Saturday, June 11, 2022
Tuesday, September 9, 2014
In Memoriam
For Loren D. Olson, Harvard '64:
"Even 50 years later, I remember his enthusiasm for a very young
and very gifted Harvard professor named Shlomo Sternberg, one
of whose special areas of interest was Lie groups. I still have no real
understanding of what a Lie group is, but not for want of trying on
Loren’s part. Loren was also quite interested in the thinking of the
theologians Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr, who were then at
Harvard. He attended some of their lectures, read several of their
books, and enjoyed discussing their ideas."
— Harvard classmate David Jackson
See also today's previous post.
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Smoke and Mirrors
This post is continued from a March 12, 2013, post titled
"Smoke and Mirrors" on art in Tromsø, Norway, and from
a June 22, 2014, post on the nineteenth-century
mathematicians Rosenhain and Göpel.
The latter day was the day of death for
mathematician Loren D. Olson, Harvard '64.
For some background on that June 22 post, see the tag
Rosenhain and Göpel in this journal.
Some background on Olson, who taught at the
University of Tromsø, from the American Mathematical
Society yesterday:
Olson died not long after attending the 50th reunion of the
Harvard Class of 1964.
For another connection between that class (also my own)
and Tromsø, see posts tagged "Elegantly Packaged."
This phrase was taken from today's (print)
New York Times review of a new play titled "Smoke."
The phrase refers here to the following "package" for
some mathematical objects that were named after
Rosenhain and Göpel — a 4×4 array —
For the way these objects were packaged within the array
in 1905 by British mathematician R. W. H. T. Hudson, see
a page at finitegometry.org/sc. For the connection to the art
in Tromsø mentioned above, see the diamond theorem.
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