Log24

Sunday, January 11, 2015

Real Beyond Artifice

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , , , — m759 @ 7:20 pm

A professor at Harvard has written about
"the urge to seize and display something
real beyond artifice."

He reportedly died on January 3, 2015.

An image from this journal on that date:

Confession in 'The Seventh Seal'

Another Gitterkrieg  image:

 The 24-set   Ω  of  R. T. Curtis

Click on the images for related material.

The XYZ of Being

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:00 pm

From a recent Gitterkrieg  post:

"The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The A B C of being…." — Wallace Stevens

See also the cover of the February 2015
Notices of the American Mathematical Society .

"Omega is as real  as we need it to be."
Burt Lancaster in The Osterman Weekend

Thursday, January 8, 2015

ABC Verlag, Zurich

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:00 pm

IMAGE- Dust jacket, 'Conceptions of International Exhibitions,' by Hans Neuburg, ABC Verlag, Zurich, 1969

"The motive for metaphor, shrinking from
The weight of primary noon,
The A B C of being…." — Wallace Stevens

See also Cube Trinity in this journal.

Gitterkrieg

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 11:00 am

(Continued)

From the abstract of a talk, "Extremal Lattices," at TU Graz
on Friday, Jan. 11, 2013, by Prof. Dr. Gabriele Nebe
(RWTH Aachen) —

"I will give a construction of the extremal even
unimodular lattice Γ of dimension 72  I discovered
in summer 2010. The existence of such a lattice
was a longstanding open problem. The
construction that allows to obtain the
minimum by computer is similar to the one of the
Leech lattice from E8 and of the Golay code from
the Hamming code (Turyn 1967)."

On an earlier talk by Nebe at Oberwolfach in 2011 —

"Exciting new developments were presented by
Gabriele Nebe (Extremal lattices and codes ) who
sketched the construction of her recently found
extremal lattice in 72 dimensions…."

Nebe's Oberwolfach slides include one on 
"The history of Turyn's construction" —

Nebe's list omits the year 1976. This was the year of
publication for "A New Combinatorial Approach to M24"
by R. T. Curtis, the paper that defined Curtis's 
"Miracle Octad Generator."

Turyn's 1967 construction, uncredited by Curtis, may have
been the basis for Curtis's octad-generator construction.

See Turyn in this journal.

Pilgrims

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:04 am

"Pilgrims to James Joyce's grave in Zurich, Switzerland,
continue to have their reveries fed by Hebald's 1966
life size bronze capturing the great modernist author
deep in thought, with open book in hand."

LA Times  obituary for Milton Hebald, sculptor,
     who reportedly died at 97 on Twelfth Night
     (Monday, January 5, 2014)

Related material: Joyce + Zurich + Serpent
in this journal.   

Wednesday, January 7, 2015

Gitterkrieg

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:00 pm

(Continued from Jan. 3 and Jan. 5.) 

Introduction: "Grids, You Say?" by Josefine Lyche,
and AntiChristmas 2010:

Related material:
Chapter 42 in
A History of Graphic Design ,
by Guity Novin.

Monday, January 5, 2015

Gitterkrieg*

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:00 pm
 

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Blackboard Jungle

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 8:00 AM 

From a review in the April 2013 issue of
Notices of the American Mathematical Society

"The author clearly is passionate about mathematics
as an art, as a creative process. In reading this book,
one can easily get the impression that mathematics
instruction should be more like an unfettered journey
into a jungle where an individual can make his or her
own way through that terrain."

From the book under review—

"Every morning you take your machete into the jungle
and explore and make observations, and every day
you fall more in love with the richness and splendor 
of the place."

— Lockhart, Paul (2009-04-01). 
A Mathematician's Lament:
How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating
and Imaginative Art Form 
 (p. 92).
Bellevue Literary Press. Kindle Edition. 

Related material: Blackboard Jungle in this journal.

See also Galois Space and Solomon's Mines.

"I pondered deeply, then, over the
adventures of the jungle. And after
some work with a colored pencil
I succeeded in making my first drawing.
My Drawing Number One.
It looked something like this:

I showed my masterpiece to the
grown-ups, and asked them whether
the drawing frightened them.

But they answered: 'Why should
anyone be frightened by a hat?'"

The Little Prince

* For the title, see Plato Thanks the Academy (Jan. 3).

Saturday, January 3, 2015

Plato Thanks the Academy

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:00 pm

(Continued)

Confession in 'The Seventh Seal'

Click on the image for related material.

Trinity for Jews

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:08 pm

See also Interpenet-  in this  journal.

"Interpenetration, that's what I  say!"
— Adapted from Humpty Dumpty

Saturday, December 14, 2013

Beautiful Mathematics

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , , — m759 @ 7:59 pm

The title, which I dislike, is taken from a 2011 publication
of the MAA, also sold by Cambridge University Press.

Some material relevant to the title adjective:

"For those who have learned something of higher mathematics, nothing could be more natural than to use the word 'beautiful' in connection with it. Mathematical beauty, like the beauty of, say, a late Beethoven quartet, arises from a combination of strangeness and inevitability. Simply defined abstractions disclose hidden quirks and complexities. Seemingly unrelated structures turn out to have mysterious correspondences. Uncanny patterns emerge, and they remain uncanny even after being underwritten by the rigor of logic."— Jim Holt, opening of a book review in the Dec. 5, 2013, issue of The New York Review of Books

Some relevant links—

The above list was updated on Jan. 31, 2014, to include the
"Strangeness" and "Hidden quirks" links.  See also a post of
​Jan. 31, 2014.

Update of March 9, 2014 —

The link "Simply defined abstractions" is to the construction of the Steiner
system S(5, 8, 24) described by R. T. Curtis in his 1976 paper defining the
Miracle Octad Generator. It should be noted that this construction is due
to Richard J. Turyn, in a 1967 Sylvania research report. (See Emily Jennings's
talk of 1 Nov. 2012.) Compare  the Curtis construction, written in 1974,
with the Turyn construction of 1967 as described in Sphere Packings, Lattices
and Groups , by J. H. Conway and N. J. A. Sloane (first published in 1988).

Monday, December 24, 2012

All Over Again

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:00 pm

Octavio Paz —

"… the movement of analogy
begins all over once again."

See A Reappearing Number in this journal.

Illustrations:

Figure 1 —

Background: MOG in this journal.

Figure 2 —

Image-- 'Then a miracle occurs' cartoon
Cartoon by S.Harris

Background —

Image-- Google search on 'miracle octad'-- top 3 results

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