Log24

Wednesday, February 12, 2020

The Reality Bond

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 3:33 pm

The plane at left is modeled naturally by
seven types of “cuts” in the cube at right.

Structure of the eightfold cube

 

Monday, April 17, 2017

Hatched

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

Related art —

See also the previous post.

Saturday, April 15, 2017

Quanta Dating

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 3:15 pm

From Quanta Magazine  —

For the Church of Synchronology

See also this  journal on July 17, 2014, and March 28, 2017.

Thursday, July 17, 2014

Paradigm Shift:

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:01 am
 

Continuous Euclidean space to discrete Galois space*

Euclidean space:

Point, line, square, cube, tesseract

From a page by Bryan Clair

Counting symmetries in Euclidean space:

Galois space:

Image-- examples from Galois affine geometry

Counting symmetries of  Galois space:
IMAGE - The Diamond Theorem

The reason for these graphic symmetries in affine Galois space —

symmetries of the underlying projective Galois space:

* For related remarks, see posts of May 26-28, 2012.

Friday, June 22, 2012

Bowling in Diagon Alley

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 8:28 am

IMAGE- Josefine Lyche bowling, from her Facebook page

Josefine Lyche bowling (Facebook, June 12, 2012)

"Where Does Math Come From?"

A professor of philosophy in 1984 on Socrates's geometric proof in Plato's Meno  dialogue—

"These recondite issues matter because theories about mathematics have had a big place in Western philosophy. All kinds of outlandish doctrines have tried to explain the nature of mathematical knowledge. Socrates set the ball rolling…."

— Ian Hacking in The New York Review of Books , Feb. 16, 1984

The same professor introducing a new edition of Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions

"Paradigms Regained" (Los Angeles Review of Books , April 18, 2012)—

"That is the structure of scientific revolutions: normal science with a paradigm and a dedication to solving puzzles; followed by serious anomalies, which lead to a crisis; and finally resolution of the crisis by a new paradigm. Another famous word does not occur in the section titles: incommensurability. This is the idea that, in the course of a revolution and paradigm shift, the new ideas and assertions cannot be strictly compared to the old ones."

The Meno  proof involves inscribing diagonals  in squares. It is therefore related, albeit indirectly, to the classic Greek discovery that the diagonals of a square are incommensurable  with its sides. Hence the following discussion of incommensurability seems relevant.

IMAGE- Von Fritz in 1945 on incommensurability and the tetractys (10 as a triangular number)

See also von Fritz and incommensurability in The New York Times  (March 8, 2011).

For mathematical remarks related to the 10-dot triangular array of von Fritz, diagonals, and bowling, see this  journal on Nov. 8, 2011— "Stoned."

Monday, May 28, 2012

Fundamental Dichotomy

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:30 am

Jamie James in The Music of the Spheres
(Springer paperback, 1995),  page 28

Pythagoras constructed a table of opposites
from which he was able to derive every concept
needed for a philosophy of the phenomenal world.
As reconstructed by Aristotle in his Metaphysics,
the table contains ten dualities….

Limited
Odd
One
Right
Male
Rest
Straight
Light
Good
Square

Unlimited
Even
Many
Left
Female
Motion
Curved
Dark
Bad
Oblong

Of these dualities, the first is the most important;
all the others may be seen as different aspects
of this fundamental dichotomy.

For further information, search on peiron + apeiron  or
consult, say, Ancient Greek Philosophy , by Vijay Tankha.

The limited-unlimited contrast is not unrelated to the
contrasts between

Sunday, May 27, 2012

Finite Jest

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

IMAGE- History of Mathematics in a Nutshell

The books pictured above are From Discrete to Continuous ,
by Katherine Neal, and Geometrical Landscapes , by Amir Alexander.

Commentary—

“Harriot has given no indication of how to resolve
such problems, but he has pasted in in English,
at the bottom of his page, these three enigmatic
lines:

‘Much ado about nothing.
Great warres and no blowes.
Who is the foole now?’

Harriot’s sardonic vein of humour, and the subtlety of
his logical reasoning still have to receive their full due.”

— “Minimum and Maximum, Finite and Infinite:
Bruno and the Northumberland Circle,” by Hilary Gatti,
Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes ,
Vol. 48 (1985), pp. 144-163

Saturday, May 26, 2012

Live from New York, It’s…

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 11:30 pm

Shift Happens!

Another shift — Geometry as Discrete .

Harriot’s Cubes

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:28 pm

See also Finite Geometry and Physical Space.

Related material from MacTutor

Harriot and binary numbers

The paper by J. W. Shirley, Binary numeration before Leibniz, Amer. J. Physics 19 (8) (1951), 452-454, contains an interesting look at some mathematics which appears in the hand written papers of Thomas Harriot [1560-1621]. Using the photographs of the two original Harriot manuscript pages reproduced in Shirley’s paper, we explain how Harriot was doing arithmetic with binary numbers.

Leibniz [1646-1716] is credited with the invention [1679-1703] of binary arithmetic, that is arithmetic using base 2. Laplace wrote:-

Leibniz saw in his binary arithmetic the image of Creation. … He imagined the Unity represented God, and Zero the void; that the Supreme Being drew all beings from the void, just as unity and zero express all numbers in his system of numeration. This conception was so pleasing to Leibniz that he communicated it to the Jesuit, Grimaldi, president of the Chinese tribunal for mathematics, in the hope that this emblem of creation would convert the Emperor of China, who was very fond of the sciences …

However, Leibniz was certainly not the first person to think of doing arithmetic using numbers to base 2. Many years earlier Harriot had experimented with the idea of different number bases….

For a discussion of Harriot on the discrete-vs.-continuous question,
see Katherine Neal, From Discrete to Continuous: The Broadening
of Number Concepts in Early Modern England  (Springer, 2002),
pages 69-71.

Thursday, March 10, 2011

Paradigms Lost

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 5:48 pm

(Continued from February 19)

The cover of the April 1, 1970 second edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , by Thomas S. Kuhn—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110310-KuhnCover.jpg

This journal on January 19, 2011

IMAGE- A Galois cube: model of the 27-point affine 3-space

If Galois geometry is thought of as a paradigm shift from Euclidean geometry,
both images above— the Kuhn cover and the nine-point affine plane—
may be viewed, taken together, as illustrating the shift. The nine subcubes
of the Euclidean  3x3x3 cube on the Kuhn cover do not  form an affine plane
in the coordinate system of the Galois  cube in the second image, but they
at least suggest  such a plane. Similarly, transformations of a
non-mathematical object, the 1974 Rubik  cube, are not Galois  transformations,
but they at least suggest  such transformations.

See also today's online Harvard Crimson  illustration of problems of translation
not unrelated to the problems of commensurability  discussed by Kuhn.

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110310-CrimsonSm.jpg

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Paradigms

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 4:16 pm

"These passages suggest that the Form is a character or set of characters
common to a number of things, i.e. the feature in reality which corresponds
to a general word. But Plato also uses language which suggests not only
that the forms exist separately (χωριστά ) from all the particulars, but also
that each form is a peculiarly accurate or good particular of its own kind,
i.e. the standard particular of the kind in question or the model (παράδειγμα )
[i.e. paradigm ] to which other particulars approximate….

… Both in the Republic  and in the Sophist  there is a strong suggestion
that correct thinking is following out the connexions between Forms.
The model is mathematical thinking, e.g. the proof given in the Meno
that the square on the diagonal is double the original square in area."

— William and Martha Kneale, The Development of Logic,
Oxford University Press paperback, 1985

Plato's paradigm in the Meno

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110217-MenoFigure16bmp.bmp

Changed paradigm in the diamond theorem (2×2 case) —

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110217-MenoFigureColored16bmp.bmp

Aspects of the paradigm change* —

Monochrome figures to
colored figures

Areas to
transformations

Continuous transformations to
non-continuous transformations

Euclidean geometry to
finite geometry

Euclidean quantities to
finite fields

Some pedagogues may find handling all of these
conceptual changes simultaneously somewhat difficult.

* "Paradigm shift " is a phrase that, as John Baez has rightly pointed out,
should be used with caution. The related phrase here was suggested by Plato's
term παράδειγμα  above, along with the commentators' specific reference to
the Meno  figure that serves as a model. (For "model" in a different sense,
see Burkard Polster.) But note that Baez's own beloved category theory
has been called a paradigm shift.

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