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Friday, January 15, 2021
Sunday, April 5, 2015
Friday, April 3, 2015
For Smiley’s People
Suggested by the excellent 2010 film "The Ghost Writer"—
See also Lebrecht in this journal, Ralph Willett, and Ave Verum Corpus.
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Saturday, January 16, 2021
Nashville Death
” ‘Across the street was the New York Doll Hospital,
a toy repair shop,’ he told Lenny Kaye in an interview
for the Bob Gruen photo book New York Dolls (2008).”
See as well other posts now tagged Smiley’s Neighborhood
in honor of the novelist known as John le Carré.
The novelist’s nom de plume suggests another tourist’s tale —
“Before 1788, the French Quarter encompassed the entirety
of New Orleans. Today the ‘old square’ (Vieux Carré ), a
six by twelve block parcel of land set on the inside of a bend
in the Mississippi River, remains New Orleans’ most definitive
area.” — https://www.frenchquarter.com/sightseeing-in-the-old-square/
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Friday, January 27, 2017
In Memory of Actor John Hurt
Hurt, who reportedly died today, played a purveyor
of magic wands in the Harry Potter series and also
Control in “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.”
“In the original screenplay for the film adaptation
of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Smiley muses that
Control had once told him that Howard Staunton
was the greatest chess master Britain had ever
produced. ‘Staunton’ later turns out to be the name
that Control used for the rental of his flat.”
— Wikipedia, Control (fictional character)
Related images —
Happy Chinese New Year.
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Tuesday, February 23, 2016
Award
An interview in Smashpipe today
deserves a Smiley award.
Related material: "Paul Winchell" in this journal.
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Saturday, November 14, 2015
Space Program
A quote that appeared here on April 14, 2013 —
"I know what 'nothing' means." — Joan Didion
Dirac on the 4×4 matrices of an underlying nothingness —
"Corresponding to the four rows and columns,
the wave function ψ must contain a variable
that takes on four values, in order that the matrices
shall be capable of being multiplied into it."
— P. A. M. Dirac, Principles of Quantum Mechanics,
Fourth Edition, Oxford University Press, 1958,
page 257
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Tuesday, July 7, 2015
Thursday, May 14, 2015
Imperial Symbology
See Found Symbol in this journal.
See also the Imperial College theorem symbol
and a page from Imperial College about
group actions on a space Ω —
For Han Solo, some less imperial symbology —
Detail of a CKEditor plugin screenshot:
horizontal line, smiley, special characters,
and iframe area.
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Tuesday, December 2, 2008
Tuesday December 2, 2008
Smiley
| A Penny for My Thoughts? by Maureen Dowd “If an online newspaper in Pasadena, Calif., can outsource coverage to India, I wonder how long can it be before some guy in Bangalore is writing my column….” — New York Times teaser for a column of Sunday, November 30, 2008 (St. Andrew’s Day) |
| DH News Service, Bangalore, Tuesday, Dec. 2, 2008:
“Monday evening had a pleasant surprise in store for sky-watchers as the night sky sported a smiley, in the form of a crescent moon flanked by two bright planets Jupiter and Venus…” |
Meanwhile, at National Geographic:
Jupiter, Venus, Moon Make “Frown”
A Midrash for Maureen:
Related material on Pasadena:
Happy birthday, R. P. Dilworth.
Related material on India:
The Shining of May 29 (2002) and
A Well-Known Theorem (2005).
“Sometimes a line of mathematical research extending through decades can be thought of as one long conversation in which many mathematicians take part. This is fortunately true at present….”
— Barry Mazur in 2000 as quoted today at the University of St. Andrews
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Tuesday, October 22, 2002
Tuesday October 22, 2002
Introduction to
Harmonic Analysis
From Dr. Mac’s Cultural Calendar for Oct. 22:
- The French actress Catherine Deneuve was born on this day in Paris in 1943….
- The Beach Boys released the single “Good Vibrations” on this day in 1966.
 |
“I hear the sound of a On the wind that lifts — The Beach Boys |
In honor of Deneuve and of George W. Mackey, author of the classic 156-page essay, “Harmonic analysis* as the exploitation of symmetry† — A historical survey” (Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society (New Series), Vol. 3, No. 1, Part 1 (July 1980), pp. 543-698), this site’s music is, for the time being, “Good Vibrations.”
For more on harmonic analysis, see “Group Representations and Harmonic Analysis from Euler to Langlands,” by Anthony W. Knapp, Part I and Part II.
* For “the simplest non-trivial model for harmonic analysis,” the Walsh functions, see F. Schipp et. al., Walsh Series: An Introduction to Dyadic Harmonic Analysis, Hilger, 1990. For Mackey’s “exploitation of symmetry” in this context, see my note Symmetry of Walsh Functions, and also the footnote below.
† “Now, it is no easy business defining what one means by the term conceptual…. I think we can say that the conceptual is usually expressible in terms of broad principles. A nice example of this comes in form of harmonic analysis, which is based on the idea, whose scope has been shown by George Mackey… to be immense, that many kinds of entity become easier to handle by decomposing them into components belonging to spaces invariant under specified symmetries.”
— The importance of mathematical conceptualisation,
by David Corfield, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge
by David Corfield, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge