Log24

Friday, August 26, 2016

Wolfe vs. Chomsky

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:00 am

1.  Tom Wolfe has a new book on Chomsky, "The Kingdom of Speech."

2.  This suggests a review of a post of Aug. 11, 2014, Syntactic/Symplectic.

To paraphrase Wittgenstein, sentence 1 above is about "correlating in real life"
(cf. Crooked House and Wolfe's From Bauhaus to Our House ), and may be 
compared to sentence 2 above, which links to a sort of "correlating in
mathematics" that is a particular example of the more general sort of
mathematical correlating mentioned by Wittgenstein in 1939.

Thursday, October 19, 2017

Design Grammar***

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 10:22 pm

The elementary shapes at the top of the figure below mirror
the looking-glass property  of the classical Lo Shu square.

The nine shapes at top left* and their looking-glass reflection
illustrate the looking-glass reflection relating two orthogonal
Latin squares over the three digits of modulo-three arithmetic.

Combining these two orthogonal Latin squares,** we have a
representation in base three of the numbers from 0 to 8.

Adding 1 to each of these numbers yields the Lo Shu square.

Mirror symmetry of the ninefold Lo Shu magic square

* The array at top left is from the cover of
Wonder Years:
Werkplaats Typografie 1998-2008
.

** A well-known construction.

*** For other instances of what might be
called "design grammar" in combinatorics,
see a slide presentation by Robin Wilson.
No reference to the work of Chomsky is
intended.

Wednesday, November 30, 2016

Language Game

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

Monday, September 12, 2016

The Kummer Lattice

The previous post quoted Tom Wolfe on Chomsky's use of
the word "array." 

An example of particular interest is the 4×4  array
(whether of dots or of unit squares) —

      .

Some context for the 4×4 array —

The following definition indicates that the 4×4 array, when
suitably coordinatized, underlies the Kummer lattice .

Further background on the Kummer lattice:

Alice Garbagnati and Alessandra Sarti, 
"Kummer Surfaces and K3 surfaces
with $(Z/2Z)^4$ symplectic action." 
To appear in Rocky Mountain J. Math.

The above article is written from the viewpoint of traditional
algebraic geometry. For a less traditional view of the underlying
affine 4-space from finite  geometry, see the website
Finite Geometry of the Square and Cube.

Some further context

"To our knowledge, the relation of the Golay code
to the Kummer lattice is a new observation."

— Anne Taormina and Katrin Wendland,
"The overarching finite symmetry group of
Kummer surfaces in the Mathieu group M24 
"

As noted earlier, Taormina and Wendland seem not to be aware of
R. W. H. T. Hudson's use of the (uncoordinatized*) 4×4 array in his
1905 book Kummer's Quartic Surface.  The array was coordinatized,
i.e. given a "vector space structure," by Cullinane eight years prior to
the cited remarks of Curtis.

* Update of Sept. 14: "Uncoordinatized," but parametrized  by 0 and
the 15 two-subsets of a six-set. See the post of Sept. 13.

The Kingdom of Arrays

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:07 am

Chomsky and arrays, from Tom Wolfe's 'The Kingdom of Speech'

See also Array  in this journal.

Thursday, September 1, 2016

Bedtime Story

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:00 am

For midnight retirees —

See also Leibniz medal in this journal.

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