Log24

Tuesday, January 14, 2025

Proofs

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 3:50 am

A phrase by Aitchison at Hiroshima . . .

"The proof of the above is a relabelling of the Klein quartic . . . ."

Related art — A relabelling of the Klein quadric  by Curtis bricks:

Update of 12:26 PM EST Wednesday, January 15, 2025  —

Here is a large (17.5 MB) PDF file containing all posts touching upon
the concept underlying the above illustration — the Klein correspondence.

(A PDF reader such as Foxit is recommended for such large files.)

Saturday, January 11, 2025

Octads within a PG(5,2) Addition Table

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 2:13 am

For some background on the PG(5,2) addition table, see Nocciolo .

Thursday, January 9, 2025

Grok 2 on the MOG and the Klein Correspondence

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:04 pm

Related illustration —

— Transcription —

Grok 2 on Klein correspondence and MOG — 9 Jan. 2025
______________________________________________________________

Prompt:

How is the Klein correspondence related to the Miracle Octad Generator?

Grok 2 response (with citations and links removed):

The Klein correspondence is closely related to the Miracle Octad Generator (MOG) through the mathematical structure they both engage with, particularly in the context of finite geometry and combinatorics.

Klein Correspondence: This refers to a mathematical framework that establishes a correspondence between points and lines in a projective space. Specifically, in the context of the MOG, it relates to the geometry of PG(3,2), the three-dimensional projective space over the field with two elements. The Klein correspondence, in this context, essentially connects the combinatorial aspects of partitions of an 8-set to the geometric structure of lines in PG(3,2).

Miracle Octad Generator (MOG): Introduced by R.T. Curtis, the MOG is a tool used in the study of the Mathieu group M24, the binary Golay code, and related structures like the Steiner system S(5,8,24). It consists of a 4×6 array where the positions are used to construct octads (sets of 8 elements) from given sets of 5 elements, reflecting the structure of the Steiner system.

Relation Between Klein Correspondence and MOG:

    Combinatorial and Geometric Link: The MOG uses the Klein correspondence to map partitions of an 8-set (into two 4-sets) to 4 parallel affine planes within PG(3,2). This mapping is natural and symmetrical, which is crucial for the MOG's functionality. The 35 partitions of an 8-set correspond to the 35 lines in PG(3,2), and this correspondence helps in understanding how to generate and visualize octads within the MOG framework.

    Structural Insight: The Klein correspondence provides a way to see how the MOG's method of generating octads can be understood geometrically. This insight is vital for exploring the symmetry and subgroup structure of M24, as the MOG's layout preserves these symmetries.

Thus, the Klein correspondence serves as a foundational link that allows the MOG to operate by translating combinatorial problems into geometric ones, facilitating the study of complex mathematical structures like the Mathieu groups and Steiner systems.

Sunday, January 5, 2025

Klein Quadric Octad Generator

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:23 pm

Saturday, January 4, 2025

For a Contemporary Faustus

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 5:58 pm

Faustus cover, Thomas Mann

A contemporary  minimalist composer whose work resembles that of
Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus  reportedly died at 85 Tuesday
in Paris on New Year's Eve (December 31, 2024). The phrase
"mathematical clarity" in his obituary in today's New York Times
suggests a synchronology check —

Compare and contrast.

Tuesday, December 31, 2024

The Yellow Brick Road to the
Miracle Octad Generator, with Conwell’s Heptads

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 2:42 am

The Klein quadric as background for the Miracle Octad Generator of R. T. Curtis —

The Klein quadric, PG(5,2), and the 'bricks' of the Miracle Octad Generator

See also Saniga on heptads in this journal.

Monday, December 23, 2024

A Projective-Space Home for the Miracle Octad Generator

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 3:17 pm

The natural geometric setting for the "bricks" in the Miracle Octad Generator
(MOG) of Robert T. Curtis is PG(5,2), the projective 5-space over GF(2).

The Klein correspondence mirrors the 35 lines of PG(3,2) — and hence, via the 
graphic approach below, the 35 "heavy bricks" of the MOG that match those
lines — in PG(5,2), where the bricks may be studied with geometric methods,
as an alternative to Curtis's original MOG combinatorial construction methods.

The construction below of a PG(5,2) brick space  is analogous to the
"line diagrams"  construction of a PG(3,2) in Cullinane's diamond theorem.

Saturday, December 21, 2024

Coordinatizing Brick Space

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 4:10 am

Exercise:  The eight-part diagrams in the graphic "brick space"
model of PG(5,2) below need to be suitably labeled with six-part
GF(2) coordinates to help illustrate the Klein correspondence that
underlies the large Mathieu group M24.

A possible approach:  The lines  separating dark squares from light
(i.e., blue from white or yellow) in the figure above may be added
in XOR fashion (as if they were diamond theorem  line diagrams)
to form a six  dimensional vector space, which, after a suitable basis
is chosen, may be represented by six-tuples of 0's and 1's.

Related reading —

log24.com/log24/241221-'Brick Space « Log24' – m759.net.pdf .

This is a large (15.1 MB) file.  The Foxit PDF reader is recommended.

The PDF is from a search for Brick Space  in this journal.

Some context:  http://m759.net/wordpress/?s=Weyl+Coordinatization.

Thursday, December 19, 2024

Different Angles

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 7:26 pm

"Drawing the same face from different angles sounds fun,
but let me tell you – it’s not. It’s not fun at all. It’s HARD!!"

Loisvb on Instagram, Dec. 18, 2024

Likewise for PG(5,2).

Exercise:  The eight-part diagrams in the graphic "brick space"
model of PG(5,2) below need to be suitably labeled with six-part
GF(2) coordinates to help illustrate the Klein correspondence that
underlies the large Mathieu group M24.

Tuesday, September 17, 2024

Brick Space Exercise

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:23 am

Exercise: Assign coordinates over GF(2) to the graphic

Tuesday, August 27, 2024

For Rubik Worshippers

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 2:37 pm

Galois space of six dimensions represented in Euclidean spaces of three and of two dimensions

The above is six-dimensional as an affine  space, but only five-dimensional
as a  projective  space . . . the space PG(5, 2).

As the domain of the smallest model of the Klein correspondence and the
Klein quadric, PG (5,2) is not without mathematical importance.

See Chess Bricks and Ovid.group.

This post was suggested by the date July 6, 2024 in a Warren, PA obituary
and by that date in this  journal.

Friday, July 5, 2024

De Bruyn on the Klein Quadric

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 10:31 pm

— De Bruyn, Bart. “Quadratic Sets on the Klein Quadric.”
JOURNAL OF COMBINATORIAL THEORY SERIES A,
vol. 190, 2022, doi:10.1016/j.jcta.2022.105635.

Related material —

Log24 on Wednesday, July 3, 2024: "The Nutshell Miracle" . . .

In particular, within that post, my own 2019 "nutshell" diagram of PG(5,2):

PG(5,2)

Wednesday, July 3, 2024

The Nutshell Miracle

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 10:42 pm

'Then a miracle occurs' cartoon

Cartoon by S. Harris

From a search in this journal for nocciolo

From a search in this journal for PG(5,2)

From a search in this journal for Curtis MOG

IMAGE- The Miracle Octad Generator (MOG) of R.T. Curtis

Shown above is a rearranged version of the
Miracle Octad Generator (MOG) of R. T. Curtis
("A new combinatorial approach to M24,"
Math. Proc. Camb. Phil. Soc., 79 (1976), 25-42.)

From a search in this journal for Klein Correspondence

Philippe Cara on the Klein correspondence

The picture of PG(5,2) above as an expanded nocciolo
shows that the Miracle Octad Generator illustrates
the Klein correspondence.

Update of 10:33 PM ET Friday, July 5, 2024 —

See the July 5 post "De Bruyn on the Klein Quadric."

Tuesday, June 21, 2022

For the Church of Synchronology*

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:30 pm

'The Klein Correspondence' at Cambridge University Press, in a 2009 book on Twistor Geometry

See also this journal on the above Cambridge U. Press date.

"There are many places one can read about twistors
and the mathematics that underlies them. One that
I can especially recommend is the book Twistor Geometry
and Field Theory
, by Ward and Wells."

— Peter Woit, "Not Even Wrong" weblog post, March 6, 2020.

* A fictional entity. See Synchronology in this journal.

Wednesday, February 9, 2022

8!

Conwell, 1910 — 

(In modern notation, Conwell is showing that the complete
projective group of collineations and dualities of the finite
3-space PG (3,2) is of order 8 factorial, i.e. "8!"
In other words, that any  permutation of eight things may be
regarded as a geometric transformation of PG (3,2).)

Later discussion of this same "Klein correspondence"
between Conwell's 3-space and 5-space . . .

A somewhat simpler toy model —

Page from 'The Paradise of Childhood,' 1906 edition

Related fiction —  "The Bulk Beings" of the film "Interstellar."

Monday, January 17, 2022

Heisenberg Revisited

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:42 pm

Click to enlarge:

See as well Klein Quadric  in this  journal.

Sunday, October 11, 2020

Saniga on Einstein

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 8:25 am

See Einstein on Acid” by Stephen Battersby
(New Scientist , Vol. 180, issue 2426 — 20 Dec. 2003, 40-43).

That 2003 article is about some speculations of Metod Saniga.

“Saniga is not a professional mystic or
a peddler of drugs, he is an astrophysicist
at the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava.
It seems unlikely that studying stars led him to
such a way-out view of space and time. Has he
undergone a drug-induced epiphany, or a period
of mental instability? ‘No, no, no,’ Saniga says,
‘I am a perfectly sane person.'”

Some more recent and much less speculative remarks by Saniga
are related to the Klein correspondence —

arXiv.org > math > arXiv:1409.5691:
Mathematics > Combinatorics
[Submitted on 17 Sep 2014]
The Complement of Binary Klein Quadric
as a Combinatorial Grassmannian

By Metod Saniga

“Given a hyperbolic quadric of PG(5,2), there are 28 points
off this quadric and 56 lines skew to it. It is shown that the
(286,563)-configuration formed by these points and lines
is isomorphic to the combinatorial Grassmannian of type
G2(8). It is also pointed out that a set of seven points of
G2(8) whose labels share a mark corresponds to a
Conwell heptad of PG(5,2). Gradual removal of Conwell
heptads from the (286,563)-configuration yields a nested
sequence of binomial configurations identical with part of
that found to be associated with Cayley-Dickson algebras
(arXiv:1405.6888).”

Related entertainment —

See Log24 on the date, 17 Sept. 2014, of Saniga’s Klein-quadric article:

Articulation Day.

Wednesday, September 16, 2020

Critical Invisibility

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:44 am

Synchronology check —

This  journal on the above dates —
8 January 2019 (“For the Church of Synchronology“)
and 24 April 2019 (“Critical Visibility“).

Related mathematics:  Klein Correspondence posts.

Related entertainment: “The Bulk Beings.”

The above Physical Review  remarks were found in a search
for a purely mathematical concept —

“35 points” + projective space . . .

Sunday, December 29, 2019

Articulation Raid

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 7:45 am

“… And so each venture Is a new beginning,
a raid on the inarticulate….”

— T. S. Eliot, “East Coker V” in Four Quartets

arXiv:1409.5691v1 [math.CO]  17 Sep 2014

The Complement of Binary Klein Quadric as
a Combinatorial Grassmannian

Metod Saniga,
Institute for Discrete Mathematics and Geometry,
Vienna University of Technology,
Wiedner Hauptstraße 8–10, A-1040 Vienna, Austria
(metod.saniga@tuwien.ac.at) and
Astronomical Institute, Slovak Academy of Sciences,
SK-05960 Tatransk ́a Lomnica, Slovak Republic
(msaniga@astro.sk)

Abstract

Given a hyperbolic quadric of PG(5, 2), there are 28 points off this quadric and 56 lines skew to it. It is shown that the (286,563)-configuration formed by these points and lines is isomorphic to the combinatorial Grassmannian of type G2(8). It is also pointed out that a set of seven points of G2(8) whose labels share a mark corresponds to a Conwell heptad of PG(5, 2). Gradual removal of Conwell heptads from the (286,563)-configuration yields a nested sequence of binomial configurations identical with part of that found to be associated with Cayley-Dickson algebras (arXiv:1405.6888).

Keywords:

Combinatorial Grassmannian −
Binary Klein Quadric − Conwell Heptad

See also this  journal on the above date — 17 September 2014.

Wednesday, December 11, 2019

Klein Quadric

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 1:06 am

The architecture of the recent post 
Geometry of 6 and 8 is in part
a reference to the Klein quadric.

Thursday, June 28, 2018

Eine Kleine Nachtmusik

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:00 am

See  Klein Quartic  and  Klein Quadric.

Monday, May 28, 2018

Skewers

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:16 pm

A piece co-written by Ivanov, the author noted in the previous post, was cited
in my "Geometry of the 4×4 Square."

Also cited there —  A paper by Pasini and Van Maldeghem that mentions
the Klein quadric.

Those sources suggested a search —

The link is to some geometry recently described by Tabachnikov
that seems rather elegant:

For another, more direct, connection to the geometry of the 4×4 square,
see Richard Evan Schwartz in this  journal.

This same Schwartz appears also in the above Tabachnikov paper:

Tuesday, April 3, 2018

Easter at Cambridge

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 11:33 pm

Three geometric readings, in chronological order —

Thursday, July 6, 2017

A Pleasing Situation

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 9:20 pm

The 4x4x4 cube is the natural setting
for the finite version of the Klein quadric
and the eight "heptads" discussed by
Conwell in 1910.

As R. Shaw remarked in 1995, 
"The situation is indeed quite pleasing."

Wednesday, July 5, 2017

Imaginarium of a Different Kind

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

The title refers to that of the previous post, "The Imaginarium."

In memory of a translator who reportedly died on May  22, 2017,
a passage quoted here on that date —

Related material — A paragraph added on March 15, 2017,
to the Wikipedia article on Galois geometry

George Conwell gave an early demonstration of Galois geometry in 1910 when he characterized a solution of Kirkman's schoolgirl problem as a partition of sets of skew lines in PG(3,2), the three-dimensional projective geometry over the Galois field GF(2).[3] Similar to methods of line geometry in space over a field of characteristic 0, Conwell used Plücker coordinates in PG(5,2) and identified the points representing lines in PG(3,2) as those on the Klein quadric.

— User Rgdboer

Thursday, May 26, 2016

Dorje

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 6:40 pm

Images suggested by the previous post

Note the name "Dorje" in the first image above.

Remarks related to the name "Dorje," as well as to
 "Projective Geometry and PT-Symmetric Dirac Hamiltonian,"
a 2009 paper by Y. Jack Ng  and the late Hendrik van Dam —

Dorje C. Brody, 'Consistency of PT-Symmetric Quantum Mechanics'

Remarks for the Church of Synchronology from December 16, 2015,
the date of the above Dorje  arXiv upload —

Expanding the Spielraum

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:45 am

(Continued)

The physicist Hendrik van Dam was mentioned in recent posts.

He reportedly died at 78 on February 11, 2013.

A post from that date, and a followup —

Wednesday, May 25, 2016

Kummer and Dirac

From "Projective Geometry and PT-Symmetric Dirac Hamiltonian,"
Y. Jack Ng  and H. van Dam, 
Physics Letters B , Volume 673, Issue 3,
23 March 2009, Pages 237–239

(http://arxiv.org/abs/0901.2579v2, last revised Feb. 20, 2009)

" Studies of spin-½ theories in the framework of projective geometry
have been undertaken before. See, e.g., Ref. [4]. 1 "

1 These papers are rather mathematical and technical.
The authors of the first two papers discuss the Dirac equation
in terms of the Plucker-Klein correspondence between lines of
a three-dimensional projective space and points of a quadric
in a five-dimensional projective space. The last paper shows
that the Dirac equation bears a certain relation to Kummer’s
surface, viz., the structure of the Dirac ring of matrices is 
related to that of Kummer’s 166 configuration . . . ."

[4]

O. Veblen
Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA , 19 (1933), p. 503
Full Text via CrossRef

E.M. Bruins
Proc. Nederl. Akad. Wetensch. , 52 (1949), p. 1135

F.C. Taylor Jr., Master thesis, University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill (1968), unpublished


A remark of my own on the structure of Kummer’s 166 configuration . . . .

See that structure in this  journal, for instance —

See as well yesterday morning's post.

Friday, May 13, 2016

Geometry and Kinematics

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 10:31 pm

"Just as both tragedy and comedy can be written
by using the same letters of the alphabet, the vast
variety of events in this world can be realized by
the same atoms through their different arrangements
and movements. Geometry and kinematics, which
were made possible by the void, proved to be still
more important in some way than pure being."

— Werner Heisenberg in Physics and Philosophy

For more about geometry and kinematics, see (for instance)

"An introduction to line geometry with applications,"
by Helmut Pottmann, Martin Peternell, and Bahram Ravani,
Computer-Aided Design  31 (1999), 3-16.

The concepts of line geometry (null point, null plane, null polarity,
linear complex, Klein quadric, etc.) are also of interest in finite  geometry.
Some small finite spaces have as their natural models arrays of cubes .

Friday, March 21, 2014

Three Constructions of the Miracle Octad Generator

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , , , , — m759 @ 12:24 pm

IMAGE- Two constructions, by Turyn/Curtis, and by Conway, of the Miracle Octad Generator

See also a Log24 post on this subject from Dec. 14, 2013,
especially (scroll down) the update of March 9, 2014.

Related material on the Turyn-Curtis construction
from the University of Cambridge —

— Slide by "Dr. Parker" — Apparently Richard A. Parker —
Lecture 4, "Discovering M24," in slides for lectures 1-8 from lectures
at Cambridge in 2010-2011 on "Sporadic and Related Groups."
See also the Parker lectures of 2012-2013 on the same topic.

A third construction of Curtis's 35  4×6  1976 MOG arrays would use
Cullinane's analysis of the 4×4 subarrays' affine and projective structure,
and point out the fact that Conwell's 1910 correspondence of the 35
4+4-partitions of an 8-set with the 35 lines of the projective 3-space
over the 2-element field, PG(3, 2), is essentially the same correspondence
as that constituting Curtis's 1976 MOG.

See The Diamond Theorem,  Finite RelativityGalois Space,
Generating the Octad Generator, and The Klein Correspondence.

Update of March 22-March 23 —

Adding together as (0,1)-matrices over GF(2) the black parts (black
squares as 1's, all other squares as 0's) of the 35  4×6 arrays of the 1976
Curtis MOG would then reveal*  the symmetric role played in octads
by what Curtis called the heavy brick , and so reveal also the action of
S3 on the three Curtis bricks that leaves invariant the set of all 759
octads of the S(5, 8, 24) constructed from the 35  MOG arrays.  For more
details of this "by-hand" construction, see Geometry of the 4×4 Square.
For the mathematical properties of the S(5, 8, 24), it is convenient to
have a separate construction (such as Turyn's), not  by hand, of the
extended binary Golay code. See the Brouwer preprint quoted above.

* "Then a miracle occurs," as in the classic 1977 Sidney Harris cartoon.

Illustration of array addition from March 23 —

IMAGE- Discovery of the S_3 action on bricks in the Conwell-Cullinane 'by-hand' approach to octad-building

Saturday, March 8, 2014

Conwell Heptads in Eastern Europe

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 11:07 am

“Charting the Real Four-Qubit Pauli Group
via Ovoids of a Hyperbolic Quadric of PG(7,2),”
by Metod Saniga, Péter Lévay and Petr Pracna,
arXiv:1202.2973v2 [math-ph] 26 Jun 2012 —

P. 4— “It was found that +(5,2) (the Klein quadric)
has, up to isomorphism, a unique  one — also known,
after its discoverer, as a Conwell heptad  [18].
The set of 28 points lying off +(5,2) comprises
eight such heptads, any two having exactly one
point in common.”

P. 11— “This split reminds us of a similar split of
63 points of PG(5,2) into 35/28 points lying on/off
a Klein quadric +(5,2).”

[18] G. M. Conwell, Ann. Math. 11 (1910) 60–76

A similar split occurs in yesterday’s Kummer Varieties post.
See the 63 = 28 + 35 vectors of R8 discussed there.

For more about Conwell heptads, see The Klein Correspondence,
Penrose Space-Time, and a Finite Model
.

For my own remarks on the date of the above arXiv paper
by Saniga et. al., click on the image below —

Walter Gropius

Friday, March 7, 2014

Kummer Varieties

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 11:20 am

The Dream of the Expanded Field continues

Image-- The Dream of the Expanded Field

From Klein's 1893 Lectures on Mathematics —

"The varieties introduced by Wirtinger may be called Kummer varieties…."
E. Spanier, 1956

From this journal on March 10, 2013 —

From a recent paper on Kummer varieties,
arXiv:1208.1229v3 [math.AG] 12 Jun 2013,
"The Universal Kummer Threefold," by
Qingchun Ren, Steven V Sam, Gus Schrader, and Bernd Sturmfels —

IMAGE- 'Consider the 6-dimensional vector space over the 2-element field,' from 'The Universal Kummer Threefold'

Two such considerations —

IMAGE- 'American Hustle' and Art Cube

IMAGE- Cube for study of I Ching group actions, with Jackie Chan and Nicole Kidman 

Update of 10 PM ET March 7, 2014 —

The following slides by one of the "Kummer Threefold" authors give
some background related to the above 64-point vector space and
to the Weyl group of type E7(E7):

The Cayley reference is to "Algorithm for the characteristics of the
triple ϑ-functions," Journal für die Reine und Angewandte
Mathematik  87 (1879): 165-169. <http://eudml.org/doc/148412>.
To read this in the context of Cayley's other work, see pp. 441-445
of Volume 10 of his Collected Mathematical Papers .

Thursday, October 10, 2013

Klein Correspondence

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 3:26 am

(Continued from June 2, 2013)

John Bamberg continues his previous post on this subject.

Sunday, June 2, 2013

Sunday School

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , , — m759 @ 9:29 am

See the Klein correspondence  at SymOmega today and in this journal.

"The casual passerby may wonder about the name SymOmega.
This comes from the notation Sym(Ω) referring to the symmetric group
of all permutations of a set Ω, which is something all of us have
both written and read many times over."

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Form:

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , , — m759 @ 9:29 pm

Story, Structure, and the Galois Tesseract

Recent Log24 posts have referred to the 
"Penrose diamond" and Minkowski space.

The Penrose diamond has nothing whatever
to do with my 1976 monograph "Diamond Theory,"
except for the diamond shape and the connection
of the Penrose diamond to the Klein quadric—

IMAGE- The Penrose diamond and the Klein quadric

The Klein quadric occurs in the five-dimensional projective space
over a field. If the field is the two-element Galois field GF(2), the
quadric helps explain certain remarkable symmetry properties 
of the R. T. Curtis Miracle Octad Generator  (MOG), hence of
the large Mathieu group M24. These properties are also 
relevant to the 1976 "Diamond Theory" monograph.

For some background on the quadric, see (for instance)

IMAGE- Stroppel on the Klein quadric, 2008

See also The Klein Correspondence,
Penrose Space-Time, and a Finite Model
.

Related material:

"… one might crudely distinguish between philosophical
and mathematical motivation. In the first case one tries
to convince with a telling conceptual story; in the second
one relies more on the elegance of some emergent
mathematical structure. If there is a tradition in logic
it favours the former, but I have a sneaking affection for
the latter. Of course the distinction is not so clear cut.
Elegant mathematics will of itself tell a tale, and one with
the merit of simplicity. This may carry philosophical
weight. But that cannot be guaranteed: in the end one
cannot escape the need to form a judgement of significance."

– J. M. E. Hyland. "Proof Theory in the Abstract." (pdf)
Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 114, 2002, 43-78.

Those who prefer story to structure may consult 

  1. today's previous post on the Penrose diamond
  2. the remarks of Scott Aaronson on August 17, 2012
  3. the remarks in this journal on that same date
  4. the geometry of the 4×4 array in the context of M24.

Monday, November 19, 2012

Poetry and Truth

From today's noon post

"In all his poems with all their enchantments
for the poet himself, there is the final enchantment
that they are true. The significance of the poetic act
then is that it is evidence. It is instance and illustration.
It is an illumination of a surface,
the movement of a self in the rock.
Above all it is a new engagement with life.
It is that miracle to which the true faith of the poet
attaches itself."

— Wallace Stevens at Bard College, March 30, 1951

Stevens also said at Bard that

"When Joan of Arc said: 

Have no fear: what I do, I do by command.
My brothers of Paradise tell me what I have to do.

these words were the words of an hallucination.
No matter what her brothers of Paradise drove her to do,
what she did was never a poetic act of faith in reality
because it could not be."

There are those who would dispute this.

Some related material:

"Ageometretos me eisito."—
"Let no one ignorant of geometry enter."—
Said to be a saying of Plato, part of the
seal of the American Mathematical Society—

A poetic approach to geometry—

"A surface" and "the rock," from All Saints' Day, 2012

Spaces as Hypercubes

— and from 1981—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix09/090217-SolidSymmetry.jpg

Some mathematical background for poets in Purgatory—

"… the Klein correspondence underlies Conwell's discussion 
of eight heptads. These play an important role in another
correspondence, illustrated in the Miracle Octad Generator
of R. T. Curtis, that may be used to picture actions
of the large Mathieu group M24."

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Cube Review

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 3:00 pm

Last Wednesday's 11 PM post mentioned the
adjacency-isomorphism relating the 4-dimensional 
hypercube over the 2-element Galois field GF(2) to
the 4×4 array made up of 16 square cells, with
opposite edges of the 4×4 array identified.

A web page illustrates this property with diagrams that
enjoy the Karnaugh property— adjacent vertices, or cells,
differ in exactly one coordinate. A brief paper by two German
authors relates the Karnaugh property to the construction
of a magic square like that of Dürer (see last Wednesday).

In a similar way (search the Web for Karnaugh + cube ),
vertex adjacency in the 6-dimensional hypercube over GF(2) 
is isomorphic to cell adjacency in the 4x4x4 cube, with
opposite faces of the 4x4x4 cube identified.

The above cube may be used to illustrate some properties
of the 64-point Galois 6-space that are more advanced
than those studied by enthusiasts of "magic" squares
and cubes.

See

Those who prefer narrative to mathematics may
consult posts in this journal containing the word "Cuber."

Monday, August 29, 2011

Many = Six.

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

A comment today on yesterday's New York Times  philosophy column "The Stone"
notes that "Augustine… incorporated Greek ideas of perfection into Christianity."

Yesterday's post here  for the Feast of St. Augustine discussed the 2×2×2 cube.

Today's Augustine comment in the Times  reflects (through a glass darkly)
a Log24 post  from Augustine's Day, 2006, that discusses the larger 4×4×4 cube.

For related material, those who prefer narrative to philosophy may consult
Charles Williams's 1931 novel Many Dimensions . Those who prefer mathematics
to either may consult an interpretation in which Many = Six.

Galois space of six dimensions represented in Euclidean spaces of three and of two dimensions

Click image for some background.

Monday, June 27, 2011

Galois Cube Revisited

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:00 pm

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11A/110427-Cube27.jpg
   The 3×3×3 Galois Cube

    See Unity and Multiplicity.

   This cube, unlike Rubik's, is a
    purely mathematical structure.

    Its properties may be compared
    with those of the order-2  Galois
    cube (of eight subcubes, or
    elements ) and the order-4  Galois
    cube (of 64 elements). The
    order-3  cube (of 27 elements)
    lacks, because it is based on
    an odd  prime, the remarkable
    symmetry properties of its smaller
    and larger cube neighbors.

Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Art Object

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

There is more than one way
to look at a cube.

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101123-plain_cube_200x227.gif

 From Cambridge U. Press on Feb. 20, 2006 —

IMAGE- 'Cambridge Tracts in Mathematics 168: The Cube'

and from this journal on June 30, 2010 —

In memory of Wu Guanzhong, Chinese artist
who died in Beijing on June 25, 2010

Image-- The Dream of the Expanded Field

See also this journal on Feb. 20, 2006
(the day The Cube  was published).

Wednesday, June 30, 2010

Field Dream

In memory of Wu Guanzhong, Chinese artist who died in Beijing on Friday

Image-- The Dream of the Expanded Field

"Once Knecht confessed to his teacher that he wished to learn enough to be able to incorporate the system of the I Ching into the Glass Bead Game.  Elder Brother laughed.  'Go ahead and try,' he exclaimed.  'You'll see how it turns out.  Anyone can create a pretty little bamboo garden in the world.  But I doubt that the gardener would succeed in incorporating the world in his bamboo grove.'"

— Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game, translated by Richard and Clara Winston

"The Chinese painter Wu Tao-tzu was famous because he could paint nature in a unique realistic way that was able to deceive all who viewed the picture. At the end of his life he painted his last work and invited all his friends and admirers to its presentation. They saw a wonderful landscape with a romantic path, starting in the foreground between flowers and moving through meadows to high mountains in the background, where it disappeared in an evening fog. He explained that this picture summed up all his life’s work and at the end of his short talk he jumped into the painting and onto the path, walked to the background and disappeared forever."

Jürgen Teichmann. Teichmann notes that "the German poet Hermann Hesse tells a variation of this anecdote, according to his own personal view, as found in his 'Kurzgefasster Lebenslauf,' 1925."

Friday, June 25, 2010

ART WARS continued

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

The Dream of
the Expanded Field

Image-- 4x4 square and 4x4x4 cube

See The Klein Correspondence.

Thursday, October 22, 2009

Chinese Cubes

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

From the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, Jan. 26, 2005:

What is known about unit cubes
by Chuanming Zong, Peking University

Abstract: Unit cubes, from any point of view, are among the simplest and the most important objects in n-dimensional Euclidean space. In fact, as one will see from this survey, they are not simple at all….

From Log24, now:

What is known about the 4×4×4 cube
by Steven H. Cullinane, unaffiliated

Abstract: The 4×4×4 cube, from one point of view, is among the simplest and the most important objects in n-dimensional binary space. In fact, as one will see from the links below, it is not simple at all.

Solomon's Cube

The Klein Correspondence, Penrose Space-Time, and a Finite Model

Non-Euclidean Blocks

Geometry of the I Ching

Related material:

Monday's entry Just Say NO and a poem by Stevens,

"The Well Dressed Man with a Beard."

Friday, October 2, 2009

Friday October 2, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 6:00 am
Edge on Heptads

Part I: Dye on Edge

“Summary:
….we obtain various orbits of partitions of quadrics over GF(2a) by their maximal totally singular subspaces; the corresponding stabilizers in the relevant orthogonal groups are investigated. It is explained how some of these partitions naturally generalize Conwell’s heptagons for the Klein quadric in PG(5,2).”

Introduction:
In 1910 Conwell… produced his heptagons in PG(5,2) associated with the Klein quadric K whose points represent the lines of PG(3,2)…. Edge… constructed the 8 heptads of complexes in PG(3,2) directly. Both he and Conwell used their 8 objects to establish geometrically the isomorphisms SL(4,2)=A8 and O6(2)=S8 where O6(2) is the group of K….”

— “Partitions and Their Stabilizers for Line Complexes and Quadrics,” by R.H. Dye, Annali di Matematica Pura ed Applicata, Volume 114, Number 1, December 1977, pp. 173-194

Part II: Edge on Heptads

The Geometry of the Linear Fractional Group LF(4,2),” by W.L. Edge, Proc. London Math Soc., Volume s3-4, No. 1, 1954, pp. 317-342. See the historical remarks on the first page.

Note added by Edge in proof:
“Since this paper was finished I have found one by G. M. Conwell: Annals of Mathematics (2) 11 (1910), 60-76….”

Some context:

The Klein Correspondence,
Penrose Space-Time,
and a Finite Model

Thursday, July 23, 2009

Thursday July 23, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 5:01 am

A Tangled Tale

Proposed task for a quantum computer:

"Using Twistor Theory to determine the plotline of Bob Dylan's 'Tangled up in Blue'"

One approach to a solution:

"In this scheme the structure of spacetime is intrinsically quantum mechanical…. We shall demonstrate that the breaking of symmetry in a QST [quantum space-time] is intimately linked to the notion of quantum entanglement."

— "Theory of Quantum Space-Time," by Dorje C. Brody and Lane P. Hughston, Royal Society of London Proceedings Series A, Vol. 461, Issue 2061, August 2005, pp. 2679-2699

(See also The Klein Correspondence, Penrose Space-Time, and a Finite Model.)

For some less technical examples of broken symmetries, see yesterday's entry, "Alphabet vs. Goddess."

That entry displays a painting in 16 parts by Kimberly Brooks (daughter of Leonard Shlain– author of The Alphabet Versus the Goddess— and wife of comedian Albert Brooks (real name: Albert Einstein)). Kimberly Brooks is shown below with another of her paintings, titled "Blue."

http://www.log24.com/log/pix09A/090722-ArtisticVision-Sm.jpg

Click image to enlarge.

"She was workin' in a topless place
 And I stopped in for a beer,
 I just kept lookin' at the side of her face
 In the spotlight so clear.
 And later on as the crowd thinned out
 I's just about to do the same,
 She was standing there in back of my chair
 Said to me, 'Don't I know your name?'
 I muttered somethin' underneath my breath,
 She studied the lines on my face.
 I must admit I felt a little uneasy
 When she bent down to tie the laces of my shoe,
 Tangled up in blue."

-- Bob Dylan

Further entanglement with blue:

The website of the Los Angeles Police Department, designed by Kimberly Brooks's firm, Lightray Productions.

Further entanglement with shoelaces:

"Entanglement can be transmitted through chains of cause and effect– and if you speak, and another hears, that too is cause and effect.  When you say 'My shoelaces are untied' over a cellphone, you're sharing your entanglement with your shoelaces with a friend."

— "What is Evidence?," by Eliezer Yudkowsky

Sunday, March 1, 2009

Sunday March 1, 2009

Solomon's Cube
continued

"There is a book… called A Fellow of Trinity, one of series dealing with what is supposed to be Cambridge college life…. There are two heroes, a primary hero called Flowers, who is almost wholly good, and a secondary hero, a much weaker vessel, called Brown. Flowers and Brown find many dangers in university life, but the worst is a gambling saloon in Chesterton run by the Misses Bellenden, two fascinating but extremely wicked young ladies. Flowers survives all these troubles, is Second Wrangler and Senior Classic, and succeeds automatically to a Fellowship (as I suppose he would have done then). Brown succumbs, ruins his parents, takes to drink, is saved from delirium tremens during a thunderstorm only by the prayers of the Junior Dean, has much difficulty in obtaining even an Ordinary Degree, and ultimately becomes a missionary. The friendship is not shattered by these unhappy events, and Flowers's thoughts stray to Brown, with affectionate pity, as he drinks port and eats walnuts for the first time in Senior Combination Room."

— G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology

"The Solomon Key is the working title of an unreleased novel in progress by American author Dan Brown. The Solomon Key will be the third book involving the character of the Harvard professor Robert Langdon, of which the first two were Angels & Demons (2000) and The Da Vinci Code (2003)." — Wikipedia

"One has O+(6) ≅ S8, the symmetric group of order 8! …."

 — "Siegel Modular Forms and Finite Symplectic Groups," by Francesco Dalla Piazza and Bert van Geemen, May 5, 2008, preprint.

"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
 

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Tuesday February 24, 2009

 
Hollywood Nihilism
Meets
Pantheistic Solipsism

Tina Fey to Steve Martin
at the Oscars:
"Oh, Steve, no one wants
 to hear about our religion
… that we made up."

Tina Fey and Steve Martin at the 2009 Oscars

From Wallace Stevens: A World of Transforming Shapes, by Alan D. Perlis, Bucknell University Press, 1976, p. 117:

… in 'The Pediment of Appearance,' a slight narrative poem in Transport to Summer

 A group of young men enter some woods 'Hunting for the great ornament, The pediment of appearance.' Though moving through the natural world, the young men seek the artificial, or pure form, believing that in discovering this pediment, this distillation of the real, they will also discover the 'savage transparence,' the rude source of human life. In Stevens's world, such a search is futile, since it is only through observing nature that one reaches beyond it to pure form. As if to demonstrate the degree to which the young men's search is misaligned, Stevens says of them that 'they go crying/The world is myself, life is myself,' believing that what surrounds them is immaterial. Such a proclamation is a cardinal violation of Stevens's principles of the imagination.


Superficially the young men's philosophy seems to resemble what Wikipedia calls "pantheistic solipsism"– noting, however, that "This article has multiple issues."

As, indeed, does pantheistic solipsism– a philosophy (properly called "eschatological pantheistic multiple-ego solipsism") devised, with tongue in cheek, by science-fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein.

Despite their preoccupation with solipsism, Heinlein and Stevens point, each in his own poetic way, to a highly non-solipsistic topic from pure mathematics that is, unlike the religion of Martin and Fey, not made up– namely, the properties of space.

Heinlein:

"Sharpie, we have condensed six dimensions into four, then we either work by analogy into six, or we have to use math that apparently nobody but Jake and my cousin Ed understands. Unless you can think of some way to project six dimensions into three– you seem to be smart at such projections."
    I closed my eyes and thought hard. "Zebbie, I don't think it can be done. Maybe Escher could have done it."

Stevens:

A discussion of Stevens's late poem "The Rock" (1954) in Wallace Stevens: A World of Transforming Shapes, by Alan D. Perlis, Bucknell University Press, 1976, p. 120:

For Stevens, the poem "makes meanings of the rock." In the mind, "its barrenness becomes a thousand things/And so exists no more." In fact, in a peculiar irony that only a poet with Stevens's particular notion of the imagination's function could develop, the rock becomes the mind itself, shattered into such diamond-faceted brilliance that it encompasses all possibilities for human thought:

The rock is the gray particular of man's life,
The stone from which he rises, up—and—ho,
The step to the bleaker depths of his descents ...

The rock is the stern particular of the air,
The mirror of the planets, one by one,
But through man's eye, their silent rhapsodist,

Turquoise the rock, at odious evening bright
With redness that sticks fast to evil dreams;
The difficult rightness of half-risen day.

The rock is the habitation of the whole,
Its strength and measure, that which is near,
     point A
In a perspective that begins again

At B: the origin of the mango's rind.

                    (Collected Poems, 528)

Stevens's rock is associated with empty space, a concept that suggests "nothingness" to one literary critic:

B. J. Leggett, "Stevens's Late Poetry" in The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens— On the poem "The Rock":

 

"… the barren rock of the title is Stevens's symbol for the nothingness that underlies all existence, 'That in which space itself is contained'….  Its subject is its speaker's sense of nothingness and his need to be cured of it."

 

This interpretation might appeal to Joan Didion, who, as author of the classic novel Play It As It Lays, is perhaps the world's leading expert on Hollywood nihilism.

More positively…

Space is, of course, also a topic
in pure mathematics…
For instance, the 6-dimensional
affine space
(or the corresponding
5-dimensional projective space)

The 4x4x4 cube

over the two-element Galois field
can be viewed as an illustration of
Stevens's metaphor in "The Rock."

Heinlein should perhaps have had in mind the Klein correspondence when he discussed "some way to project six dimensions into three." While such a projection is of course trivial for anyone who has taken an undergraduate course in linear algebra, the following remarks by Philippe Cara present a much more meaningful mapping, using the Klein correspondence, of structures in six (affine) dimensions to structures in three.

Cara:

Philippe Cara on the Klein correspondence
Here the 6-dimensional affine
space contains the 63 points
of PG(5, 2), plus the origin, and
the 3-dimensional affine
space contains as its 8 points
Conwell's eight "heptads," as in
Generating the Octad Generator.

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Tuesday April 29, 2008

Sacerdotal Jargon
at Harvard:

Thomas Wolfe

Thomas Wolfe
(Harvard M.A., 1922)

versus

Rosalind Krauss

Rosalind Krauss
(Harvard M.A., 1964,
Ph.D., 1969)

on

The Kernel of Eternity

"No culture has a pact with eternity."
George Steiner, interview in  
The Guardian of April 19

"At that instant he saw,
in one blaze of light, an image
of unutterable conviction….
the core of life, the essential
pattern whence all other things
proceed, the kernel of eternity."

— Thomas Wolfe, Of Time
and the River, quoted in
Log24 on June 9, 2005

 

From today's online Harvard Crimson:

"… under the leadership of Faust,
Harvard students should look forward
to an ever-growing opportunity for
international experience
and artistic endeavor."

 

Wolfgang Pauli as Mephistopheles

Pauli as Mephistopheles
in a 1932 parody of
Goethe's
Faust at Niels Bohr's
institute in Copenhagen

From a recent book
on Wolfgang Pauli,
The Innermost Kernel:

Pauli's Dream Square (square plus the two diagonals)

A belated happy birthday
to the late
Felix Christian Klein
  (born on April 25) —

The Klein Group: The four elements in four colors, with black points representing the identity

Another Harvard figure quoted here on Dec. 5, 2002:

"The theory of poetry, that is to say, the total of the theories of poetry, often seems to become in time a mystical theology or, more simply, a mystique. The reason for this must by now be clear. The reason is the same reason why the pictures in a museum of modern art often seem to become in time a mystical aesthetic, a prodigious search of appearance, as if to find a way of saying and of establishing that all things, whether below or above appearance, are one and that it is only through reality, in which they are reflected or, it may be, joined together, that we can reach them. Under such stress, reality changes from substance to subtlety, a subtlety in which it was natural for Cézanne to say: 'I see planes bestriding each other and sometimes straight lines seem to me to fall' or 'Planes in color…. The colored area where shimmer the souls of the planes, in the blaze of the kindled prism, the meeting of planes in the sunlight.' The conversion of our Lumpenwelt went far beyond this. It was from the point of view of another subtlety that Klee could write: 'But he is one chosen that today comes near to the secret places where original law fosters all evolution. And what artist would not establish himself there where the organic center of all movement in time and space– which he calls the mind or heart of creation– determines every function.' Conceding that this sounds a bit like sacerdotal jargon, that is not too much to allow to those that have helped to create a new reality, a modern reality, since what has been created is nothing less."

— Wallace Stevens, Harvard College Class of 1901, "The Relations between Poetry and Painting" in The Necessary Angel (Knopf, 1951)

From a review of Rosalind Krauss's The Optical Unconscious  (MIT Press hardcover, 1993):

Krauss is concerned to present Modernism less in terms of its history than its structure, which she seeks to represent by means of a kind of diagram: "It is more interesting to think of modernism as a graph or table than a history." The "table" is a square with diagonally connected corners, of the kind most likely to be familiar to readers as the Square of Opposition, found in elementary logic texts since the mid-19th century. The square, as Krauss sees it, defines a kind of idealized space "within which to work out unbearable contradictions produced within the real field of history." This she calls, using the inevitable gallicism, "the site of Jameson's Political Unconscious" and then, in art, the optical unconscious, which consists of what Utopian Modernism had to kick downstairs, to repress, to "evacuate… from its field."

— Arthur C. Danto in ArtForum, Summer 1993

Rosalind Krauss in The Optical Unconscious (MIT Press paperback, 1994):

For a presentation of the Klein Group, see Marc Barbut, "On the Meaning of the Word 'Structure' in Mathematics," in Introduction to Structuralism, ed. Michael Lane (New York: Basic Books, 1970). Claude Lévi-Strauss uses the Klein group in his analysis of the relation between Kwakiutl and Salish masks in The Way of the Masks, trans. Sylvia Modelski (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982), p. 125; and in relation to the Oedipus myth in "The Structural Analysis of Myth," Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jackobson [sic] and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963). In a transformation of the Klein Group, A. J. Greimas has developed the semiotic square, which he describes as giving "a slightly different formulation to the same structure," in "The Interaction of Semiotic Constraints," On Meaning (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 50. Jameson uses the semiotic square in The Political Unconscious (see pp. 167, 254, 256, 277) [Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981)], as does Louis Marin in "Disneyland: A Degenerate Utopia," Glyph, no. 1 (1977), p. 64.

For related non-sacerdotal jargon, see…
 

Wikipedia on the Klein group (denoted V, for Vierergruppe):

In this representation, V is a normal subgroup of the alternating group A4 (and also the symmetric group S4) on 4 letters. In fact, it is the kernel of a surjective map from S4 to S3. According to Galois theory, the existence of the Klein four-group (and in particular, this representation of it) explains the existence of the formula for calculating the roots of quartic equations in terms of radicals.

For radicals of another sort, see A Logocentric Meditation, A Mass for Lucero, and [update of 7 PM] Steven Erlanger in today's New York Times— "France Still Divided Over Lessons of 1968 Unrest."

For material related to Klee's phrase mentioned above by Stevens, "the organic center of all movement in time and space," see the following Google search:

April 29, 2008, Google search on 'penrose space time'

Click on the above
 image for details.

See also yesterday's
Religious Art.

Monday, April 28, 2008

Monday April 28, 2008

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 7:00 am
Religious Art

The black monolith of
Kubrick's 2001 is, in
its way, an example
of religious art.

Black monolith, proportions 4x9

One artistic shortcoming
(or strength– it is, after
all, monolithic) of
that artifact is its
resistance to being
analyzed as a whole
consisting of parts, as
in a Joycean epiphany.

The following
figure does
allow such
  an epiphany.

A 2x4 array of squares

One approach to
 the epiphany:

"Transformations play
  a major role in
  modern mathematics."
– A biography of
Felix Christian Klein

The above 2×4 array
(2 columns, 4 rows)
 furnishes an example of
a transformation acting
on the parts of
an organized whole:

The 35 partitions of an 8-set into two 4-sets

For other transformations
acting on the eight parts,
hence on the 35 partitions, see
"Geometry of the 4×4 Square,"
as well as Peter J. Cameron's
"The Klein Quadric
and Triality" (pdf),
and (for added context)
"The Klein Correspondence,
Penrose Space-Time, and
a Finite Model
."

For a related structure–
  not rectangle but cube– 
see Epiphany 2008.

Monday, July 23, 2007

Monday July 23, 2007

 
Daniel Radcliffe
is 18 today.
 
Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter
 

Greetings.

“The greatest sorcerer (writes Novalis memorably)
would be the one who bewitched himself to the point of
taking his own phantasmagorias for autonomous apparitions.
Would not this be true of us?”

Jorge Luis Borges, “Avatars of the Tortoise”

El mayor hechicero (escribe memorablemente Novalis)
sería el que se hechizara hasta el punto de
tomar sus propias fantasmagorías por apariciones autónomas.
¿No sería este nuestro caso?”

Jorge Luis Borges, “Los Avatares de la Tortuga

Autonomous Apparition
 
 

At Midsummer Noon:

 
“In Many Dimensions (1931)
Williams sets before his reader the
mysterious Stone of King Solomon,
an image he probably drew from
a brief description in Waite’s
The Holy Kabbalah (1929) of
a supernatural cubic stone
on which was inscribed
‘the Divine Name.’”
 
The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070624-Waite.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.
 
Related material:
 
It is not enough to cover the rock with leaves.
We must be cured of it by a cure of the ground
Or a cure of ourselves, that is equal to a cure

Of the ground, a cure beyond forgetfulness.
And yet the leaves, if they broke into bud,
If they broke into bloom, if they bore fruit,

And if we ate the incipient colorings
Of their fresh culls might be a cure of the ground.

– Wallace Stevens, “The Rock”

 
See also
 
as well as
Hofstadter on
his magnum opus:
 
“… I realized that to me,
Gödel and Escher and Bach
were only shadows
cast in different directions by
some central solid essence.
I tried to reconstruct
the central object, and
came up with this book.”
 
Goedel Escher Bach cover
Hofstadter’s cover.

 

 
Here are three patterns,
“shadows” of a sort,
derived from a different
“central object”:
 
Faces of Solomon's Cube, related to Escher's 'Verbum'

Click on image for details.

Sunday, June 24, 2007

Sunday June 24, 2007

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:00 pm
Raiders of
the Lost Stone

(Continued from June 23)

Scott McLaren on
Charles Williams:
 
"In Many Dimensions (1931)
Williams sets before his reader the
mysterious Stone of King Solomon,
an image he probably drew
from a brief description in Waite's
The Holy Kabbalah (1929)
of a supernatural cubic stone
on which was inscribed
'the Divine Name.'"

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070624-Waite.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Related material:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070624-Cube.gif” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Solomon's Cube,

Geometry of the 4x4x4 Cube,

The Klein Correspondence,
Penrose Space-Time,
and a Finite Model

Monday, May 28, 2007

Monday May 28, 2007

Space-Time

and a Finite Model

Notes by Steven H. Cullinane
May 28, 2007

Part I: A Model of Space-Time

The following paper includes a figure illustrating Penrose’s model of  “complexified, compactified Minkowski space-time as the Klein quadric in complex projective 5-space.”
 
The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070528-Twistor.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Click on picture to enlarge.

For some background on the Klein quadric and space-time, see Roger Penrose, “On the Origins of Twistor Theory,” from Gravitation and Geometry: A Volume in Honor of Ivor Robinson, Bibliopolis, 1987.


Part II: A Corresponding Finite Model

 

The Klein quadric also occurs in a finite model of projective 5-space.  See a 1910 paper:

G. M. Conwell, The 3-space PG(3,2) and its group, Ann. of Math. 11, 60-76.

Conwell discusses the quadric, and the related Klein correspondence, in detail.  This is noted in a more recent paper by Philippe Cara:

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix07/070528-Quadric.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

 

As Cara goes on to explain, the Klein correspondence underlies Conwell’s discussion of eight heptads.  These play an important role in another correspondence, illustrated in the Miracle Octad Generator of R. T. Curtis, that may be used to picture actions of the large Mathieu group M24.


Related material:

The projective space PG(5,2), home of the Klein quadric in the finite model, may be viewed as the set of 64 points of the affine space AG(6,2), minus the origin.

The 64 points of this affine space may in turn be viewed as the 64 hexagrams of the Classic of Transformation, China’s I Ching.

There is a natural correspondence between the 64 hexagrams and the 64 subcubes of a 4x4x4 cube.  This correspondence leads to a natural way to generate the affine group AGL(6,2).  This may in turn be viewed as a group of over a trillion natural transformations of the 64 hexagrams.

Geometry of the I Ching.
“Once Knecht confessed to his teacher that he wished to learn enough to be able to incorporate the system of the I Ching into the Glass Bead Game.  Elder Brother laughed.  ‘Go ahead and try,’ he exclaimed.  ‘You’ll see how it turns out.  Anyone can create a pretty little bamboo garden in the world.  But I doubt that the gardener would succeed in incorporating the world in his bamboo grove.'”
— Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game,
  translated by Richard and Clara Winston

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