Saturday, August 16, 2025
Friday, December 20, 2024
For Harlan Kane: The Galois Rectangle
Galois's birthday, 1993 —
The title rectangle is featured in a recent sequel to The Galois Tesseract —
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Saturday, November 18, 2023
“Don’t solicit for your sister,* it’s not nice.” — Tom Lehrer
From this journal at 1:51 AM ET Thursday, September 8, 2022 —
"The pleasure comes from the illusion" . . .
Exercise:
Compare and contrast the following structure with the three
"bricks" of the R. T. Curtis Miracle Octad Generator (MOG).
Note that the 4-row-2-column "brick" at left is quite
different from the other two bricks, which together
show chevron variations within a Galois tesseract —
.
Further Weil remarks . . .
A Slew of Prayers
"The pleasure comes from the illusion
and the far from clear meaning;
once the illusion is dissipated,
and knowledge obtained, one becomes
indifferent at the same time;
at least in the Gitâ there is a slew of prayers
(slokas) on the subject, each one more final
than the previous ones."
* —
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Friday, April 28, 2023
The Small Space Model
From the previous post, "The Large Language Model,"
a passage from Wikipedia —
"… sometimes large models undergo a 'discontinuous phase shift'
where the model suddenly acquires substantial abilities not seen
in smaller models. These are known as 'emergent abilities,' and
have been the subject of substantial study." — Wikipedia
Compare and contrast
this with the change undergone by a "small space model,"
that of the finite affine 4-space A with 16 points (a Galois tesseract ),
when it is augmented by an eight-point "octad." The 30 eight-point
hyperplanes of A then have a natural extension within the new
24-point set to 759 eight-point octads, and the 322,560 affine
automorphisms of the space expand to the 244,823,040 Mathieu
automorphisms of the 759-octad set — a (5, 8, 24) Steiner system.
For a visual analogue of the enlarged 24-point space and some remarks
on analogy by Simone Weil's brother, a mathematician, see this journal
on September 8 and 9, 2022.
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Tuesday, March 28, 2023
Onestone Parable
“You’re literally looking for like a one in a million thing.
You filter out the 999,999 of the boring ones, then
you’ve got something that’s weird, and then that’s worth
further exploration.”
— Quote from a mathematics story today at Gizmodo
A different "one in a million" mathematics story —
On Steiner Quadruple Systems of Order 16.
See also Galois Tesseract.
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Thursday, December 22, 2022
Thursday, November 24, 2022
The Drum Machine
"A struggling music producer sells his soul to a 1970s drum machine."
— Summary of a short film by Kevin Ignatius, "Hook Man."
The music producer pawns his current drum device
and acquires a demonic 1970s machine.
Artistic symbolism —
The 16-pad device at left may be viewed by enthusiasts of ekphrasis
as a Galois tesseract, and the machine at right as the voice of
Hal Foster, an art theorist who graduated from Princeton in 1977.
For an example of Foster's prose style, see
the current London Review of Books.
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Thursday, September 8, 2022
Analogy in Mathematics: Chevron Variations
André Weil in 1940 on analogy in mathematics —
| . "Once it is possible to translate any particular proof from one theory to another, then the analogy has ceased to be productive for this purpose; it would cease to be at all productive if at one point we had a meaningful and natural way of deriving both theories from a single one. In this sense, around 1820, mathematicians (Gauss, Abel, Galois, Jacobi) permitted themselves, with anguish and delight, to be guided by the analogy between the division of the circle (Gauss’s problem) and the division of elliptic functions. Today, we can easily show that both problems have a place in the theory of abelian equations; we have the theory (I am speaking of a purely algebraic theory, so it is not a matter of number theory in this case) of abelian extensions. Gone is the analogy: gone are the two theories, their conflicts and their delicious reciprocal reflections, their furtive caresses, their inexplicable quarrels; alas, all is just one theory, whose majestic beauty can no longer excite us. Nothing is more fecund than these slightly adulterous relationships; nothing gives greater pleasure to the connoisseur, whether he participates in it, or even if he is an historian contemplating it retrospectively, accompanied, nevertheless, by a touch of melancholy. The pleasure comes from the illusion and the far from clear meaning; once the illusion is dissipated, and knowledge obtained, one becomes indifferent at the same time; at least in the Gitâ there is a slew of prayers (slokas) on the subject, each one more final than the previous ones." |
"The pleasure comes from the illusion" . . .
Exercise:
Compare and contrast the following structure with the three
"bricks" of the R. T. Curtis Miracle Octad Generator (MOG).
Note that the 4-row-2-column "brick" at left is quite
different from the other two bricks, which together
show chevron variations within a Galois tesseract —
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Saturday, September 3, 2022
1984 Revisited
Note the three quadruplets of parallel edges in the 1984 figure above.
The above Gates article appeared earlier, in the June 2010 issue of
Physics World , with bigger illustrations. For instance —
Exercise: Describe, without seeing the rest of the article,
the rule used for connecting the balls above.
Wikipedia offers a much clearer picture of a (non-adinkra) tesseract —
And then, more simply, there is the Galois tesseract —
For parts of my own world in June 2010, see this journal for that month.
The above Galois tesseract appears there as follows:
See also the Klein correspondence in a paper from 1968
in yesterday's 2:54 PM ET post.
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Saturday, March 26, 2022
Box Geometry: Space, Group, Art (Work in Progress)
| Name Tag | .Space | .Group | .Art |
|---|---|---|---|
| Box4 |
2×2 square representing the four-point finite affine geometry AG(2,2). (Box4.space) |
S4 = AGL(2,2) (Box4.group) |
(Box4.art) |
| Box6 |
3×2 (3-row, 2-column) rectangular array representing the elements of an arbitrary 6-set. |
S6 | |
| Box8 | 2x2x2 cube or 4×2 (4-row, 2-column) array. | S8 or A8 or AGL(3,2) of order 1344, or GL(3,2) of order 168 | |
| Box9 | The 3×3 square. | AGL(2,3) or GL(2,3) | |
| Box12 | The 12 edges of a cube, or a 4×3 array for picturing the actions of the Mathieu group M12. | Symmetries of the cube or elements of the group M12 | |
| Box13 | The 13 symmetry axes of the cube. | Symmetries of the cube. | |
| Box15 |
The 15 points of PG(3,2), the projective geometry of 3 dimensions over the 2-element Galois field. |
Collineations of PG(3,2) | |
| Box16 |
The 16 points of AG(4,2), the affine geometry of 4 dimensions over the 2-element Galois field. |
AGL(4,2), the affine group of |
|
| Box20 | The configuration representing Desargues's theorem. | ||
| Box21 | The 21 points and 21 lines of PG(2,4). | ||
| Box24 | The 24 points of the Steiner system S(5, 8, 24). | ||
| Box25 | A 5×5 array representing PG(2,5). | ||
| Box27 |
The 3-dimensional Galois affine space over the 3-element Galois field GF(3). |
||
| Box28 | The 28 bitangents of a plane quartic curve. | ||
| Box32 |
Pair of 4×4 arrays representing orthogonal Latin squares. |
Used to represent elements of AGL(4,2) |
|
| Box35 |
A 5-row-by-7-column array representing the 35 lines in the finite projective space PG(3,2) |
PGL(3,2), order 20,160 | |
| Box36 | Eurler's 36-officer problem. | ||
| Box45 | The 45 Pascal points of the Pascal configuration. | ||
| Box48 | The 48 elements of the group AGL(2,3). | AGL(2,3). | |
| Box56 |
The 56 three-sets within an 8-set or |
||
| Box60 | The Klein configuration. | ||
| Box64 | Solomon's cube. |
— Steven H. Cullinane, March 26-27, 2022
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Sunday, February 20, 2022
4×4 Nomenclature
The geometry of the 4×4 square may be associated with the name
Galois, as in "the Galois tesseract," or similarly with the name Kummer.
Here is a Google image search using the latter name —
(Click to enlarge.)
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Friday, December 10, 2021
Unhinged Melody
The time of the previous post was 4:46 AM ET today.
Fourteen minutes later —
"I'm a groupie, really." — Murray Bartlett in today's online NY Times
The previous post discussed group actions on a 3×3 square array. A tune
about related group actions on a 4×4 square array (a Galois tesseract ) . . .
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Sunday, December 5, 2021
Saturday, October 24, 2020
The Galois Tesseract
Stanley E. Payne and J. A. Thas in 1983* (previous post) —
“… a 4×4 grid together with
the affine lines on it is AG(2,4).”
Payne and Thas of course use their own definition
of affine lines on a grid.
Actually, a 4×4 grid together with the affine lines on it
is, viewed in a different way, not AG(2,4) but rather AG(4,2).
For AG(4,2) in the proper context, see
Affine Groups on Small Binary Spaces and
The Galois Tesseract.
* And 26 years later, in 2009.
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Saturday, March 7, 2020
The “Octad Group” as Symmetries of the 4×4 Square
From "Mathieu Moonshine and Symmetry Surfing" —
(Submitted on 29 Sep 2016, last revised 22 Jan 2018)
by Matthias R. Gaberdiel (1), Christoph A. Keller (2),
and Hynek Paul (1)
(1) Institute for Theoretical Physics, ETH Zurich
(2) Department of Mathematics, ETH Zurich
https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.09302v2 —
"This presentation of the symmetry groups Gi is
particularly well-adapted for the symmetry surfing
philosophy. In particular it is straightforward to
combine them into an overarching symmetry group G
by combining all the generators. The resulting group is
the so-called octad group
G = (Z2)4 ⋊ A8 .
It can be described as a maximal subgroup of M24
obtained by the setwise stabilizer of a particular
'reference octad' in the Golay code, which we take
to be O9 = {3,5,6,9,15,19,23,24} ∈ 𝒢24. The octad
subgroup is of order 322560, and its index in M24
is 759, which is precisely the number of
different reference octads one can choose."
This "octad group" is in fact the symmetry group of the affine 4-space over GF(2),
so described in 1979 in connection not with the Golay code but with the geometry
of the 4×4 square.* Its nature as an affine group acting on the Golay code was
known long before 1979, but its description as an affine group acting on
the 4×4 square may first have been published in connection with the
Cullinane diamond theorem and Abstract 79T-A37, "Symmetry invariance in a
diamond ring," by Steven H. Cullinane in Notices of the American Mathematical
Society , February 1979, pages A-193, 194.
* The Galois tesseract .
Update of March 15, 2020 —
Conway and Sloane on the "octad group" in 1993 —
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Monday, January 27, 2020
Jewel Box
The phrase "jewel box" in a New York Times obituary online this afternoon
suggests a review. See "And He Built a Crooked House" and Galois Tesseract.
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Monday, March 11, 2019
Ant-Man Meets Doctor Strange
The 4×4 square may also be called the Galois Tesseract .
By analogy, the 4x4x4 cube may be called the Galois Hexeract .
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Monday, October 15, 2018
History at Bellevue
The previous post, "Tesserae for a Tesseract," contains the following
passage from a 1987 review of a book about Finnegans Wake —
"Basically, Mr. Bishop sees the text from above
and as a whole — less as a sequential story than
as a box of pied type or tesserae for a mosaic,
materials for a pattern to be made."
A set of 16 of the Wechsler cubes below are tesserae that
may be used to make patterns in the Galois tesseract.
Another Bellevue story —
“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare
from which I am trying to awake.”
— James Joyce, Ulysses
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Thursday, June 21, 2018
Models of Being
A Buddhist view —
“Just fancy a scale model of Being
made out of string and cardboard.”
— Nanavira Thera, 1 October 1957,
on a model of Kummer’s Quartic Surface
mentioned by Eddington
A Christian view —
A formal view —
From a Log24 search for High Concept:
See also Galois Tesseract.
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Monday, June 11, 2018
Arty Fact
The title was suggested by the name "ARTI" of an artificial
intelligence in the new film 2036: Origin Unknown.
The Eye of ARTI —
See also a post of May 19, "Uh-Oh" —
— and a post of June 6, "Geometry for Goyim" —
Mystery box merchandise from the 2011 J. J. Abrams film Super 8
An arty fact I prefer, suggested by the triangular computer-eye forms above —
This is from the July 29, 2012, post The Galois Tesseract.
See as well . . .
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Thursday, January 25, 2018
Beware of Analogical Extension
"By an archetype I mean a systematic repertoire
of ideas by means of which a given thinker describes,
by analogical extension , some domain to which
those ideas do not immediately and literally apply."
— Max Black in Models and Metaphors
(Cornell, 1962, p. 241)
"Others … spoke of 'ultimate frames of reference' …."
— Ibid.
A "frame of reference" for the concept four quartets —
A less reputable analogical extension of the same
frame of reference —
Madeleine L'Engle in A Swiftly Tilting Planet :
"… deep in concentration, bent over the model
they were building of a tesseract:
the square squared, and squared again…."
See also the phrase Galois tesseract .
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Saturday, September 23, 2017
The Turn of the Frame
"With respect to the story's content, the frame thus acts
both as an inclusion of the exterior and as an exclusion
of the interior: it is a perturbation of the outside at the
very core of the story's inside, and as such, it is a blurring
of the very difference between inside and outside."
— Shoshana Felman on a Henry James story, p. 123 in
"Turning the Screw of Interpretation,"
Yale French Studies No. 55/56 (1977), pp. 94-207.
Published by Yale University Press.
See also the previous post and The Galois Tesseract.
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Sunday, August 27, 2017
Black Well
The “Black” of the title refers to the previous post.
For the “Well,” see Hexagram 48.
Related material —
The Galois Tesseract and, more generally, Binary Coordinate Systems.
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Saturday, June 3, 2017
Expanding the Spielraum (Continued*)
Or: The Square
"What we do may be small, but it has
a certain character of permanence."
— G. H. Hardy
* See Expanding the Spielraum in this journal.
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Tuesday, May 23, 2017
Saturday, May 20, 2017
The Ludicrous Extreme
From a review of the 2016 film "Arrival" —
"A seemingly off-hand reference to Abbott and Costello
is our gateway. In a movie as generally humorless as Arrival,
the jokes mean something. Ironically, it is Donnelly, not Banks,
who initiates the joke, naming the verbally inexpressive
Heptapod aliens after the loquacious Classical Hollywood
comedians. The squid-like aliens communicate via those beautiful,
cryptic images. Those signs, when thoroughly comprehended,
open the perceiver to a nonlinear conception of time; this is
Sapir-Whorf taken to the ludicrous extreme."
— Jordan Brower in the Los Angeles Review of Books
Further on in the review —
"Banks doesn’t fully understand the alien language, but she
knows it well enough to get by. This realization emerges
most evidently when Banks enters the alien ship and, floating
alongside Costello, converses with it in their picture-language.
She asks where Abbott is, and it responds — as presented
in subtitling — that Abbott 'is death process.'
'Death process' — dying — is not idiomatic English, and what
we see, written for us, is not a perfect translation but a
rendering of Banks’s understanding. This, it seems to me, is a
crucial moment marking the hard limit of a human mind,
working within the confines of human language to understand
an ultimately intractable xenolinguistic system."
For what may seem like an intractable xenolinguistic system to
those whose experience of mathematics is limited to portrayals
by Hollywood, see the previous post —
van Lint and Wilson Meet the Galois Tesseract.
The death process of van Lint occurred on Sept. 28, 2004.
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van Lint and Wilson Meet the Galois Tesseract*
Click image to enlarge.
The above 35 projective lines, within a 4×4 array —
.jpg){kind=link}
The above 15 projective planes, within a 4×4 array (in white) —
* See Galois Tesseract in this journal.
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Tuesday, May 2, 2017
Image Albums
Pinterest boards uploaded to the new m759.net/piwigo —
Update of May 2 —
Update of May 3 —
Update of May 8 —
Art Space board created at Pinterest
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Wednesday, October 5, 2016
Sources
From a Google image search yesterday —
Sources (left to right, top to bottom) —
Math Guy (July 16, 2014)
The Galois Tesseract (Sept. 1, 2011)
The Full Force of Roman Law (April 21, 2014)
A Great Moonshine (Sept. 25, 2015)
A Point of Identity (August 8, 2016)
Pascal via Curtis (April 6, 2013)
Correspondences (August 6, 2011)
Symmetric Generation (Sept. 21, 2011)
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Tuesday, June 9, 2015
Colorful Song
For geeks* —
" Domain, Domain on the Range , "
where Domain = the Galois tesseract and
Range = the four-element Galois field.
This post was suggested by the previous post,
by a Log24 search for Knight + Move, and by
the phrase "discouraging words" found in that search.
* A term from the 1947 film "Nightmare Alley."
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