The "Facets" tag in this morning's previous post,
"The Portable Divinity Box," suggests a look at
Box759.
Sunday, September 22, 2024
Raiders of the Lost Box
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The Portable Divinity Box
In 1978, Harvard moved a structure known as the Morton Prince House
from Divinity Avenue to Prescott Street, where it occupies the former Hurlbut
Parking Lot, which was the vista from my 1960-61 freshman room.
From the Log24 post "Very Stable Kool-Aid" —
|
A Letter from Timothy Leary, Ph.D., July 17, 1961
Harvard University July 17, 1961
Dr. Thomas S. Szasz Dear Dr. Szasz: Your book arrived several days ago. I've spent eight hours on it and realize the task (and joy) of reading it has just begun. The Myth of Mental Illness is the most important book in the history of psychiatry. I know it is rash and premature to make this earlier judgment. I reserve the right later to revise and perhaps suggest it is the most important book published in the twentieth century. It is great in so many ways–scholarship, clinical insight, political savvy, common sense, historical sweep, human concern– and most of all for its compassionate, shattering honesty. . . . . |
|
Morton Prince, a Boston neurologist, founded the Journal of Abnormal Psychology in 1906 as an outlet especially for those who took a psychogenic view of neurotic disorders. Through experiments with hypnotism, he added appreciably to knowledge of subconscious and coconscious mental processes; The Dissociation of a Personality (Prince, 1905) still ranks as a classic. He early saw that studying normal people in the depth and detail with which one studied patients could make significant contributions to our whole understanding of human nature. Before his death he established and briefly directed the Harvard Psychological Clinic, devising the research environment out of which presently sprang major contributions to the study of personality.
— "Who Was Morton Prince?," by R. W. White, |
See as well Who Was R. W. White?
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Wednesday, December 23, 2020
Facets . . .
“The book by Hesse has many facets ….” (Link added.)
— V. V. Nalimov, In the Labyrinths of Language ,
Ch. 1, “What Language Is,” p. 22.
Related philosophical speculation —
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Sunday, December 20, 2020
Facets
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Thursday, August 20, 2020
“One More Reality Show”
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Thursday, August 6, 2020
Dramarama
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Wednesday, August 5, 2020
Tuesday, January 28, 2020
Very Stable Kool-Aid
Two of the thumbnail previews
from yesterday's 1 AM post …
Further down in the "6 Prescott St." post, the link 5 Divinity Avenue
leads to …
|
A Letter from Timothy Leary, Ph.D., July 17, 1961
Harvard University July 17, 1961
Dr. Thomas S. Szasz Dear Dr. Szasz: Your book arrived several days ago. I've spent eight hours on it and realize the task (and joy) of reading it has just begun. The Myth of Mental Illness is the most important book in the history of psychiatry. I know it is rash and premature to make this earlier judgment. I reserve the right later to revise and perhaps suggest it is the most important book published in the twentieth century. It is great in so many ways–scholarship, clinical insight, political savvy, common sense, historical sweep, human concern– and most of all for its compassionate, shattering honesty. . . . . |
The small Morton Prince House in the above letter might, according to
the above-quoted remarks by Corinna S. Rohse, be called a "jewel box."
Harvard moved it in 1978 from Divinity Avenue to its current location at
6 Prescott Street.
Related "jewel box" material for those who
prefer narrative to mathematics —
"In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test , Tom Wolfe writes about encountering
'a young psychologist,' 'Clifton Fadiman’s nephew, it turned out,' in the
waiting room of the San Mateo County jail. Fadiman and his wife were
'happily stuffing three I-Ching coins into some interminable dense volume*
of Oriental mysticism' that they planned to give Ken Kesey, the Prankster-
in-Chief whom the FBI had just nabbed after eight months on the lam.
Wolfe had been granted an interview with Kesey, and they wanted him to
tell their friend about the hidden coins. During this difficult time, they
explained, Kesey needed oracular advice."
— Tim Doody in The Morning News web 'zine on July 26, 2012**
Oracular advice related to yesterday evening's
"jewel box" post …
A 4-dimensional hypercube H (a tesseract ) has 24 square
2-dimensional faces. In its incarnation as a Galois tesseract
(a 4×4 square array of points for which the appropriate transformations
are those of the affine 4-space over the finite (i.e., Galois) two-element
field GF(2)), the 24 faces transform into 140 4-point "facets." The Galois
version of H has a group of 322,560 automorphisms. Therefore, by the
orbit-stabilizer theorem, each of the 140 facets of the Galois version has
a stabilizer group of 2,304 affine transformations.
Similar remarks apply to the I Ching In its incarnation as
a Galois hexaract , for which the symmetry group — the group of
affine transformations of the 6-dimensional affine space over GF(2) —
has not 322,560 elements, but rather 1,290,157,424,640.
* The volume Wolfe mentions was, according to Fadiman, the I Ching.
** See also this journal on that date — July 26, 2012.
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Friday, October 25, 2019
Facettenreiche Gestaltung
On the word Gestaltung —
(Here “eidolon” should instead be “eidos .”)
A search for a translation of the book "Facettenreiche Mathematik " —
A paper found in the above search —
A related translation —
See also octad.design.
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Wednesday, May 15, 2019
Facets
". . . the most magnificent 'object' in all of mathematics . . . .
is like a diamond with thousands of facets . . . ."
— MIT professor emeritus quoted here on Aug. 19, 2008
Also on that date —
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Tuesday, April 2, 2019
Friday, March 22, 2019
Charles Jencks’s Grand Unified Theory
"The stars and galaxies seem static, eternal, or moving slowly
in deterministic patterns, becoming the background stage
on which we move. But if we could speed up the sequence,
we would see how dramatic and unpredictable this background
really is — an actor, director, script and stage all at once.
Moreover, it is a unified universe, a single unfolding event
of which we are an embedded part, a narrative of highly
dangerous and fine-tuned events, something more like
a detective thriller with many crimes and last-minute escapes
than the impersonal account of astronomy textbooks.
We are only just beginning to decipher the plot and figure out
the Cosmic Code, as Heinz Pagels puts it."
— Charles Jencks, The Architecture of the Jumping Universe :
A Polemic (How Complexity Science is Changing Architecture
and Culture), Academy Editions, 1995, rev. ed. 1997
"A Grand Unified Theory (GUT) is a model in particle physics…."
— Wikipedia
"Under the GUT symmetry operation these field components
transform into one another. The reason quantum particles
appear to have different properties in nature is that the unifying
symmetry is broken. The various gluons, quarks and leptons
are analogous to the facets of a cut diamond, which appear
differently according to the way the diamond is held but in
fact are all manifestations of the same underlying object."
— Heinz Pagels, Perfect Symmetry , Bantam paperback, 1986, p. 284
See also the recent post Multifaceted Narrative.
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Saturday, March 16, 2019
Multifaceted Narrative
"Here, modernism is defined as an autonomous body
of ideas, having little or no outward reference, placing
considerable emphasis on formal aspects of the work
and maintaining a complicated—indeed, anxious—
rather than a naïve relationship with the day-to-day
world, which is the de facto view of a coherent group
of people, such as a professional or discipline-based
group that has a high sense of the seriousness and
value of what it is trying to achieve. This brisk definition…."
— Jeremy Gray, Plato's Ghost: The Modernist
Transformation of Mathematics , Princeton, 2008
"Even as the dominant modernist narrative was being written,
there were art historians who recognized that it was inaccurate.
The narrative was too focused on France . . . . Nor was it
correct to build the narrative so exclusively around formalism;
modernism was far messier, far more multifaceted than that."
— Jane Kallir, https://www.tabletmag.com/
jewish-arts-and-culture/visual-art-and-design/
269564/the-end-of-middle-class-art,
quoted here on the above date — Sept. 11, 2018.
From some related Log24 posts —
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Sunday, February 24, 2019
Lost in Rashomon
" What this research implies is that we are not just hearing different 'stories'
about the electron, one of which may be true. Rather, there is one true story,
but it has many facets, seemingly in contradiction, just like in 'Rashomon.' "
— Edward Frenkel on "the Rashomon effect"
"Program or be programmed." — The Rushkoff Maxim
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Thursday, February 21, 2019
Frenkel on “the Rashomon Effect”
Earlier in Frenkel's above opinion piece —
"What this research implies is that we are not just hearing
different 'stories' about the electron, one of which may be
true. Rather, there is one true story, but it has many facets,
seemingly in contradiction, just like in 'Rashomon.'
There is really no escape from the mysterious — some
might say, mystical — nature of the quantum world."
See also a recent New Yorker version of the fashionable cocktail-party
phrase "the Rashomon effect."
For a different approach to the dictum "there is one true story, but
it has many facets," see . . .
"Read something that means something."
— New Yorker motto
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Wednesday, September 5, 2018
Multifaceted Narrative
See also, in this journal, 23-cycle.
Update of Sept. 6, 2018, 9:05 AM ET: "The Cubist Method" —
Multifaceted narrative by James Joyce —
Multifaceted structures in pure mathematics, from Plato and R. T. Curtis —
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Monday, May 7, 2018
Glitter Ball for Cannes
In memory of a French film publicist who worked with Clint Eastwood
in 1971 on the release of "The Beguiled" —
From a New York Times graphic review dated Sept. 16, 2016 —
It's Chapter 1 of George Eliot's "Middlemarch."
Dorothea Brooke, young and brilliant, filled with passion
no one needs, is beguiled by some gemstones . . . .
The characters, moving through the book,
glitter as they turn their different facets toward us . . . .
Cf. a glitter-ball-like image in today's New York Times philosophy column
"The Stone" — a column named for the legendary philosophers' stone.
The publicist, Pierre Rissient, reportedly died early Sunday.
See as well Duelle in this journal.
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Data
(Continued from yesterday's Sunday School Lesson Plan for Peculiar Children)
Novelist George Eliot and programming pioneer Ada Lovelace —
For an image that suggests a resurrected multifaceted
(specifically, 759-faceted) Osterman Omega (as in Sunday's afternoon
Log24 post), behold a photo from today's NY Times philosophy
column "The Stone" that was reproduced here in today's previous post —
For a New York Times view of George Eliot data, see a Log24 post
of September 20, 2016, on the diamond theorem as the Middlemarch
"key to all mythologies."
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Thursday, May 3, 2018
Multifaceted . . .
. . . Con Figuras de Espantar
"He Who Searches is multifaceted in structure …"
— Publisher's description of a Helen Lane translation
of "Como en la Guerra ," by Luisa Valenzuela.
Also by Valenzuela —
Related material — An obituary from The Boston Globe today
on the April 5 death of Borinsky's translator, and . . .
"He Who Searches" may consult also posts tagged Date.
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Monday, April 23, 2018
Facets
See also the Feb. 17, 2017, post on Bertram Kostant
as well as "Mathieu Moonshine and Symmetry Surfing."
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Tuesday, December 26, 2017
Raiders of the Lost Stone
Two Students of Structure
A comment on Sean Kelly's Christmas Morning column on "aliveness"
in the New York Times philosophy series The Stone —
Diana Senechal's 1999 doctoral thesis at Yale was titled
"Diabolical Structures in the Poetics of Nikolai Gogol."
Her mother, Marjorie Senechal, has written extensively on symmetry
and served as editor-in-chief of The Mathematical Intelligencer .
From a 2013 memoir by Marjorie Senechal —
|
"While I was in Holland my enterprising student assistant at Smith had found, in Soviet Physics – Crystallography, an article by N. N. Sheftal' on tetrahedral penetration twins. She gave it to me on my return. It was just what I was looking for. The twins Sheftal' described had evidently begun as (111) contact twins, with the two crystallites rotated 60o with respect to one another. As they grew, he suggested, each crystal overgrew the edges of the other and proceeded to spread across the adjacent facet. When all was said and done, they looked like they'd grown through each other, but the reality was over-and-around. Brilliant! I thought. Could I apply this to cubes? No, evidently not. Cube facets are all (100) planes. But . . . these crystals might not have been cubes in their earliest stages, when twinning occurred! I wrote a paper on "The mechanism of certain growth twins of the penetration type" and sent it to Martin Buerger, editor of Neues Jarbuch für Mineralogie. This was before the Wrinch symposium; I had never met him. Buerger rejected it by return mail, mostly on the grounds that I hadn't quoted any of Buerger's many papers on twinning. And so I learned about turf wars in twin domains. In fact I hadn't read his papers but I quickly did. I added a reference to one of them, the paper was published, and we became friends.[5]
After reading Professor Sheftal's paper I wrote to him in Moscow; a warm and encouraging correspondence ensued, and we wrote a paper together long distance.[6] Then I heard about the scientific exchanges between the Academies of Science of the USSR and USA. I applied to spend a year at the Shubnikov Institute for Crystallography, where Sheftal' worked. I would, I proposed, study crystal growth with him, and color symmetry with Koptsik. To my delight, I was accepted for an 11-month stay. Of course the children, now 11 and 14, would come too and attend Russian schools and learn Russian; they'd managed in Holland, hadn't they? Diana, my older daughter, was as delighted as I was. We had gone to Holland on a Russian boat, and she had fallen in love with the language. (Today she holds a Ph.D. in Slavic Languages and Literature from Yale.) . . . . |
Philosophy professors and those whose only interest in mathematics
is as a path to the occult may consult the Log24 posts tagged Tsimtsum.
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Friday, February 17, 2017
Kostant Is Dead
"Bertram Kostant, professor emeritus of mathematics at MIT,
died at the Hebrew Senior Rehabilitation Center in Roslindale,
Massachusetts, on Thursday, Feb. 2, at the age of 88."
— MIT News, story dated Feb. 16, 2017
See also a search for Kostant in this journal.
Regarding the discussions of symmetries and "facets" found in
that search —
Kostant:
“A word about E(8). In my opinion, and shared by others,
E(8) is the most magnificent ‘object’ in all of mathematics.
It is like a diamond with thousands of facets. Each facet
offering a different view of its unbelievable intricate internal
structure.”
Cullinane:
In the Steiner system S(5, 8, 24) each octad might be
regarded as a "facet," with the order of the system's
automorphism group, the Mathieu group M24 , obtained
by multiplying the number of such facets, 759, by the
order of the octad stabilizer group, 322,560.
Analogously …
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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)
Göpel tetrads as 15 of the 35 projective lines in PG(3,2)
Related terminology describing the Göpel tetrads above
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Friday, April 3, 2015
NPR Requiem
Multifaceted Music Critic Andrew Porter Dies At 86
APRIL 03, 2015 4:38 PM ET
From the article:
Over the Rainbow
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Wednesday, June 25, 2014
Nocciolo
In memory of an actor “who as a boy was one of the few Jewish children
in his mostly Italian-American neighborhood in Brooklyn” —
See the link nocciolo from The Book of Abraham (Oct. 7, 2013).
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Tuesday, December 31, 2013
Christmas Ornaments
Continued from December 25—
A link from Sunday afternoon to Nov. 26, 2012,
suggests a review of one of the above structures.
The Dreaming Jewels cover at left is taken from a review
by Jo Walton at Tor.com—
"This is a book that it’s clearly been difficult
for publishers to market. The covers have been
generally pretty awful, and also very different.
I own a 1975 Corgi SF Collectors Library
paperback that I bought new for 40p in the later
seventies. It’s purple, and it has a slightly grainy
cover, and it matches my editions of The Menace
From Earth and A Canticle for Leibowitz .
(Dear old Corgi SF Collectors Editions with their
very seventies fonts! How I imprinted on them at
an early age!) I mention this, however, because
the (uncredited) illustration actually represents and
illustrates the book much better than any of the other
cover pictures I’ve seen. It shows a hexagon with an
attempt at facets, a man, a woman, hands, a snake,
and stars, all in shades of green. It isn’t attractive,
but it wouldn’t put off people who’d enjoy what’s inside
either."
The "hexagon with an attempt at facets" is actually
an icosahedron, as the above diagram shows.
(The geometric part of the diagram is from a Euclid webpage.)
For Plato's dream about these jewels, see his Timaeus.
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Wednesday, December 25, 2013
Rotating the Facets
“… her mind rotated the facts….”
Related material— hypercube rotation,* in the context
of rotational symmetries of the Platonic solids:
“I’ve heard of affairs that are strictly Platonic”
* Footnote added on Dec. 26, 2013 —
See Arnold Emch, “Triple and Multiple Systems, Their Geometric
Configurations and Groups,” Trans. Amer. Math. Soc. 31 (1929),
No. 1, 25–42.
On page 42, Emch describes the above method of rotating a
hypercube’s 8 facets (i.e., three-dimensional cubes) to count
rotational symmetries —
See also Diamond Theory in 1937.
Also on p. 42, Emch mentions work of Carmichael on a
Steiner system with the Mathieu group M11 as automorphism
group, and poses the problem of finding such systems and
groups that are larger. This may have inspired the 1931
discovery by Carmichael of the Steiner system S(5, 8, 24),
which has as automorphisms the Mathieu group M24 .
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Monday, December 3, 2012
The Revisiting
Alan Cowell in the The New York Times ,
October 21, 2006—
"Mr. Pinter played the role of Krapp,
a 69-year-old man revisiting
a tape recording he had made at 39…."
See also a weblog post by a 69-year-old man
revisiting a drawing he had made at 39.
The revisiting:
On Guy Fawkes Day 2011,
a return to Guy Fawkes day 2005—
Contrapuntal Themes in a Shadowland.
The drawing:
A clearer version, from 1981, of the central object below —
For commentary on the original 1981 drawing, see
Diamond-Faceted: Transformations of the Rock.
(A link in that page to "an earlier note from 1981"
leads to remarks from exactly thirty years before
the 2011 post, made on another Guy Fawkes Day.)
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Wednesday, October 10, 2012
Melancholia, Depression, Ambiguity
Occurrences of the phrase "magic square" in Lowe-Porter's translation of the Thomas Mann novel Doctor Faustus—
"On the wall above the piano was an arithmetical diagram fastened with drawing-pins, something he had found in a second-hand shop: a so-called magic square, such as appears also in Dürer's Melancolia , along with the hour-glass, the circle, the scale, the polyhedron, and other symbols. Here as there, the figure was divided into sixteen Arabic-numbered fields, in such a way that number one was in the right-hand lower corner, sixteen in the upper left; and the magic, or the oddity, simply consisted in the fact that the sum of these numerals, however you added them, straight down, crosswise, or diagonally, always came to thirty-four. What the principle was upon which this magic uniformity rested I never made out, but by virtue of the prominent place Adrian had given it over the piano, it always attracted the eye, and I believe I never visited his room without giving a quick glance, slanting up or straight down and testing once more the invariable, incredible result."
….
"Adrian kept without changing during the whole four and a half years he spent in Leipzig his two-room quarters in Peterstrasse near the Collegium Beatae Virginis, where he had again pinned the magic square above his cottage piano."
….
" 'The decisive factor is that every note, without exception, has significance and function according to its place in the basic series or its derivatives. That would guarantee what I call the indifference to harmony and melody.'
'A magic square,' I said. 'But do you hope to have people hear all that?' "
….
" 'Extraordinarily Dürerish. You love it. First "how will I shiver after the sun"; and then the houre-glasse of the Melancolia . Is the magic square coming too?' "
….
"Here I will remind the reader of a conversation I had with Adrian on a long-ago day, the day of his sister's wedding at Buchel, as we walked round the Cow Trough. He developed for me— under pressure of a headache— his idea of the 'strict style,' derived from the way in which, as in the lied 'O lieb Madel, wie schlecht bist du ' melody and harmony are determined by the permutation of a fundamental five-note motif, the symbolic letters h, e, a, e, e-flat. He showed me the 'magic square' of a style of technique which yet developed the extreme of variety out of identical material and in which there is no longer anything unthematic, anything that could not prove itself to be a variation of an ever constant element. This style, this technique, he said, admitted no note, not one, which did not fulfil its thematic function in the whole structure— there was no longer any free note."
Review of related material—
Last night's midnight post (disambiguation), the followup 1 AM post (ambiguation), today's noon post (ambiguity), and Dürer in this journal.
The tesseracts of the noon post are related to the Dürer magic square by a well-known adjacency property.
"… the once stable 'father's depression' has been transmuted into a shifting reality that shimmered in a multiplicity of facets."
— Haim Omer, Tel-Aviv University, on Milanese ambiguation therapy,
p. 321 in "Three Styles of Constructive Therapy,"
Constructive Therapies, Vol. 2 , pp. 319-333,
ed. by Michael F. Hoyt (Guilford Press paperback, 1998)
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