt from his publisher’s foreword to Anchoring :
In its iconic simplicity, his work seems to be about
the language of architecture, not in the allusive sense
used by postmodernists nor in the paradigmatic sense
used by so-called 'deconstructivists' but at the level of
essences of tropes and morphs… He is the only
American architect of his generation to be directly
influenced by the main lines in modern philosophy and
music, that is to say, by the line leading from Husserl
through to Heidegger and by separate achievements
of Bartok and Schonberg ."
Actually, although the above "iconic simplicity" passage,
up to the ellipsis after "morphs," is from the foreword
by Lippert, the references that follow the ellipsis — to
Husserl, Heidegger, Bartok, and Schonberg — are not
from Lippert's foreword, but from the introduction by
one Kenneth Frampton —
From Google Books:
Bibliographic data —
Another architectural memorial, from the reported date of Lippert's death —
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Wednesday, January 29, 2020
The 2013 Simplicity Conference…
… is reviewed by the American Mathematical Society (AMS) in
the February 2020 issue (online Jan. 27) of the AMS Notices :
See as well Simplicity Conference in this journal.
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Tuesday, October 23, 2018
Simplicity Versus Complexity
Simplicity (Click for some complexity.)
Complexity (Click for some simplicity.)
A passage from the 2011 book Idea Man that was suggested by
a recent New Yorker article on the book's author, the late Paul Allen —
Left-click image to enlarge.
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Sunday, October 21, 2018
Monday, August 27, 2018
Geometry and Simplicity
From …
Thinking in Four Dimensions
By Dusa McDuff
"I’ve got the rather foolhardy idea of trying to explain
to you the kind of mathematics I do, and the kind of
ideas that seem simple to me. For me, the search
for simplicity is almost synonymous with the search
for structure.
I’m a geometer and topologist, which means that
I study the structure of space …
. . . .
In each dimension there is a simplest space
called Euclidean space … "
— In Roman Kossak, ed.,
Simplicity: Ideals of Practice in Mathematics and the Arts
(Kindle Locations 705-710, 735). Kindle Edition.
For some much simpler spaces of various
dimensions, see Galois Space in this journal.
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Sunday, December 11, 2016
Complexity to Simplicity via Hudson and Rosenhain*
*The Hudson of the title is the author of Kummer's Quartic Surface (1905).
The Rosenhain of the title is the author for whom Hudson's 4×4 diagrams
of "Rosenhain tetrads" are named. For the "complexity to simplicity" of
the title, see Roger Fry in the previous post.
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Complexity to Simplicity
Cézanne "showed how it was possible to pass
from the complexity of the appearance of things
to the geometrical simplicity which design demands."
— Roger Fry in the catalogue for the 1910 London
exhibition "Manet and the Post-Impressionists,"
according to …
See also A Roger Fry Reader
(edited by Christopher Reed,
University of Chicago Press, 1996).
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Saturday, July 27, 2013
Simplicity
(Continued from July 16)
From the schedule of an April 2013 philosophical conference:
Why should anyone care what Zwicky thinks?
1. Her writings. In particular, Plato as Artist .
2. Her husband. See Robert Bringhurst in this journal.
3. A reading by Zwicky and Bringhurst on March 20, 2013.
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Monday, January 26, 2026
Sunday Evening*
|
We are born with the dead: With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling
We shall not cease from exploration
Not known, because not looked for |
* A post from Dec. 3, 2023, that was saved as a draft and
apparently future-dated to today —whether by mistake or not,
I do not know — and appeared to me this (Monday) evening.
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Monday, January 5, 2026
Blackboard Jungle . . . Continues.
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Tuesday, September 9, 2025
For Cairo Sweet: Yale Review on Abstractions and Epiphanies
Excerpt —
| "But the first thing I felt when rereading Oliver’s work was frustration. Though almost uniformly straightforward and sincere, her poetry is vastly uneven in quality, demonstrating little thematic or stylistic growth over the long arc of her career. In the dullest poems, her trademark simplicity can seem like the result of lazy writing, bloated with abstractions that hurry the reader toward unearned epiphany. It wasn’t just that these poems didn’t require all my hard-won hermeneutic tools to be understood; it was that they seemed to actively thwart them, resisting my scalpel like polished stones." — Maggie Millner |
Tired of Maggie's farm?
Try Adrienne Rich on stonecutting —
|
Now, you intelligence
Be serious, because
— From the Adrienne Rich poem |
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Sunday, August 18, 2024
“Like a Kernel”
|
“The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, — Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness
“By groping toward the light we are made to realize
— Arthur Koestler, The Call Girls: A Tragi-Comedy, |
From an obituary of Alain Delon, who reportedly died today . . .
|
"He starred in the 1976 French best picture winner, 'Mr. Klein,' as a wartime German art dealer threatened by being mistaken for a Jewish man with the same name." |
See as well Felix Christian Klein in this journal.
And then there is being mistaken for a fictional archaeologist
with the same name.
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Saturday, June 15, 2024
Screwing Up a Space
Flashback to April 12, 2011 —
|
In the landscape of minimalism, John McCracken cuts a unique figure. He is often grouped with the “light and space” artists who formed the West Coast branch of the movement. Indeed, he shares interests in vivid color, new materials, and polished surfaces with fellow Californians enamored of the Kustom Kar culture. On the other hand, his signature works, the “planks” that he invented in 1966 and still makes today, have the tough simplicity and aggressive presence of New York minimalism…. “They kind of screw up a space because they lean,” McCracken has said of the planks. Their tilting, reflective surfaces activate the room, leaving the viewer uncertain of traditional boundaries. He notes that the planks bridge sculpture (identified with the floor) and painting (identified with the wall)…. His ultimate goal, as with all mystics, is unity— not just of painting and sculpture, but of substance and illusion, of matter and spirit, of art and life. Such ideas recall the utopian aspirations of early modernists like Piet Mondrian and Wassily Kandinsky. Related Art —
Unity
—Roman numeral I For a related figure, see a film review by A. O. Scott at The New York Times (September 21, 2010)— “You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger” begins with an unseen narrator— , sounding a lot like — paraphrasing . You may remember the quotation from high school English, about how life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. The observation is attributed to the playwright himself (“Shakespeare once said”), rather than to Macbeth, whose grim experience led him to such nihilism, but never mind. In context, it amounts to a perfectly superfluous statement of the obvious. If life signifies nothing, perhaps the tall dark figure above signifies something . Discuss. |
Related (if only phonetically) drama . . . Detective Cruz at Planck's Café.
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Thursday, February 29, 2024
Masonic Mojo Dojo Casa House
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Tuesday, December 12, 2023
If It’s Tuesday…
|
“The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, — Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness
“By groping toward the light we are made to realize
— Arthur Koestler, The Call Girls: A Tragi-Comedy, |
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Monday, November 27, 2023
Problems with the Process
Condensed from Peter J. Cameron's weblog today —
|
“Words that tear and strange rhymes” "In his youth, Paul Simon thought of himself as a poet . . . . And surprisingly often he describes problems with the process:
For me, things were somewhat similar. Like many people, I wrote poetry in my youth. Julian Jaynes says something like 'Poems are rafts grasped at by men drowning in inadequate minds', but I think I knew from early on that one of the main reasons was to practise my writing, so that when I had something to say I could say it clearly. When Bob Dylan renounced the over-elaborate imagery of Blonde on Blonde for the clean simplicity of John Wesley Harding, I took that as a role model. Could Simon’s experience happen in mathematics? It is possible to imagine that an important mathematical truth is expressed in 'words that tear and strange rhymes'. More worryingly, an argument written in the most elegant style could be wrong, and we may be less likely to see the mistake because the writing is so good." |
The problem with the process in this case is Cameron's misheard lyrics.
From https://www.paulsimon.com/track/kathys-song-2/ —
And a song I was writing is left undone
I don’t know why I spend my time
Writing songs I can’t believe
With words that tear and strain to rhyme
A rather different artist titled a more recent song
"Strange Rhymes Can Change Minds."
See also . . .
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Thursday, November 23, 2023
Speak, Memory: 12 Panes or 16?
"Blackboard Jungle," 1955 —
"Through the unknown, remembered gate . . . ."
A differently remembered gate —
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Wednesday, August 17, 2022
Cold Comfort Dam
"And, as with all retold tales that are in people's hearts,
there are only good and bad things and black and white
things and good and evil things and no in-between anywhere."
— John Steinbeck, author's epigraph to The Pearl
From the Season 4 finale of Westworld :
uploading Dolores's pearl at Hoover Dam —
For those who prefer greater theological simplicity . . .
Optimus Prime on a different Hoover Dam figure, that of
the AllSpark: "Before time began, there was the Cube."
Simplifying even more . . .
“A set having three members is a single thing
wholly constituted by its members but distinct from them.
After this, the theological doctrine of the Trinity as
‘three in one’ should be child’s play.”
– Max Black, Caveats and Critiques: Philosophical Essays
in Language, Logic, and Art , Cornell U. Press, 1975
As above, Black's theology forms a cube.
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Monday, April 18, 2022
A Space Between
From yesterday's post "Annals of Iconic Simplicity" —
On the founding of Princeton Architectural Press:
"'There was a space between the academic,
theory-heavy M.I.T. Press and the coffeetableism
of Rizzoli,' Mr. Lamster wrote, adding that
Princeton Architectural Press would fill the gap
with 'the voice of the young practitioner.'"
Some context —
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Tuesday, February 8, 2022
Directions Out
On reading about DNA:
"Suddenly it was clear to me
that all the beautiful complexity of life
had simplicity at its core," he says.
"This is the kind of thing mathematicians love."
— Eric Lander in "The 2004 TIME 100 — Our list
of the most influential people in the world today"
The date on the above TIME piece is Monday,
Apr. 26, 2004. Remarks in this journal on that date
are now tagged Directions Out.
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Sunday, January 2, 2022
Annals of Modernism: UR–Grid
The above New Yorker art illustrates the 2×4 structure of
an octad in the Miracle Octad Generator of R. T. Curtis.
Enthusiasts of simplicity may note how properties of this eight-cell
2×4 grid are related to those of the smaller six-cell 3×2 grid:
See Nocciolo in this journal and . . .
Further reading on the six-set – eight-set relationship:
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Wednesday, September 15, 2021
The Razor and the Touchstone
It is often good to remember that writers of headlines (and subheadlines)
are usually not the same people as the authors of the following texts.
In particular, in the above example, neither the word "touchstone" nor
the use of "enquires" to mean "enquiries" appears in the text proper.
Still, the mixed metaphor of "razor" as "touchstone" is not without interest.
See The Eightfold Cube and Modernist Cuts.
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Wednesday, September 2, 2020
Little Metal Letters
From a report of another August 14 death —
“… on Dec. 7, 1941, ‘it seemed as though everyone at Harvard
came to the Crimson building that night, and anxiously
hung over the ticker tape [i.e., teletype ] machine to watch the
little metal letters hammer out the words that told the story.'”
— Dan Huntington Fenn Jr., quoted in his Boston Globe obituary.
“Simplicity, clarity, showing the text” — The late Howell Binkley.
“To expand the words and music and dance” . . .
See Coconut Dance.
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Thursday, May 14, 2020
Art Issue*
"… the beautiful object
that stood in
for something else.”
— Holland Cotter quoting an art historian
in The New York Times on May 13
From a post of April 27, 2020 —
“The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity,
the whole meaning of which lies within the shell
of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not typical
(if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted),
and to him the meaning of an episode was not inside
like a kernel but outside….”
— Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness
The beautiful object —
Something else —
* The title is a reference to other posts now also tagged Art Issue.
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Monday, April 27, 2020
The Cracked Nut
“At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable
conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being –
the reward he seeks –the only reward he really cares about, without which
there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic,
to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life,
the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence
of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the
essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity.”
— Thomas Wolfe, Of Time and the River
“… the stabiliser of an octad preserves the affine space structure on its
complement, and (from the construction) induces AGL(4,2) on it.
(It induces A8 on the octad, the kernel of this action being the translation
group of the affine space.)”
— Peter J. Cameron,
The Geometry of the Mathieu Groups (pdf)
“The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning
of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not
typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the
meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside…."
— Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness
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Sunday, April 26, 2020
Crux
This post was suggested by a David Justice weblog post yesterday,
Coincidence and Cosmos. Some related remarks —
“The yarns of seamen have a direct simplicity, the whole meaning
of which lies within the shell of a cracked nut. But Marlow was not
typical (if his propensity to spin yarns be excepted), and to him the
meaning of an episode was not inside like a kernel but outside,
enveloping the tale which brought it out only as a glow brings out a
haze, in the likeness of one of these misty halos that sometimes
are made visible by the spectral illumination of moonshine.”
— Joseph Conrad in Heart of Darkness
“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
See as well posts now tagged Crux.
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Monday, October 7, 2019
Oblivion
(A sequel to Simplex Sigillum Veri and
Rabbit Hole Meets Memory Hole)
" Wittgenstein does not, however, relegate all that is not inside the bounds
of sense to oblivion. He makes a distinction between saying and showing
which is made to do additional crucial work. 'What can be shown cannot
be said,' that is, what cannot be formulated in sayable (sensical)
propositions can only be shown. This applies, for example, to the logical
form of the world, the pictorial form, etc., which show themselves in the
form of (contingent) propositions, in the symbolism, and in logical
propositions. Even the unsayable (metaphysical, ethical, aesthetic)
propositions of philosophy belong in this group — which Wittgenstein
finally describes as 'things that cannot be put into words. They make
themselves manifest. They are what is mystical' " (Tractatus 6.522).
— Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy , "Ludwig Wittgenstein"
|
From Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein.
(First published in Annalen der Naturphilosophie ,1921. 5.4541 The solutions of the problems of logic must be simple, since they set the standard of simplicity. Men have always had a presentiment that there must be a realm in which the answers to questions are symmetrically combined — a priori — to form a self-contained system. A realm subject to the law: Simplex sigillum veri. |
Somehow, the old Harvard seal, with its motto "Christo et Ecclesiae ,"
was deleted from a bookplate in an archived Harvard copy of Whitehead's
The Axioms of Projective Geometry (Cambridge U. Press, 1906).
In accordance with Wittgenstein's remarks above, here is a new
bookplate seal for Whitehead, based on a simplex —
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Sunday, August 4, 2019
Bright Club
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Monday, January 7, 2019
Resonant Clarity
|
Abstract for a talk at the City University of New York:
The Experience of Meaning Once the question of truth is settled, and often prior to it, what we value in a mathematical proof or conjecture is what we value in a work of lyric art: potency of meaning. An absence of clutter is a feature of such artifacts: they possess a resonant clarity that allows their meaning to break on our inner eye like light. But this absence of clutter is not tantamount to 'being simple': consider Eliot's Four Quartets or Mozart's late symphonies. Some truths are complex, and they are simplified at the cost of distortion, at the cost of ceasing to be truths. Nonetheless, it's often possible to express a complex truth in a way that precipitates a powerful experience of meaning. It is that experience we seek — not simplicity per se , but the flash of insight, the sense we've seen into the heart of things. I'll first try to say something about what is involved in such recognitions; and then something about why an absence of clutter matters to them. |
For some context, see posts tagged Artifacts.
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