The American Mathematical Society on April 4 posted a story
about a death that they said occurred on March 14 (Pi Day):
* Notes on the Title —
The Thread Part
The Phantom Part
"What a yarn!" — Raymond Reddington in "The Blacklist"
Fact check on the death date reported by the AMS —
But Davis's funeral-home obituary agrees with the Pi Day date.
The above title may be regarded as a poetic variant
of the title of Katherine Neville's 1988 novel The Eight .
Related material —
See also The Black Queen, a note from 2001.
From this journal at midnight (12 AM ET) on April 4 —
Related material —
From the weblog of Ready Player One author Ernest Cline —
"Recently, a lot of people have asked me if a real person
inspired the character of James Halliday, the eccentric
billionaire video game designer in my book. Steve Jobs
and Steve Wozniak are both mentioned in the text,
because their world changing partnership inspired the
relationship between James Halliday and Ogden Morrow,
with Morrow being a charismatic tech industry leader like
Jobs, and Halliday being the computer geek genius of the
duo like Woz. But the character of James Halliday was
inspired by two other very different people.
As I told Wired magazine earlier this year, from the
beginning, I envisioned James Halliday’s personality as
a cross between Howard Hughes and Richard Garriott.
If I had to break it down mathematically, I’d estimate that
about 15% of Halliday’s character was inspired by
Howard Hughes (the crazy reclusive millionaire part), with
most of the other 85% being inspired by Richard Garriott."
See as well Log24 posts tagged "Space Writer"
and the classic tune "Midnight at the Oasis."
Or: "Show me all the blueprints!"
— A saying attributed to Howard Hughes.
From the Blacklist episode in the previous post, "Date," blueprints
allegedly describing the boiler room in the Denver Mint —
Note the Thrust/Translation Controller Assembly (TTCA) at upper left
and the Attitude Controller Assembly (ACA) at lower right.
A NASA publication dated April 1, 1971, illustrates the Attitude Controller —
Krysten Ritter was born more than ten years later, in 1981.
For more on Attitude Control, see Boiler Room in this journal.
See as well a search for "Gold Bug" in this journal.
From that search —
Richard Powers, The Gold Bug Variations , first published in 1991—
Botkin, whatever her gifts as a conversationist, is almost as old
as the rediscovery of Mendel. The other extreme in age,
Joe Lovering, beat a time-honored path out of pure math
into muddy population statistics. Ressler has seen the guy
potting about in the lab, although exactly what the excitable kid
does is anybody's guess. He looks decidedly gumfooted holding
any equipment more corporeal than a chi-square. Stuart takes
him to the Y for lunch, part of a court-your-resources campaign.
He has the sub, Lovering the congealed mac and cheese.
Hardly are they seated when Joe whips out a napkin and begins
sketching proofs. He argues that the genetic code, as an
algorithmic formal system, is subject to Gödel's Incompleteness
Theorem. "That would mean the symbolic language of the code
can't be both consistent and complete. Wouldn't that be a kick
in the head?"
Kid talk, competitive showing off, intellectual fantasy.
But Ressler knows what Joe is driving at. He's toyed with similar
ideas, cast in less abstruse terms. We are the by-product of the
mechanism in there. So it must be more ingenious than us.
Anything complex enough to create consciousness may be too
complex for consciousness to understand. Yet the ultimate paradox
is Lovering, crouched over his table napkin, using proofs to
demonstrate proof's limits. Lovering laughs off recursion and takes
up another tack: the key is to find some formal symmetry folded
in this four-base chaos. Stuart distrusts this approach even more.
He picks up the tab for their two untouched lunches, thanking
Lovering politely for the insight.
"The key is to find some formal symmetry…."
"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.
For those who, like the author of The Eight (a novel in which today's
date figures prominently), prefer fiction —
See as well . . .
Literary theorists may, if they wish, connect
cabalistically the Insidious address "414"
with the date 4/14 of the above post, and
the word Appletree with the biblical Garden.
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