Log24

Friday, March 26, 2021

Sex Textiles: Introduction to Symplectic* Finite Geometry

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 11:13 pm

'The Eddington Song'

Another concept from The New York Times  today: intertwining

“The historical achievements and experiences of women and men
are like the intertwined warp and weft threads of a woven fabric.”

— Virginia Postrel in a NY Times  opinion piece today.

From Postrel’s Web page

* See (for instance) A Picture Show for Quanta Magazine.

Sunday, August 2, 2015

Symplectic

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 7:00 am

See "Symplectic" in this journal.  Some illustrations —

 

Midrash —

"Adorned with cryptic stones and sliding shines,
An immaculate personage in nothingness,
With the whole spirit sparkling in its cloth,

Generations of the imagination piled
In the manner of its stitchings, of its thread,
In the weaving round the wonder of its need,

And the first flowers upon it, an alphabet
By which to spell out holy doom and end,
A bee for the remembering of happiness."

— Wallace Stevens, "The Owl in the Sarcophagus"

Friday, January 23, 2015

Complex Symplectic Fantasy

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:08 pm

"We are not isolated free chosers,
monarchs of all we survey, but
benighted creatures sunk in a reality
whose nature we are constantly and
overwhelmingly tempted to deform
by fantasy."

—Iris Murdoch, "Against Dryness"
in Encounter , p. 20 of issue 88 
(vol. 16 no. 1, January 1961, pp. 16-20)

"We need to turn our attention away from the consoling
dream necessity of Romanticism, away from the dry
symbol, the bogus individual, the false whole, towards
the real impenetrable human person."

— Iris Murdoch, 1961

"Impenetrability!  That's what I  say!"

Humpty Dumpty, 1871

Friday, November 14, 2014

Some Symplectic History

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 1:28 am

A paper from 1976 on symplectic torsors  and finite geometry:

IMAGE- Saavedra-Rivano, 'Finite Geometries in the Theory of Theta Characteristics' (1976)

A pdf is now available:

FINITE GEOMETRIES IN THE THEORY OF THETA CHARACTERISTICS
Autor(en): Rivano, Neantro Saavedra
Objekttyp: Article
Zeitschrift: L’Enseignement Mathématique
Band (Jahr): 22 (1976)
Heft 1-2: L’ENSEIGNEMENT MATHÉMATIQUE
PDF erstellt am: 14.11.2014
Persistenter Link: http://dx.doi.org/10.5169/seals-48185

(Received by the journal on February 20, 1976.)

Saavedra-Rivano was a student of Grothendieck, who reportedly died yesterday.

Saturday, September 20, 2014

Symplectic Structure

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 11:30 am

(Continued)

The fictional zero theorem  of Terry Gilliam's current film
by that name should not be confused with the zero system
underlying the diamond theorem.

Sunday, August 24, 2014

Symplectic Structure…

In the Miracle Octad Generator (MOG):

The above details from a one-page note of April 26, 1986, refer to the
Miracle Octad Generator of R. T. Curtis, as it was published in 1976:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10A/100514-Curtis1976MOG.jpg

From R. T. Curtis (1976). A new combinatorial approach to M24,
Mathematical Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society ,
79, pp 25-42. doi:10.1017/S0305004100052075.

The 1986 note assumed that the reader would be able to supply, from the
MOG itself, the missing top row of each heavy brick.

Note that the interchange of the two squares in the top row of each
heavy brick induces the diamond-theorem correlation.

Note also that the 20 pictured 3-subsets of a 6-set in the 1986 note
occur as paired complements  in two pictures, each showing 10 of the
3-subsets.

This pair of pictures corresponds to the 20 Rosenhain tetrads  among
the 35 lines of PG(3,2), while the picture showing the 2-subsets
corresponds to the 15 Göpel tetrads  among the 35 lines.

See Rosenhain and Göpel tetrads in PG(3,2). Some further background:

Wednesday, August 13, 2014

Symplectic Structure continued

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

Some background for the part of the 2002 paper by Dolgachev and Keum
quoted here on January 17, 2014 —

Related material in this journal (click image for posts) —

Monday, August 11, 2014

Syntactic/Symplectic

(Continued from August 9, 2014.)

Syntactic:

Symplectic:

"Visual forms— lines, colors, proportions, etc.— are just as capable of
articulation , i.e. of complex combination, as words. But the laws that govern
this sort of articulation are altogether different from the laws of syntax that
govern language. The most radical difference is that visual forms are not
discursive 
. They do not present their constituents successively, but
simultaneously, so the relations determining a visual structure are grasped
in one act of vision."

– Susanne K. LangerPhilosophy in a New Key

For examples, see The Diamond-Theorem Correlation
in Rosenhain and Göpel Tetrads in PG(3,2).

This is a symplectic  correlation,* constructed using the following
visual structure:

IMAGE- A symplectic structure -- i.e. a structure that is symplectic (meaning plaited or woven).

* Defined in (for instance) Paul B. Yale, Geometry and Symmetry ,
Holden-Day, 1968, sections 6.9 and 6.10.

Saturday, August 9, 2014

Syntactic/Symplectic

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 3:00 pm

Syntactic  Structure —

See the Lightfoot of today’s previous post:

Symplectic  Structure —

See the plaited, or woven, structure of  August 6:

IMAGE- A symplectic structure -- i.e. a structure that is symplectic (meaning plaited or woven).

See also Deep  Structure  (Dec. 9, 2012).

Wednesday, August 6, 2014

Symplectic Structure*

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 1:00 pm

From Gotay and Isenberg, "The Symplectization of Science,"
Gazette des Mathématiciens  54, 59-79 (1992):

"… what is the origin of the unusual name 'symplectic'? ….
Its mathematical usage is due to Hermann Weyl who,
in an effort to avoid a certain semantic confusion, renamed
the then obscure 'line complex group' the 'symplectic group.'
… the adjective 'symplectic' means 'plaited together' or 'woven.'
This is wonderfully apt…."

IMAGE- A symplectic structure -- i.e. a structure that is symplectic (meaning plaited or woven)

The above symplectic  structure** now appears in the figure
illustrating the diamond-theorem correlation in the webpage
Rosenhain and Göpel Tetrads in PG(3,2).

Some related passages from the literature:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/100915-SteinbergOnChevalleyGroups.jpg

* The title is a deliberate abuse of language .
For the real definition of "symplectic structure," see (for instance)
"Symplectic Geometry," by Ana Cannas da Silva (article written for
Handbook of Differential Geometry, vol 2.) To establish that the
above figure is indeed symplectic , see the post Zero System of
July 31, 2014.

** See Steven H. Cullinane, Inscapes III, 1986

Saturday, August 26, 2023

Jing

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:40 am

The previous post suggests a reading:

"The Chinese word for 'sacred texts' is jing  經, a character
having its etymological origin in textiles. The first meaning
of this character denotes the fixed lead thread or warp of cloth,
insofar as the weft threads are woven into warp threads to
make a fabric. Its extended meaning referes to authority,
orthodoxy, and the essential way toward truth and principle." 

— Page 497, Yanrong Chen,  "Christian Biblical Tradition in 
the Jing Chinese Culture," Oxford Handbook of the Bible 
in China
, edited by K. K. Yeo, Oxford U. Press, 2021.

See as well the non-Chinese word "symplectic" in this  journal.

Wednesday, August 9, 2023

The Junction Function

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:27 pm

A function (in this case, a 1-to-1 correspondence) from finite geometry:

IMAGE- The natural symplectic polarity in PG(3,2), illustrating a symplectic structure

This correspondence between points and hyperplanes underlies
the symmetries discussed in the Cullinane diamond theorem.

Academics who prefer cartoon graveyards may consult …

Cohn, N. (2014). Narrative conjunction’s junction function:
A theoretical model of “additive” inference in visual narratives. 
Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science
Society
, 36. See https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2050s18m .

Thursday, June 15, 2023

Michaelmas 2019

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:06 pm

Transcribed from a PDF:

Received September 29, 2019, accepted October 15, 2019,
date of publication October 24, 2019, date of current version
November 7, 2019.

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/ACCESS.2019.2949310

A Method for Determining
the Affine Equivalence of Boolean Functions

ZIYU WANG1 , XIAO ZENG1 , JINZHAO WU2,3, AND
GUOWU YANG1

1Big Data Research Center, School of Computer Science
and Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology
of China, Chengdu 611731, China

2Guangxi Key Laboratory of Hybrid Computation and
IC Design Analysis, Guangxi University for Nationalities,
Nanning 530006, China

3School of Computer and Electronic Information,
Guangxi University, Nanning 530004, China

Corresponding authors:
Jinzhao Wu (gxmdwjzh@aliyun.com) and
Guowu Yang (ygwuestc@163.com)

This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation
of China under Grant 61772006 and Grant 61572109, in part by the
State Key Laboratory of Information Security, Institute of Information Engineering, 
Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, in part by the Science and Technology
Program of Guangxi  under Grant AB17129012, in part by the Science and
Technology Major Project of Guangxi under Grant AA17204096, in part by 
the Special Fund for Scientific and Technological Bases and Talents
of Guangxi under Grant 2016AD05050, and in part by the Special Fund for
Bagui Scholars of Guangxi, in part by the Open fund of State Key Laboratory 
of Information Security.

ABSTRACT 
Determining the affine equivalence of Boolean functions
has significant applications in circuit and cryptography.
Previous methods for determining this require a large
amount of computation when Boolean functions are bent
functions or when the truth table is sparse. This paper
presents a new method to determine the affine equivalence
based on matrix algebra. By transforming Boolean function
to the corresponding matrix representation, we first propose
and prove the congruent standard form of Boolean function.
It lays the foundation for the determination of equivalence
because affine Boolean functions must have the same
standard form. Then we find the generators of orthogonal
matrix group and symplectic matrix group, which greatly
reduce the search space. The computation complexity of
our method is o (2r2/2+n∗(nr) ), where is the number of
bit operations, and r  is the rank of the matrix, which is
the product of Boolean-1 matrix of the test Boolean function
and its transposition. The experimental results show that our
method is useful when the test Boolean function is no more
than 7 bits and r  is greater than 2.

INDEX TERMS  Logic synthesis, Boolean functions,
affine equivalence, matrix group, algorithm.

Meanwhile . . .

Sunday, September 4, 2022

Dice and the Eightfold Cube

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 4:47 pm

At Hiroshima on March 9, 2018, Aitchison discussed another 
"hexagonal array" with two added points… not at the center, but
rather at the ends  of a cube's diagonal axis of symmetry.

See some related illustrations below. 

Fans of the fictional "Transfiguration College" in the play
"Heroes of the Fourth Turning" may recall that August 6,
another Hiroshima date, was the Feast of the Transfiguration.

Iain Aitchison's 'dice-labelled' cuboctahedron at Hiroshima, March 2018

The exceptional role of  0 and  in Aitchison's diagram is echoed
by the occurence of these symbols in the "knight" labeling of a 
Miracle Octad Generator octad —

Transposition of  0 and  in the knight coordinatization 
induces the symplectic polarity of PG(3,2) discussed by 
(for instance) Anne Duncan in 1968.

Friday, September 2, 2022

History of Mathematics

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:54 pm

Anne Duncan in 1968 on a 1960 paper by Robert Steinberg —


_______________________________________________________________________________

Related remarks in this  journal — Steinberg + Chevalley.

Related illustrations in this journal — 4×4.

Related biographical remarksSteinberg Deathdate.

Tuesday, November 16, 2021

Wrap Party

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:23 am

Art Date:

"The serpent's eyes shine
As he wraps around the vine"
— Don Henley, The Garden of Allah

Thursday, July 30, 2020

A Picture Show for Quanta Magazine

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 8:33 am

An article yesterday at Quanta Magazine  suggests a review . . .

From Diamond Theorem  images at Pinterest —

Some background —

Wednesday, January 15, 2020

Paradigm Shift

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:33 pm

Sheehan, 'Making Sense of Heidegger,' p. 39

Illustration, from a search in this journal for “Symplectic” —

IMAGE- A symplectic structure -- i.e. a structure that is symplectic (meaning plaited or woven).

Some background:  Rift-design  in this journal and

Tuesday, January 7, 2020

Invisible Weaving

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 10:13 am

See as well a post from this journal on the above date
June 12, 2014. (That post revisits a post from today's  date —
January 7 — eight years ago, in 2012.)

Related material:  Dharma Fabric and Symplectic.

Wednesday, September 25, 2019

Before Personalities …

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 6:10 pm

Tuesday, April 23, 2019

Critical Invisibility

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , , — m759 @ 11:00 pm

From Gotay and Isenberg, "The Symplectization of Science,"
Gazette des Mathématiciens  54, 59-79 (1992):

" what is the origin of the unusual name 'symplectic'? ….
Its mathematical usage is due to Hermann Weyl who,
in an effort to avoid a certain semantic confusion, renamed
the then obscure 'line complex group' the 'symplectic group.'
… the adjective 'symplectic' means 'plaited together' or 'woven.'
This is wonderfully apt…."

On "The Emperor's New Clothes" —

Andersen’s weavers, as one commentator points out, are merely insisting that “the value of their labor be recognized apart from its material embodiment.” The invisible cloth they weave may never manifest itself in material terms, but the description of its beauty (“as light as spiderwebs” and “exquisite”) turns it into one of the many wondrous objects found in Andersen’s fairy tales. It is that cloth that captivates us, making us do the imaginative work of seeing something beautiful even when it has no material reality. Deeply resonant with meaning and of rare aesthetic beauty—even if they never become real—the cloth and other wondrous objets d’art have attained a certain degree of critical invisibility.

—  Maria Tatar, The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen  (W. W. Norton & Company, 2007). Kindle Edition. 

Tuesday, February 26, 2019

Citation

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

Some related material in this journal — See a search for k6.gif.

Some related material from Harvard —

Elkies's  "15 simple transpositions" clearly correspond to the 15 edges of
the complete graph K6 and to the 15  2-subsets of a 6-set.

For the connection to PG(3,2), see Finite Geometry of the Square and Cube.

The following "manifestation" of the 2-subsets of a 6-set might serve as
the desired Wikipedia citation —

See also the above 1986 construction of PG(3,2) from a 6-set
in the work of other authors in 1994 and 2002 . . .

IMAGE- Dolgachev and Keum, coordinatization of the 4x4 array in 'Birational Automorphisms of Quartic Hessian Surfaces,' AMS Transactions, 2002

Tuesday, June 19, 2018

Death on Father’s Day

Filed under: General — m759 @ 8:45 pm

From the University of Notre Dame in an obituary dated June 17

Timothy O’Meara, provost emeritus, Kenna Professor of Mathematics Emeritus and Trustee Emeritus at the University of Notre Dame, died June 17. He was 90.

A member of the Notre Dame faculty since 1962, O’Meara twice served as chairman of the University’s mathematics department and served as its first lay provost from 1978 to 1996.
. . . .         

He was graduated from the University of Cape Town in 1947 and earned a master’s degree in mathematics there the following year.  Earning his doctoral degree from Princeton University in 1953, he taught at the University of Otago in New Zealand from 1954 to 1956 before returning to Princeton where he served on the mathematics faculty and as a member of the Institute for Advanced Study for the next six years.  
. . . .

In addition to his mathematical teaching and scholarship, he published magisterial works, including “Introduction to Quadratic Forms,” “Lectures on Linear Groups,” “Symplectic Groups” and “The Classical Groups and K-Theory,” co-authored with Alexander J. Hahn, professor of mathematics emeritus at Notre Dame and a former O’Meara doctoral student.
. . . .

Related material (update of 9:20 PM ET on June 19) —

Sunday, December 10, 2017

Geometry

Google search result for Plato + Statesman + interlacing + interweaving

See also Symplectic in this journal.

From Gotay and Isenberg, “The Symplectization of Science,”
Gazette des Mathématiciens  54, 59-79 (1992):

“… what is the origin of the unusual name ‘symplectic’? ….
Its mathematical usage is due to Hermann Weyl who,
in an effort to avoid a certain semantic confusion, renamed
the then obscure ‘line complex group’ the ‘symplectic group.’
… the adjective ‘symplectic’ means ‘plaited together’ or ‘woven.’
This is wonderfully apt….”

IMAGE- A symplectic structure -- i.e. a structure that is symplectic (meaning plaited or woven)

The above symplectic  figure appears in remarks on
the diamond-theorem correlation in the webpage
Rosenhain and Göpel Tetrads in PG(3,2). See also
related remarks on the notion of  linear  (or line ) complex
in the finite projective space PG(3,2) —

Anticommuting Dirac matrices as spreads of projective lines

Ron Shaw on the 15 lines of the classical generalized quadrangle W(2), a general linear complex in PG(3,2)

Friday, April 14, 2017

Hudson and Finite Geometry

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 3:00 am

IMAGE- Geometry of the Six-Set, Steven H. Cullinane, April 23, 2013

The above four-element sets of black subsquares of a 4×4 square array 
are 15 of the 60 Göpel tetrads , and 20 of the 80 Rosenhain tetrads , defined
by R. W. H. T. Hudson in his 1905 classic Kummer's Quartic Surface .

Hudson did not  view these 35 tetrads as planes through the origin in a finite
affine 4-space (or, equivalently, as lines in the corresponding finite projective
3-space).

In order to view them in this way, one can view the tetrads as derived,
via the 15 two-element subsets of a six-element set, from the 16 elements
of the binary Galois affine space pictured above at top left.

This space is formed by taking symmetric-difference (Galois binary)
sums of the 15 two-element subsets, and identifying any resulting four-
element (or, summing three disjoint two-element subsets, six-element)
subsets with their complements.  This process was described in my note
"The 2-subsets of a 6-set are the points of a PG(3,2)" of May 26, 1986.

The space was later described in the following —

IMAGE- Dolgachev and Keum, coordinatization of the 4x4 array in 'Birational Automorphisms of Quartic Hessian Surfaces,' AMS Transactions, 2002

Wednesday, February 15, 2017

Warp and Woof

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 3:00 pm

Space —

Space structure —

From Gotay and Isenberg, “The Symplectization of Science,”
Gazette des Mathématiciens  54, 59-79 (1992):

“… what is the origin of the unusual name ‘symplectic’? ….
Its mathematical usage is due to Hermann Weyl who,
in an effort to avoid a certain semantic confusion, renamed
the then obscure ‘line complex group’ the ‘symplectic group.’
… the adjective ‘symplectic’ means ‘plaited together’ or ‘woven.’
This is wonderfully apt….”

IMAGE- A symplectic structure -- i.e. a structure that is symplectic (meaning plaited or woven)

The above symplectic  figure appears in remarks on
the diamond-theorem correlation in the webpage
Rosenhain and Göpel Tetrads in PG(3,2).

Space shuttle —

Related ethnic remarks —

As opposed to Michael  Larsen —

Funny, you don't look  Danish.

Wednesday, November 23, 2016

Yogiism

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:31 pm

From the American Mathematical Society (AMS) webpage today —

From the current AMS Notices

Related material from a post of Aug. 6, 2014

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/100915-SteinbergOnChevalleyGroups.jpg

(Here "five point sets" should be "five-point sets.")

From Gotay and Isenberg, “The Symplectization of Science,”
Gazette des Mathématiciens  54, 59-79 (1992):

“… what is the origin of the unusual name ‘symplectic’? ….
Its mathematical usage is due to Hermann Weyl who,
in an effort to avoid a certain semantic confusion, renamed
the then obscure ‘line complex group’ the ‘symplectic group.’
… the adjective ‘symplectic’ means ‘plaited together’ or ‘woven.’
This is wonderfully apt….”

IMAGE- A symplectic structure -- i.e. a structure that is symplectic (meaning plaited or woven)

The above symplectic  structure* now appears in the figure
illustrating the diamond-theorem correlation in the webpage
Rosenhain and Göpel Tetrads in PG(3,2).

* The phrase as used here is a deliberate 
abuse of language .  For the real definition of 
“symplectic structure,” see (for instance) 
“Symplectic Geometry,” by Ana Cannas da Silva
(article written for Handbook of Differential
Geometry 
, Vol 2.) To establish that the above
figure is indeed symplectic , see the post 
Zero System of July 31, 2014.

Friday, September 16, 2016

A Counting-Pattern

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 10:48 am

Wittgenstein, 1939

Dolgachev and Keum, 2002

IMAGE- Dolgachev and Keum, coordinatization of the 4x4 array in 'Birational Automorphisms of Quartic Hessian Surfaces,' AMS Transactions, 2002

For some related material, see posts tagged Priority.

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.

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.

Tuesday, May 24, 2016

Rosenhain and Göpel Revisited

The authors Taormina and Wendland in the previous post
discussed some mathematics they apparently did not know was
related to a classic 1905 book by R. W. H. T. Hudson, Kummer's
Quartic Surface
.

"This famous book is a prototype for the possibility
of explaining and exploring a many-faceted topic of
research, without focussing on general definitions,
formal techniques, or even fancy machinery. In this
regard, the book still stands as a highly recommendable,
unparalleled introduction to Kummer surfaces, as a
permanent source of inspiration and, last but not least, 
as an everlasting symbol of mathematical culture."

— Werner Kleinert, Mathematical Reviews ,
     as quoted at Amazon.com

Some 4×4 diagrams from that book are highly relevant to the
discussion by Taormina and Wendland of the 4×4 squares within
the 1974 Miracle Octad Generator of R. T. Curtis that were later,
in 1987, described by Curtis as pictures of the vector 4-space over
the two-element Galois field GF(2).

Hudson did not think of his 4×4 diagrams as illustrating a vector space,
but he did use them to picture certain subsets of the 16 cells in each
diagram that he called Rosenhain and Göpel tetrads .

Some related work of my own (click images for related posts)—

Rosenhain tetrads as 20 of the 35 projective lines in PG(3,2)

IMAGE- Desargues's theorem in light of Galois geometry

Göpel tetrads as 15 of the 35 projective lines in PG(3,2)

Anticommuting Dirac matrices as spreads of projective lines

Related terminology describing the Göpel tetrads above

Ron Shaw on symplectic geometry and a linear complex in PG(3,2)

Saturday, January 30, 2016

Pope’s Geometry

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 10:21 am

From page 56 of The Science Fiction of Mark Clifton ,
Southern Illinois University Press, 1980 —
 

See also the following image in this journal

IMAGE- A symplectic structure -- i.e. a structure that is symplectic (meaning plaited or woven).

Monday, January 25, 2016

Marvin Minsky, 1927-2016

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 7:45 pm

In this  journal, see Syntactic/Symplectic and Raiding Minsky’s.

Wednesday, January 20, 2016

Fringe Physics and Beyond

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 11:00 am

"One day not long ago Oppenheimer stalked
up and down his office and divulged some
startling new discoveries about the 15 fundamental
particles of which the universe is made….

physicists today are wondering if these particles
are themselves actually the final, stark, immutable
and indivisible foundation stones of the universe
that until now they have been thought to be."

—Lincoln Barnett in LIFE magazine,
    Oct. 10, 1949, page 122

Fringe Physics

" astrophysics limits the number of fundamental particles to 15…."

— Franklin Potter at FQXi.org on Sep. 27, 2009

"I agree there can't be more than 15 fundamental particles."

— Lawrence B. Crowell at FQXi.org on Sep. 29, 2009

Beyond

There are, at any rate, 15 "final, stark, immutable* and indivisible*
foundation stones" (namely, 15 points ) of the finite projective
space PG(3,2). See Symplectic  in this journal.

For related physics, see posts tagged Dirac and Geometry.

* Update of Jan. 21, 2016 — I was carried away by Barnett's
   powerful rhetoric. These adjectives are wrong.

Monday, January 18, 2016

First and Last

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 11:15 am

"First and last, he was a skeptic …."

— Home page of Martin-Gardner.org

See also, in this  journal, Alpha and Omega.

Related material from the last full day of Gardner's life —

See as well Symplectic in this journal.

Friday, January 1, 2016

Art as Religion

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 7:11 am

A recent phrase from art critic Peter Schjeldahl —
"art in essence, immaculately conceived."

'No results found in this book [THE LOOM OF GOD] for SYMPLECTIC'

But see "symplectic" in this journal.

Friday, November 13, 2015

A Connection between the 16 Dirac Matrices and the Large Mathieu Group



Note that the six anticommuting sets of Dirac matrices listed by Arfken
correspond exactly to the six spreads in the above complex of 15 projective
lines of PG(3,2) fixed under a symplectic polarity (the diamond theorem
correlation
 
). As I noted in 1986, this correlation underlies the Miracle
Octad Generator of R. T. Curtis, hence also the large Mathieu group.

References:

Arfken, George B., Mathematical Methods for Physicists , Third Edition,
Academic Press, 1985, pages 213-214

Cullinane, Steven H., Notes on Groups and Geometry, 1978-1986

Related material:

The 6-set in my 1986 note above also appears in a 1996 paper on
the sixteen Dirac matrices by David M. Goodmanson —

Background reading:

Ron Shaw on finite geometry, Clifford algebras, and Dirac groups 
(undated compilation of publications from roughly 1994-1995)—

Saturday, October 31, 2015

Weaving World…

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 6:00 pm

Continues.

Addendum —


      See also Symplectic Structure 
      and Stevens's Rock.

Thursday, October 15, 2015

Contrapuntal Interweaving

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 2:01 am

The title is a phrase from R. D. Laing's book The Politics of Experience .
(Published in the psychedelic year 1967. The later "contrapuntal interweaving"
below is of a less psychedelic nature.)

An illustration of the "interweaving' part of the title —
The "deep structure" of the diamond theorem:

IMAGE- A symplectic structure -- i.e. a structure that is symplectic (meaning plaited or woven).

The word "symplectic" from the end of last Sunday's (Oct. 11) sermon
describes the "interwoven" nature of the above illustration.

An illustration of the "contrapuntal" part of the title (click to enlarge):

The diamond-theorem correlation

 

Sunday, October 11, 2015

Weavers’ Tale

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 11:00 am

"Andersen's weavers, as one commentator points out,
are merely insisting that 'the value of their labor be
recognized apart from its material embodiment.' The
invisible cloth they weave may never manifest itself in
material terms, but the description of its beauty
('as light as spiderwebs' and 'exquisite') turns it into
one of the many wondrous objects found in Andersen's
fairy tales. It is that cloth that captivates us, making us
do the imaginative work of seeing something beautiful
even when it has no material reality."

The Annotated Hans Christian Andersen ,
     edited with an introduction and notes by Maria Tatar

See also Symplectic in this journal.

Tuesday, September 29, 2015

Quotes for Michaelmas

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:48 pm

A search in this journal for material related to the previous post
on theta characteristics yields

"The Solomon Key  is the working title of an unreleased
novel in progress by American author Dan Brown. 
The Solomon Key  will be the third book involving the
character of the Harvard professor Robert Langdon,
of which the first two were Angels & Demons  (2000) and 
The Da Vinci Code  (2003)." — Wikipedia

"One has O+(6) ≅ S8, the symmetric group of order 8! …."
 — "Siegel Modular Forms and Finite Symplectic Groups,"
by Francesco Dalla Piazza and Bert van Geemen, 
May 5, 2008, preprint.

"It was only in retrospect
that the silliness
became profound."

— Review of   
Faust in Copenhagen

"The page numbers
are generally reliable."

— Michaelmas 2007 

For further backstory, click the above link "May 5, 2008," 
which now leads to all posts tagged on080505

Monday, September 28, 2015

Hypercube Structure

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 1:01 am

Click to enlarge:

Two views of tesseracts as 4D vector spaces over GF(2)

For the hypercube as a vector space over the two-element field GF(2),
see a search in this journal for Hypercube + Vector + Space .

For connections with the related symplectic geometry, see Symplectic
in this journal and Notes on Groups and Geometry, 1978-1986.

For the above 1976 hypercube (or tesseract ), see "Diamond Theory,"
by Steven H. Cullinane, Computer Graphics and Art , Vol. 2, No. 1,
Feb. 1977, pp. 5-7.

Thursday, September 17, 2015

A Word to the Wise:

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 12:00 pm

Symplectic.

Related material:

From the website of the American Mathematical Society today,
a column by John Baez that was falsely backdated to Sept. 1, 2015 —

Compare and contrast this Baez column 
with the posts in the above
Log24 search for "Symplectic."

Updates after 9 PM ET Sept. 17, 2015 —

Related wrinkles in time: 

Baez's preceding Visual Insight  post, titled 
"Tutte-Coxeter Graph," was dated Aug. 15, 2015.
This seems to contradict the AMS home page headline
of Sept. 5, 2015, that linked to Baez's still earlier post
"Heawood Graph," dated Aug. 1. Also, note the 
reference in "Tutte-Coxeter Graph" to Baez's related 
essay — dated August 17, 2015 — 

Tuesday, September 15, 2015

Schoolgirl Problem

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 2:00 pm

Or: Ten Years and a Day

In memory of film director Robert Wise,
who died ten years ago yesterday.

A search in this journal for "Schoolgirl" ends with a post
from Sept. 10, 2002, The Sound of Hanging Rock.

See as well a Log24 search for "Strangerland"
(a 2015 film about a search for a schoolgirl) and
a Log24 search for "Weaving."

Related mathematics:  Symplectic.

Some related images (click to enlarge) —

Monday, August 3, 2015

Text and Context*

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 2:00 am

"The ORCID organization offers an open and
independent registry intended to be the de facto  
standard for contributor identification in research
and academic publishing. On 16 October 2012,
ORCID launched its registry services and
started issuing user identifiers." — Wikipedia

This journal on the above date —

  

A more recent identifier —

Related material —

See also the recent posts Ein Kampf and Symplectic.

* Continued.

Saturday, July 4, 2015

Context

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 10:00 am

Some context for yesterday's post on a symplectic polarity —

This 1986 note may or may not have inspired some remarks 
of Wolf Barth in his foreword to the 1990 reissue of Hudson's
1905 Kummer's Quartic Surface .

See also the diamond-theorem correlation.  

Friday, July 3, 2015

Crunching Entities*

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:19 pm

A figure I prefer to the "Golden Tablet" of Night at the Museum —

IMAGE- The natural symplectic polarity in PG(3,2), illustrating a symplectic structure

The source — The Log24 post "Zero System" of July 31, 2014.

* For the title, see The New Yorker  of Sept. 22, 2014.

Thursday, April 9, 2015

Translation

Filed under: General — m759 @ 6:27 pm

From an informative April 7 essay in The Nation —

In his marvelous book Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything , David Bellos demonstrates many of the ways that translation is not only possible but ubiquitous, so thoroughly woven into the fabric of our daily lives—from classrooms to international financial markets, from instruction manuals to poems—that if translation were somehow to become impossible, the world would descend into the zombie apocalypse faster than you can say “je ne sais quoi ."

— "Forensic Translation," by Benjamin Paloff

See also searches in this  journal for Core and for Kernel.
See as well Fabric Design and Symplectic.

Wednesday, February 25, 2015

Words and Images

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 5:30 pm

The words:  "symplectic polarity"—

The images:

The Natural Symplectic Polarity in PG(3,2)

Symmetry Invariance in a Diamond Ring

The Diamond-Theorem Correlation

Picturing the Smallest Projective 3-Space

Quilt Block Designs

Saturday, February 21, 2015

High and Low Concepts

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 4:30 pm

Steven Pressfield on April 25, 2012:

What exactly is High Concept?

Let’s start with its opposite, low concept.
Low concept stories are personal,
idiosyncratic, ambiguous, often European. 
“Well, it’s a sensitive fable about a Swedish
sardine fisherman whose wife and daughter
find themselves conflicted over … ”

ZZZZZZZZ.

Fans of Oslo artist Josefine Lyche know she has
valiantly struggled to find a high-concept approach
to the diamond theorem. Any such approach must,
unfortunately, reckon with the following low
(i.e., not easily summarized) concept —

The Diamond Theorem Correlation:

From left to right

http://www.log24.com/log/pix14B/140824-Diamond-Theorem-Correlation-1202w.jpg

http://www.log24.com/log/pix14B/140731-Diamond-Theorem-Correlation-747w.jpg

http://www.log24.com/log/pix14B/140824-Picturing_the_Smallest-1986.gif

http://www.log24.com/log/pix14B/140806-ProjPoints.gif

For some backstory, see ProjPoints.gif and "Symplectic Polarity" in this journal.

Saturday, February 7, 2015

Words and Pictures, continued

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 7:59 pm

Saturday, December 27, 2014

More To Be Done

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 1:44 am

  Ball and Weiner, 'An Introduction to Finite Geometry,' version of Sept. 5, 2011

The Ball-Weiner date above, 5 September 2011,
suggests a review of this journal on that date —

"Think of a DO NOT ENTER pictogram,
a circle with a diagonal slash, a type of ideogram.
It tells you what to do or not do, but not why.
The why is part of a larger context, a bigger picture."

— Customer review at Amazon.com

This passage was quoted here on August 10, 2009.

Also from that date:

The Sept. 5, 2011, Ball-Weiner paper illustrates the
"doily" view of the mathematical structure W(3,2), also
known as GQ(2,2), the Sp(4,2) generalized quadrangle.
(See Fig. 3.1 on page 33, exercise 13 on page 38, and
the answer to that exercise on page 55, illustrated by 
Fig. 5.1 on page 56.)

For "another view, hidden yet true," of GQ(2,2),
see Inscape and Symplectic Polarity in this journal.

Monday, December 15, 2014

Mythic Metaphysics

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:01 pm

Today’s 8:01 PM post quoted Husserl on
the perception of the cube.

Another approach to perception of the cube,
from Narrative  Metaphysics on St. Lucia’s Day —


      See also Symplectic Structure and Stevens’s Rock.

From today’s 11:29 AM post —

John Burt Foster Jr. in Nabokov’s Art of Memory and
European Modernism
  (Princeton U. Press, 1993, p. 224) —

At the time of The Waste Land , in a comment on
Joyce’s Ulysses  that influenced many later definitions
of modernism in the English-speaking world, Eliot
announced, “instead of narrative method, we may
now use the mythical method.”13

For some illuminating remarks on a mythical  approach
to perception of the cube, see Gareth Knight on Schicksalstag   2012.

Saturday, December 13, 2014

Narrative Metaphysics

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

From "Guardians of the Galaxy" —

"Then the Universe exploded into existence…"

For those who prefer a more traditional approach :

See also Symplectic Structure and Stevens's Rock.

Wednesday, November 19, 2014

The Eye/Mind Conflict

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 10:25 am

Harold Rosenberg, "Art and Words," 
The New Yorker , March 29, 1969. From page 110:

"An advanced painting of this century inevitably gives rise
in the spectator to a conflict between his eye and his mind; 
as Thomas Hess has pointed out, the fable of the emperor's 
new clothes is echoed at the birth of every modemist art 
movement. If work in a new mode is to be accepted, the 
eye/mind conflict must be resolved in favor of the mind; 
that is, of the language absorbed into the work. Of itself, 
the eye is incapable of breaking into the intellectual system 
that today distinguishes between objects that are art and 
those that are not. Given its primitive function of 
discriminating among things in shopping centers and on 
highways, the eye will recognize a Noland as a fabric
design, a Judd as a stack of metal bins— until the eye's 
outrageous philistinism has been subdued by the drone of 
formulas concerning breakthroughs in color, space, and 
even optical perception (this, too, unseen by the eye, of 
course). It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that paintings 
are today apprehended with the ears. Miss Barbara Rose, 
once a promoter of striped canvases and aluminum boxes, 
confesses that words are essential to the art she favored 
when she writes, 'Although the logic of minimal art gained 
critical respect, if not admiration, its reductiveness allowed
for a relatively limited art experience.' Recent art criticism 
has reversed earlier procedures: instead of deriving principles 
from what it sees, it teaches the eye to 'see' principles; the 
writings of one of America's influential critics often pivot on 
the drama of how he failed to respond to a painting or 
sculpture the first few times he saw it but, returning to the 
work, penetrated the concept that made it significant and
was then able to appreciate it. To qualify as a member of the 
art public, an individual must be tuned to the appropriate 
verbal reverberations of objects in art galleries, and his 
receptive mechanism must be constantly adjusted to oscillate 
to new vocabularies."

New vocabulary illustrated:

Graphic Design and a Symplectic Polarity —

Background: The diamond theorem
and a zero system .

Monday, November 3, 2014

The Rhetoric of Abstract Concepts

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 12:48 pm

From a post of June 3, 2013:

New Yorker  editor David Remnick at Princeton today
(from a copy of his prepared remarks):

“Finally, speaking of fabric design….”

I prefer Tom and Harold:

Tom Wolfe in The Painted Word 

“I am willing (now that so much has been revealed!)
to predict that in the year 2000, when the Metropolitan
or the Museum of Modern Art puts on the great
retrospective exhibition of American Art 1945-75,
the three artists who will be featured, the three seminal
figures of the era, will be not Pollock, de Kooning, and
Johns-but Greenberg, Rosenberg, and Steinberg.
Up on the walls will be huge copy blocks, eight and a half
by eleven feet each, presenting the protean passages of
the period … a little ‘fuliginous flatness’ here … a little
‘action painting’ there … and some of that ‘all great art
is about art’ just beyond. Beside them will be small
reproductions of the work of leading illustrators of
the Word from that period….”

Harold Rosenberg in The New Yorker  (click to enlarge)

From Gotay and Isenberg, “The Symplectization of Science,”
Gazette des Mathématiciens  54, 59-79 (1992):

“… what is the origin of the unusual name ‘symplectic’? ….
Its mathematical usage is due to Hermann Weyl who,
in an effort to avoid a certain semantic confusion, renamed
the then obscure ‘line complex group’ the ‘symplectic group.’
… the adjective ‘symplectic’ means ‘plaited together’ or ‘woven.’
This is wonderfully apt….”

Symplectic :

IMAGE- A symplectic structure -- i.e. a structure that is symplectic (meaning plaited or woven)

— Steven H. Cullinane,
diamond theorem illustration

Monday, August 25, 2014

A Challenging Story:

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 11:30 pm

Symplectic Macbeth

Lead on, McDuff:

Friday, August 22, 2014

Review

Filed under: General — m759 @ 12:00 pm

Image search for “symplectic structure” + “35 lines” —

Click for larger (2.5 MB) image.

Friday, August 15, 2014

The Omega Matrix

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 11:00 pm

(Continued)

The webpage Rosenhain and Göpel Tetrads in PG(3,2)
has been updated to include more material on symplectic structure.

Wednesday, August 13, 2014

Stranger than Dreams*

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

Illustration from a discussion of a symplectic structure 
in a 4×4 array quoted here on January 17, 2014 —

See symplectic structure in this journal.

* The final words of Point Omega , a 2010 novel by Don DeLillo.
See also Omega Matrix in this journal.

Thursday, August 7, 2014

Abuse of Language

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

From Wikipedia — Abuse of language —

“… in mathematics, a use of terminology in a way that is not formally correct
but that simplifies exposition or suggests the correct intuition.”

The phrase “symplectic structure” in the previous post
was a deliberate abuse of languageThe real definition:

Friday, August 1, 2014

The Diamond-Theorem Correlation

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:00 am

Click image for a larger, clearer version.

IMAGE- The symplectic correlation underlying Rosenhain and Göpel tetrads

Thursday, July 31, 2014

Zero System

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 6:11 pm

The title phrase (not to be confused with the film 'The Zero Theorem')
means, according to the Encyclopedia of Mathematics,
a null system , and

"A null system is also called null polarity,
a symplectic polarity or a symplectic correlation….
it is a polarity such that every point lies in its own
polar hyperplane."

See Reinhold Baer, "Null Systems in Projective Space,"
Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, Vol. 51
(1945), pp. 903-906.

An example in PG(3,2), the projective 3-space over the
two-element Galois field GF(2):

IMAGE- The natural symplectic polarity in PG(3,2), illustrating a symplectic structure

See also the 10 AM ET post of Sunday, June 8, 2014, on this topic.

Sunday, June 8, 2014

Vide

Some background on the large Desargues configuration

"The relevance of a geometric theorem is determined by what the theorem
tells us about space, and not by the eventual difficulty of the proof."

— Gian-Carlo Rota discussing the theorem of Desargues

What space  tells us about the theorem :  

In the simplest case of a projective space  (as opposed to a plane ),
there are 15 points and 35 lines: 15 Göpel  lines and 20 Rosenhain  lines.*
The theorem of Desargues in this simplest case is essentially a symmetry
within the set of 20 Rosenhain lines. The symmetry, a reflection
about the main diagonal in the square model of this space, interchanges
10 horizontally oriented (row-based) lines with 10 corresponding
vertically oriented (column-based) lines.

Vide  Classical Geometry in Light of Galois Geometry.

* Update of June 9: For a more traditional nomenclature, see (for instance)
R. Shaw, 1995.  The "simplest case" link above was added to point out that
the two types of lines named are derived from a natural symplectic polarity 
in the space. The square model of the space, apparently first described in
notes written in October and December, 1978, makes this polarity clearly visible:

A coordinate-free approach to symplectic structure

Friday, January 17, 2014

The 4×4 Relativity Problem

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 11:00 pm

The sixteen-dot square array in yesterday’s noon post suggests
the following remarks.

“This is the relativity problem:  to fix objectively a class of
equivalent coordinatizations and to ascertain the group of
transformations S mediating between them.”

— Hermann Weyl, The Classical Groups ,
Princeton University Press, 1946, p. 16

The Galois tesseract  appeared in an early form in the journal
Computer Graphics and Art , Vol. 2, No. 1, February 1977—

IMAGE- Hypercube and 4x4 matrix from the 1976 'Diamond Theory' preprint, as excerpted in 'Computer Graphics and Art'

The 1977 matrix Q is echoed in the following from 2002—

IMAGE- Dolgachev and Keum, coordinatization of the 4x4 array in 'Birational Automorphisms of Quartic Hessian Surfaces,' AMS Transactions, 2002

A different representation of Cullinane’s 1977 square model of the
16-point affine geometry over the two-element Galois field GF(2)
is supplied by Conway and Sloane in Sphere Packings, Lattices and Groups   
(first published in 1988) :

IMAGE- The Galois tesseract as a four-dimensional vector space, from a diagram by Conway and Sloane in 'Sphere Packings, Lattices, and Groups'

Here a, b, c, d   are basis vectors in the vector 4-space over GF(2).
(For a 1979 version of this vector space, see AMS Abstract 79T-A37.)

See also a 2011 publication of the Mathematical Association of America —

From 'Beautiful Mathematics,' by Martin Erickson, an excerpt on the Cullinane diamond theorem (with source not mentioned)

Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Vril Chick

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 4:30 am

Profile picture of "Jo Lyxe" (Josefine Lyche) at Vimeo

Profile picture for "Jo Lyxe" (Josefine Lyche) at Vimeo

Compare to an image of Vril muse Maria Orsitsch.

From the catalog of a current art exhibition
(25 May – 31 August, 2013) in Norway,
I DE LANGE NÆTTER —

Josefine Lyche
Born in 1973 in Bergen, Norway.
Lives and works in Oslo and Berlin.

Keywords (to help place my artwork in the
proper context): Aliens, affine geometry, affine
planes, affine spaces, automorphisms, binary
codes, block designs, classical groups, codes,
coding theory, collineations, combinatorial,
combinatorics, conjugacy classes, the Conwell
correspondence, correlations, Cullinane,
R. T. Curtis, design theory, the diamond theorem,
diamond theory, duads, duality, error correcting
codes, esoteric, exceptional groups,
extraterrestrials, finite fields, finite geometry, finite
groups, finite rings, Galois fields, generalized
quadrangles, generators, geometry, GF(2),
GF(4), the (24,12) Golay code, group actions,
group theory, Hadamard matrices, hypercube,
hyperplanes, hyperspace, incidence structures,
invariance, Karnaugh maps, Kirkman’s schoolgirls
problem, Latin squares, Leech lattice, linear
groups, linear spaces, linear transformations,
Magick, Mathieu groups, matrix theory, Meno,
Miracle Octad Generator, MOG, multiply transitive
groups, occultism, octahedron, the octahedral
group, Orsic, orthogonal arrays, outer automorphisms,
parallelisms, partial geometries,
permutation groups, PG(3,2), Plato, Platonic
solids, polarities, Polya-Burnside theorem, projective
geometry, projective planes, projective
spaces, projectivities, Pythagoras, reincarnation,
Reed-Muller codes, the relativity problem,
reverse engineering, sacred geometry, Singer
cycle, skew lines, Socrates, sporadic simple
groups, Steiner systems, Sylvester, symmetric,
symmetry, symplectic, synthemes, synthematic,
Theosophical Society tesseract, Tessla, transvections,
Venn diagrams, Vril society, Walsh
functions, Witt designs.

(See also the original catalog page.)

Clearly most of this (the non-highlighted parts) was taken
from my webpage Diamond Theory. I suppose I should be
flattered, but I am not thrilled to be associated with the
(apparently fictional) Vril Society.

For some background, see (for instance) 
Conspiracy Theories and Secret Societies for Dummies .

Friday, February 8, 2013

Dictum

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 3:00 pm

A review of the life of physicist Arthur Wightman,
who died at 90 on January 13th, 2013. yields 
the following.

Wightman at Wikipedia:
"His graduate students include
 Arthur Jaffe,  Jerrold Marsden, and Alan Sokal."

"I think of Arthur as the spiritual leader
of mathematical physics and his death
really marks the end of an era."

— Arthur Jaffe in News at Princeton , Jan. 30

Marsden at Wikipedia
"He [Marsden] has laid much of the foundation for
symplectic topology." (Link redirects to symplectic geometry.)

A Wikipedia reference in the symplectic geometry article leads to

THE SYMPLECTIZATION OF SCIENCE:
Symplectic Geometry Lies at the Very
Foundations of Physics and Mathematics

Mark J. Gotay
Department of Mathematics
University of Hawai‘i

James A. Isenberg
Institute of Theoretical Science and Department of Mathematics
University of Oregon

February 18, 1992

Acknowledgments:

We would like to thank Jerry Marsden and Alan Weinstein
for their comments on previous drafts.

Published in: Gazette des Mathématiciens  54, 59-79 (1992).

Opening:

"Physics is geometry .  This dictum is one of the guiding
principles of modern physics. It largely originated with
Albert Einstein…."

A different account of the dictum:

The strange term Geometrodynamics 
is apparently due to Wheeler.

Physics may or may not be geometry, but
geometry is definitely not physics.

For some pure geometry that has no apparent 
connection to physics, see this journal
on the date of Wightman's death.

Saturday, April 4, 2009

Saturday April 4, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 8:00 am
Annual Tribute to
The Eight

Katherine Neville's 'The Eight,' edition with knight on cover, on her April 4 birthday

Other knight figures:

Knight figures in finite geometry (Singer 7-cycles in the 3-space over GF(2) by Cullinane, 1985, and Curtis, 1987)

The knight logo at the SpringerLink site

Click on the SpringerLink
knight for a free copy
(pdf, 1.2 mb) of
the following paper
dealing with the geometry
underlying the R.T. Curtis
knight figures above:

Springer description of 1970 paper on Mathieu-group geometry by Wilbur Jonsson of McGill U.

Context:

Literature and Chess and
Sporadic Group References

Details:

 

Adapted (for HTML) from the opening paragraphs of the above paper, W. Jonsson's 1970 "On the Mathieu Groups M22, M23, M24…"–

"[A]… uniqueness proof is offered here based upon a detailed knowledge of the geometric aspects of the elementary abelian group of order 16 together with a knowledge of the geometries associated with certain subgroups of its automorphism group. This construction was motivated by a question posed by D.R. Hughes and by the discussion Edge [5] (see also Conwell [4]) gives of certain isomorphisms between classical groups, namely

PGL(4,2)~PSL(4,2)~SL(4,2)~A8,
PSp(4,2)~Sp(4,2)~S6,

where A8 is the alternating group on eight symbols, S6 the symmetric group on six symbols, Sp(4,2) and PSp(4,2) the symplectic and projective symplectic groups in four variables over the field GF(2) of two elements, [and] PGL, PSL and SL are the projective linear, projective special linear and special linear groups (see for example [7], Kapitel II).

The symplectic group PSp(4,2) is the group of collineations of the three dimensional projective space PG(3,2) over GF(2) which commute with a fixed null polarity tau…."

References

4. Conwell, George M.: The three space PG(3,2) and its group. Ann. of Math. (2) 11, 60-76 (1910).

5. Edge, W.L.: The geometry of the linear fractional group LF(4,2). Proc. London Math. Soc. (3) 4, 317-342 (1954).

7. Huppert, B.: Endliche Gruppen I. Berlin-Heidelberg-New York: Springer 1967.

Sunday, March 1, 2009

Sunday March 1, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 11:00 am

Solomon's Cube
continued

"There is a book… called A Fellow of Trinity, one of series dealing with what is supposed to be Cambridge college life…. There are two heroes, a primary hero called Flowers, who is almost wholly good, and a secondary hero, a much weaker vessel, called Brown. Flowers and Brown find many dangers in university life, but the worst is a gambling saloon in Chesterton run by the Misses Bellenden, two fascinating but extremely wicked young ladies. Flowers survives all these troubles, is Second Wrangler and Senior Classic, and succeeds automatically to a Fellowship (as I suppose he would have done then). Brown succumbs, ruins his parents, takes to drink, is saved from delirium tremens during a thunderstorm only by the prayers of the Junior Dean, has much difficulty in obtaining even an Ordinary Degree, and ultimately becomes a missionary. The friendship is not shattered by these unhappy events, and Flowers's thoughts stray to Brown, with affectionate pity, as he drinks port and eats walnuts for the first time in Senior Combination Room."

— G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology

"The Solomon Key is the working title of an unreleased novel in progress by American author Dan Brown. The Solomon Key will be the third book involving the character of the Harvard professor Robert Langdon, of which the first two were Angels & Demons (2000) and The Da Vinci Code (2003)." — Wikipedia

"One has O+(6) ≅ S8, the symmetric group of order 8! …."

 — "Siegel Modular Forms and Finite Symplectic Groups," by Francesco Dalla Piazza and Bert van Geemen, May 5, 2008, preprint.

"The complete projective group of collineations and dualities of the [projective] 3-space is shown to be of order [in modern notation] 8! …. To every transformation of the 3-space there corresponds a transformation of the [projective] 5-space. In the 5-space, there are determined 8 sets of 7 points each, 'heptads' …."

— George M. Conwell, "The 3-space PG(3, 2) and Its Group," The Annals of Mathematics, Second Series, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Jan., 1910), pp. 60-76

"It must be remarked that these 8 heptads are the key to an elegant proof…."

— Philippe Cara, "RWPRI Geometries for the Alternating Group A8," in Finite Geometries: Proceedings of the Fourth Isle of Thorns Conference (July 16-21, 2000), Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001, ed. Aart Blokhuis, James W. P. Hirschfeld, Dieter Jungnickel, and Joseph A. Thas, pp. 61-97
 

Saturday, February 28, 2009

Saturday February 28, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 8:00 am
Mathematics
and Narrative

continued

Narrative:

xxx

Mathematics:

"It must be remarked that these 8 heptads are the key to an elegant proof…."

— Philippe Cara, "RWPRI Geometries for the Alternating Group A8," in Finite Geometries: Proceedings of the Fourth Isle of Thorns Conference, (July 2000), Springer, 2001, ed. Aart Blokhuis, James W. P. Hirschfeld, Dieter Jungnickel, and Joseph A. Thas, pp. 61-97
 

Mathematics:

"Regular graphs are considered, whose automorphism groups are permutation representations P of the orthogonal groups in various dimensions over GF(2). Vertices and adjacencies are defined by quadratic forms, and after graphical displays of the trivial isomorphisms between the symmetric groups S2, S3, S5, S6 and corresponding orthogonal groups, a 28-vertex graph is constructed that displays the isomorphism between S8 and O6 + (2)."

J. Sutherland Frame in "Orthogonal Groups over GF(2) and Related Graphs," Springer Lecture Notes in Mathematics vol. 642, Theory and Applications of Graphs (Proceedings, Michigan, May 11–15, 1976), edited by Y. Alavi and D. R. Lick, pp. 174-185

"One has O+(6) ≅ S8, the symmetric group of order 8!…."

— "Siegel Modular Forms and Finite Symplectic Groups," by Francesco Dalla Piazza and Bert van Geemen, May 5, 2008, preprint. This paper gives some context in superstring theory for the following work of Frame:

[F1] J.S. Frame, The classes and representations of the group of 27 lines and 28 bitangents, Annali
di Mathematica Pura ed Applicata, 32 (1951) 83–119.
[F2] J.S. Frame, Some characters of orthogonal groups over the field of two elements, In: Proc. of the
Second Inter. Conf. on the Theory of Groups, Lecture Notes in Math., Vol. 372, pp. 298–314,
Springer, 1974.
[F3] J. S. Frame, Degree polynomials for the orthogonal groups over GF(2), C. R. Math. Rep. Acad.
Sci. Canada 2 (1980) 253–258.

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Tuesday October 16, 2007

Filed under: General — m759 @ 10:00 am
In memory of
Harish-Chandra,
who died at 60
on this date in 1983

  The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07A/071016-Harish-Chandra.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
Harish-Chandra in 1981
(Photo by Herman Landshof)

Recent Log24 entries have parodied the use of the phrase “deep beauty” as the title of the Oct. 3-4 physics symposium of that name, which was supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation and sponsored by the Department of Philosophy at Princeton University.
Such parody was in part suggested by the symposium’s sources of financial and academic support. This support had, in the view of some, the effect of linking the symposium’s topic, the mathematics of quantum theory, with both religion (the Templeton Foundation) and philosophy (a field sometimes associated in popular thought– though not at Princeton— with quantum mysticism.)

As a corrective to the previous parodies here, the following material on the mathematician Harish-Chandra may help to establish that there is, in fact, such a thing as “deep beauty”– if not in physics, religion, or philosophy, at least in pure mathematics.

MacTutor History of Mathematics:

“Harish-Chandra worked at the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton from 1963. He was appointed IBM-von Neumann Professor in 1968.”

R. P. Langlands (pdf, undated, apparently from a 1983 memorial talk):

“Almost immediately upon his arrival in Princeton he began working at a ferocious pace, setting standards that the rest of us may emulate but never achieve. For us there is a welter of semi-simple groups: orthogonal groups, symplectic groups, unitary groups, exceptional groups; and in our frailty we are often forced to treat them separately. For him, or so it appeared because his methods were always completely general, there was a single group. This was one of the sources of beauty of the subject in his hands, and I once asked him how he achieved it. He replied, honestly I believe, that he could think no other way. It is certainly true that he was driven back upon the simplifying properties of special examples only in desperate need and always temporarily.”

“It is difficult to communicate the grandeur of Harish-Chandra’s achievements and I have not tried to do so. The theory he created still stands– if I may be excused a clumsy simile– like a Gothic cathedral, heavily buttressed below but, in spite of its great weight, light and soaring in its upper reaches, coming as close to heaven as mathematics can. Harish, who was of a spiritual, even religious, cast and who liked to express himself in metaphors, vivid and compelling, did see, I believe, mathematics as mediating between man and what one can only call God. Occasionally, on a stroll after a seminar, usually towards evening, he would express his feelings, his fine hands slightly upraised, his eyes intent on the distant sky; but he saw as his task not to bring men closer to God but God closer to men. For those who can understand his work and who accept that God has a mathematical side, he accomplished it.”

For deeper views of his work, see

  1. Rebecca A. Herb, “Harish-Chandra and His Work” (pdf), Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, July 1991, and
  2. R. P. Langlands, “Harish-Chandra, 1923-1983” (pdf, 28 pp., Royal Society memoir, 1985)

Tuesday, October 3, 2006

Tuesday October 3, 2006

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 9:26 am

Serious

"I don't think the 'diamond theorem' is anything serious, so I started with blitzing that."

Charles Matthews at Wikipedia, Oct. 2, 2006

"The 'seriousness' of a mathematical theorem lies, not in its practical consequences, which are usually negligible, but in the significance of the mathematical ideas which it connects. We may say, roughly, that a mathematical idea is 'significant' if it can be connected, in a natural and illuminating way, with a large complex of other mathematical ideas."

— G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology

Matthews yesterday deleted references to the diamond theorem and related material in the following Wikipedia articles:

Affine group‎
Reflection group‎
Symmetry in mathematics‎
Incidence structure‎
Invariant (mathematics)‎
Symmetry‎
Finite geometry‎
Group action‎
History of geometry‎

This would appear to be a fairly large complex of mathematical ideas.

See also the following "large complex" cited, following the above words of Hardy, in Diamond Theory:

Affine geometry, affine planes, affine spaces, automorphisms, binary codes, block designs, classical groups, codes, coding theory, collineations, combinatorial, combinatorics, conjugacy classes, the Conwell correspondence, correlations, design theory, duads, duality, error correcting codes, exceptional groups, finite fields, finite geometry, finite groups, finite rings, Galois fields, generalized quadrangles, generators, geometry, GF(2), GF(4), the (24,12) Golay code, group actions, group theory, Hadamard matrices, hypercube, hyperplanes, hyperspace, incidence structures, invariance, Karnaugh maps, Kirkman's schoolgirl problem, Latin squares, Leech lattice, linear groups, linear spaces, linear transformations, Mathieu groups, matrix theory, Meno, Miracle Octad Generator, MOG, multiply transitive groups, octads, the octahedral group, orthogonal arrays, outer automorphisms, parallelisms, partial geometries, permutation groups, PG(3,2), polarities, Polya-Burnside theorem, projective geometry, projective planes, projective spaces, projectivities, Reed-Muller codes, the relativity problem, Singer cycle, skew lines,  sporadic simple groups, Steiner systems, symmetric, symmetry, symplectic, synthemes, synthematic, tesseract, transvections, Walsh functions, Witt designs.

Tuesday, November 16, 2004

Tuesday November 16, 2004

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 12:12 pm

Geometry, continued

Added a long footnote on symplectic properties of the 4×4 array to “Geometry of the 4×4 Square.”

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