Log24

Wednesday, September 20, 2017

The Imaginary Professor

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 8:35 pm
- I was a teacher.
- You're being modest, aren't you?
  You were a professor at Boston University...
  Isn't that right?
- Yes, well, assistant professor.
- And what'd you teach?
- Philosophy. Truth and logic. 
  That sort of thing.

Read more: 
https://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/
movie_script.php?movie=gifted

Compare and contrast with a real  Boston University professor,
John Stachel, quoted here on Sept. 5, 2017.

Tuesday, September 5, 2017

Annals of Critical Epistemology

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 5:36 pm

"But unlike many who left the Communist Party, I turned left
rather than right, and returned—or rather turned for the first time—
to a critical examination of Marx's work. I found—and still find—
that his analysis of capitalism, which for me is the heart of his work,
provides the best starting point, the best critical tools, with which—
suitably developed—to understand contemporary capitalism.
I remind you that this year is also the sesquicentennial of the
Communist Manifesto , a document that still haunts the capitalist world."

— From "Autobiographical Reflections," a talk given on June 5, 1998, by
John Stachel at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin
on the occasion of a workshop honoring his 70th birthday, 
"Space-Time, Quantum Entanglement and Critical Epistemology."

From a passage by Stachel quoted in the previous post

From the source for Stachel's remarks on Weyl and coordinatization —

Note that Stachel distorted Weyl's text by replacing Weyl's word 
"symbols" with the word "quantities." —

This replacement makes no sense if the coordinates in question
are drawn from a Galois field — a field not of quantities , but rather
of algebraic symbols .

"You've got to pick up every stitch… Must be the season of the witch."
— Donovan song at the end of Nicole Kidman's "To Die For"

Florence 2001

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 4:44 am

Or:  Coordinatization for Physicists

This post was suggested by the link on the word "coordinatized"
in the previous post.

I regret that Weyl's term "coordinatization" perhaps has
too many syllables for the readers of recreational mathematics —
for example, of an article on 4×4 magic squares by Conway, Norton,
and Ryba to be published today by Princeton University Press.

Insight into the deeper properties of such squares unfortunately
requires both the ability to learn what a "Galois field" is and the
ability to comprehend seven-syllable words.

Monday, September 4, 2017

Identity Revisited

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:00 pm

From the Log24 post "A Point of Identity" (August 8, 2016) —

A logo that may be interpreted as one-eighth of a 2x2x2 array
of cubes —

The figure in white above may be viewed as a subcube representing,
when the eight-cube array is coordinatized, the identity (i.e., (0, 0, 0)).

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