A review by Robert Ghrist of a paper on aperiodic
Wang tilings suggests a search in this journal for Wang tiles.
A resulting image seems appropriate for today's posts,
which include a reference to a renowned Prada-wearer.
"She's like the wind." — Song lyric. See as well Hexagram 57.
This post was suggested by this morning's New York Times story on the missing cornerstone of St. Patrick's Cathedral and by the recent design for an official T-shirt celebrating Harvard's 375th anniversary—
In Harvard's case, the missing piece beneath the cathedral-like spire* is the VERITAS on the college shield.
Possible sources for a shield image representing VERITAS—
1. "Patrick Blackburn" in this journal, which might be combined with
2. Reflections on Kurt Gödel ** by Hao Wang, Chapter 9, "To Fit All the Parts Together"—
"The metaphor of fitting parts together readily suggests
the concrete image of solving a picture puzzle…." (p. 243)
Or the image of a Wang tiles puzzle.
A graphic image, colorful but garish, that summarizes these two sources—
Shield with matching Wang tiles
* The Lowell House bell tower
** MIT Press, first published in 1987
"I know no writing— except perhaps Henry James's introductory essays— which conveys so clearly and with such an absence of fuss the excitement of the creative artist."
— Graham Greene on A Mathematician's Apology , review in The Spectator , 20 December 1940
"The mere quality and play of an ironic consciousness in the designer left wholly alone, amid a chattering unperceiving world, with the thing he has most wanted to do, with the design more or less realised— some effectual glimpse of that might, by itself, for instance, reward one's experiment."
— Henry James, "Prefaces to the New York Edition," in The Figure in the Carpet and Other Stories, Penguin Books, 1986, with introduction and notes by Frank Kermode
"What? You've found a pattern?"
— Greg Egan, "Wang's Carpets"
See also Notes on Mathematics and Narrative, with its discussion of the tiles of the creative artist Patrick Blackburn in the recent (August 2010) Pythagorean novel The Thousand and the discussion of Wang tiles in Modal Logic, a book from November 2002 whose author also happens to be named Patrick Blackburn.
(Credit for the Greene bibliographic information is due to Janelle Robyn Humphreys, whose doctoral thesis, Shadows of Another Dimension, was published in 2009 by the University of Wollongong.)
From Devil’s Night Art Notes —
“Create the largest colour fields and win!“
The MOZAA (pronounced Mo’s-A-A ? ) game was reportedly
published on April 1, 2013. A note from this journal on that date —
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