Log24

From the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, Jan. 26, 2005:

What is known about unit cubes
by Chuanming Zong, Peking University

Abstract: Unit cubes, from any point of view, are among the simplest and the most important objects in n-dimensional Euclidean space. In fact, as one will see from this survey, they are not simple at all….

From Log24, now:

What is known about the 4×4×4 cube
by Steven H. Cullinane, unaffiliated

Abstract: The 4×4×4 cube, from one point of view, is among the simplest and the most important objects in n-dimensional binary space. In fact, as one will see from the links below, it is not simple at all.

Solomon’s Cube

The Klein Correspondence, Penrose Space-Time, and a Finite Model

Non-Euclidean Blocks

Geometry of the I Ching

Related material:

Monday’s entry Just Say NO and a poem by Stevens,

“The Well Dressed Man with a Beard.”

"… Lincoln Plaza Cinemas, the Juilliard String Quartet,
and the Strand Book Store remained  oases
for cultural and intellectual stimulation."

— John S. Friedman in The Forward , Jan. 21, 2018

Read more: 

https://forward.com/culture/392483/
how-fred-bass-dan-talbot-robert-mann
-shaped-new-york-culture/

From  the Oasis  in Steven Spielberg's "Ready Player One" (2018) —

I prefer, from a Log24 search for Flux Capacitor …

From "Raiders of the Lost Images" —

"The cube shape of the lost Mother Box,
also known as the Change Engine,
is shared by the Stone in a novel by
Charles Williams, Many Dimensions .
See the Solomon's Cube webpage."

The above title was suggested by a film trailer quoted here Saturday —

" Jeremy Irons' dry Alfred Pennyworth:
'One misses the days when one's biggest concerns
were exploding wind-up penguins.' "

"Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition" describes, among other books,
an edition of the I Ching  published on December 1, 2015.

Excerpt from this journal on that date —

Related material —

Or:  Y  for Yale  continued

See also Transformers in this journal and Y for Yale.

Transformations acting on Solomon's Cube
furnish a model of poetic order.

Some backstory for Hollywood —

See Hanks + Cube in this journal … For instance …

The Log24 version  (Nov. 9, 2005, and later posts) —

The Warner Brothers version —

The Paramount version —

See also related material in the previous post, Transformers.

A note related to the diamond theorem and to the site
Finite Geometry of the Square and Cube —

The last link in the previous post leads to a post of last October whose
final link leads, in turn, to a 2009 post titled Summa Mythologica .

Some may view the above web page as illustrating the
Glasperlenspiel  passage quoted here in Summa Mythologica —

“"I suddenly realized that in the language, or at any rate
in the spirit of the Glass Bead Game, everything actually
was all-meaningful, that every symbol and combination of
symbols led not hither and yon, not to single examples,
experiments, and proofs, but into the center, the mystery
and innermost heart of the world, into primal knowledge.
Every transition from major to minor in a sonata, every
transformation of a myth or a religious cult, every classical
or artistic formulation was, I realized in that flashing moment,
if seen with a truly meditative mind, nothing but a direct route
into the interior of the cosmic mystery, where in the alternation
between inhaling and exhaling, between heaven and earth,
between Yin and Yang, holiness is forever being created.”

A less poetic meditation on the above web page* —

"I saw that in the alternation between front and back,
between top and bottom, between left and right,
symmetry is forever being created."

Update of Sept. 5, 2016 — See also a related remark
by Lévi-Strauss in 1955: "…three different readings
become possible: left to right, top to bottom, front 
to back."

* For the underlying mathematics, see a June 21, 1983, research note. 

Click image to search Log24
for Solomon + Stone.

For Poetry Month

From the home page of Alexandre Borovik:

Book in progress: Shadows of the Truth

This book (to be published soon) can be viewed
as a sequel to Mathematics under the Microscope ,
but with focus shifted on mathematics as it was
experienced by children (well, by children who
became mathematicians). The cover is designed
by Edmund Harriss.

See also Harriss's weblog post of Dec. 27, 2008, on the death
of Harold Pinter: "The Search for the Truth Can Never Stop."

This suggests a review of my own post of Dec. 3, 2012,
"The Revisiting." A figure from that post:

For Ursula K. Le Guin

“For me it is a sign that we have fundamentally different
conceptions of the work of the intelligence services.”

— Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel in
theguardian.com, Saturday, 12 July 2014, 14.32 EDT

Another sort of service, thanks to Dan Brown and Tom Hanks:

See Cube Symbology.

“Da hats ein Eck“ 

“The About page contains detailed descriptions of the project….”

— The Illustris project on constructing a model of the universe

For the mathematics of a simpler traditional Chinese model
of everything, see

• Geometry of the I Ching ,
• Solomon’s Cube, and the
• Diamond Space about  page.

…. and John Golding, an authority on Cubism who "courted abstraction"—

"Adam in Eden was the father of Descartes." — Wallace Stevens

Fictional symbologist Robert Langdon and a cube—

From a Log24 post, "Eightfold Cube Revisited,"
on the date of Golding's death—

A related quotation—

"… quaternions provide a useful paradigm
  for studying the phenomenon of 'triality.'"

  — David A. Richter's webpage Zometool Triality

See also quaternions in another Log24 post
from the date of Golding's death— Easter Act.

For Alyssa Milano —

The Forking

(Click here for cheesy Neil Diamond background music.)

For some related philosophical remarks, see Deconstructing Alice

and the new Pythagorean thriller The Thousand.

(Continued from April 23, 2009, and February 13, 2010.)

Paul Valéry as quoted in yesterday’s post:

“The S[elf] is invariant, origin, locus or field, it’s a functional property of consciousness” (Cahiers, 15:170 [2: 315])

The geometric example discussed here yesterday as a Self symbol may seem too small to be really impressive. Here is a larger example from the Chinese, rather than European, tradition. It may be regarded as a way of representing the Galois field GF(64). (“Field” is a rather ambiguous term; here it does not, of course, mean what it did in the Valéry quotation.)

From Geometry of the I Ching—

The above 64 hexagrams may also be regarded as
the finite affine space AG(6,2)— a larger version
of the finite affine space AG(4,2) in yesterday’s post.
That smaller space has a group of 322,560 symmetries.
The larger hexagram  space has a group of
1,290,157,424,640 affine symmetries.

From a paper on GL(6,2), the symmetry group
of the corresponding projective  space PG(5,2),*
which has 1/64 as many symmetries—

(Click to enlarge.)

For some narrative in the European  tradition
related to this geometry, see Solomon’s Cube.

* Update of July 29, 2011: The “PG(5,2)” above is a correction from an earlier error.

For Alyssa

 An Old Magic Symbol

… and for Dan Brown —

Symbology

Yesterday's Times —

Today's Times —

   Annals of Deconstruction —

Click on image for background.

Related material
   for Baron Samedi —

The Found Symbol

Public Space

“… the Danish cartoons crisis last March showed ‘two world views colliding in public space with no common point of reference.'”

— George Carey, Archbishop of Canterbury from 1991 to 2002, quoted in today’s London Times.

Related material:

Geometry and Christianity
   (Google search yielding
    “about 1,540,000” results)

Geometry and Islam
   (Google search yielding
    “about 1,580,000” results)

MySpace.com/affine

A Public Space

— Motto of 
Plato’s Academy

Background from
Log24 on Feb. 15, 2006:
  

If we replace the Chinese word “I” (change, transformation) with the word “permutation,” the relevance of Western mathematics (which some might call “the Logos“) to the I Ching (“Changes Classic”) beomes apparent. Related material:     Hitler’s Still Point,   Jung’s Imago,    Solomon’s Cube,   Geometry of the I Ching,  and Globe Award.

For the relevance of Plato to
Islam, see David Wade’s
Pattern in Islamic Art
and a Google search on
Plato and Islam
(“about 1,680,000” results).

“We should let ourselves be guided by what is common to all. Yet although the Logos is common to all, most men live as if each had a private intelligence of his own.”

— Heraclitus of Ephesus, about 500 B.C.

And now, from
the author of Sphere…

He beomes aware of something else… some other presence.
“Anybody here?” he says.
I am here.
He almost jumps, it is so loud. Or it seems loud. Then he wonders if he has heard anything at all.
“Did you speak?”
No.
How are we communicating? he wonders.
The way everything communicates with everything else.
Which way is that?
Why do you ask if you already know the answer?

— Sphere, by Michael Crichton, Harvard ’64

“… when I went to Princeton things were completely different. This chapel, for instance– I remember when it was just a clearing, cordoned off with sharp sticks.  Prayer was compulsory back then, and you couldn’t just fake it by moving your lips; you had to know the words, and really mean them.  I’m dating myself, but this was before Jesus Christ.”

— Baccalaureate address at Princeton, Pentecost 2006, reprinted in The New Yorker, edited by David Remnick, Princeton ’81

My Space

“… we have condensed six dimensions into four, then we either work by analogy into six, or we have to use math that apparently nobody but Jake and my cousin Ed understands. Unless you can think of some way to project six dimensions into three– you seem to be smart at such projections.”
I closed my eyes and thought hard. “Zebbie, I don’t think it can be done. Maybe Escher could have done it.”

The above screenshot shows a
moveable JavaScript display
of a space of six dimensions
(over the 2-element field).

(To see how the display works,
try the Kaleidoscope Puzzle first.)

“I laugh because I dare not cry.
This is a crazy world and
the only way to enjoy it
is to treat it as a joke.”

— Robert A. Heinlein,
The Number of the Beast

And so…

Compare and contrast:

Solomon’s Cube, the five
Log24 entries ending on 3/14,
and the
American Mathematical Society
on Mathematical Imagery.

Related material:

A more extensive excerpt from
The Number of the Beast, and

Story Theory and
the Number of the Beast.

Finitegeometry.org Update

(Revised May 21, 2006)

Finitegeometry.org now has permutable JavaScript views of the 2x2x2 and 4x4x4 design cubes.  Solomon’s Cube presented a claim that the 4x4x4 design cube retains symmetry under a group of about 1.3 trillion transformations.  The JavaScript version at finitegeometry.org/sc/64/view/ lets the reader visually verify this claim.  The reader should first try the Diamond 16 Puzzle.  The simpler 2x2x2 design cube, with its 1,344 transformations, was described in Diamonds and Whirls; the permutable JavaScript version is at finitegeometry.org/sc/8/view/.

In memory of Humphrey Carpenter, author of The Inklings, who attended The Dragon School.  Carpenter died a year ago today.

“Lewis began with a number of haunted images….”

“The best of the books are the ones… where the allegory is at a minimum and the images just flow.”

“‘Everything began with images,’ Lewis wrote….”

From Paul Preuss,
Broken Symmetries
(see previous entry):

“Mathematical relationships were enough to satisfy him, mere formal relationships which existed at all times, everywhere, at once.  It was a thin nectar, but he was convinced it was the nectar of the gods….”

From
Verbum Sat Sapienti?

Escher’s Verbum

Solomon’s Cube

Geometry of the I Ching