See also Priority (November 25, 2016).
Sunday, November 15, 2020
Map Methods
Wednesday, May 20, 2020
Wednesday, April 29, 2020
Curtis at Pilsen, Thursday, July 5, 2018
For an account by R. T. Curtis of how he discovered the Miracle Octad Generator,
see slides by Curtis, “Graphs and Groups,” from his talk on July 5, 2018, at the
Pilsen conference on algebraic graph theory, “Symmetry vs. Regularity: The first
50 years since Weisfeiler-Leman stabilization” (WL2018).
See also “Notes to Robert Curtis’s presentation at WL2018,” by R. T. Curtis.
Meanwhile, here on July 5, 2018 —
Simultaneous perspective does not look upon language as a path because it is not the search for meaning that orients it. Poetry does not attempt to discover what there is at the end of the road; it conceives of the text as a series of transparent strata within which the various parts—the different verbal and semantic currents—produce momentary configurations as they intertwine or break apart, as they reflect each other or efface each other. Poetry contemplates itself, fuses with itself, and obliterates itself in the crystallizations of language. Apparitions, metamorphoses, volatilizations, precipitations of presences. These configurations are crystallized time: although they are perpetually in motion, they always point to the same hour—the hour of change. Each one of them contains all the others, each one is inside the others: change is only the oft-repeated and ever-different metaphor of identity.
— Paz, Octavio. The Monkey Grammarian |
The 2018 Log24 post containing the above Paz quote goes on to quote
remarks by Lévi-Strauss. Paz’s phrase “series of transparent strata”
suggests a review of other remarks by Lévi-Strauss in the 2016 post
“Key to All Mythologies.“
Sunday, March 15, 2020
The “Octad Group”
The phrase “octad group” discussed here in a post
of March 7 is now a domain name, “octad.group,”
that leads to that post. Remarks by Conway and
Sloane now quoted there indicate how the group
that I defined in 1979 is embedded in the large
Mathieu group M24.
Related literary notes — Watson + Embedding.
Friday, March 1, 2019
Wikipedia Scholarship (Continued)
This post continues a post from yesterday on the square model of
PG(3,2) that apparently first appeared (presented as such*) in . . .
Cullinane, "Symmetry invariance in a diamond ring,"
Notices of the AMS , pp. A193-194, Feb. 1979.
Yesterday's Wikipedia presentation of the square model was today
revised by yet another anonymous author —
Revision history accounting for the above change from yesterday —
The jargon "rm OR" means "remove original research."
The added verbiage about block designs is a smokescreen having
nothing to do with the subject, which is square representation
of the 35 points and lines.
* The 35 squares, each consisting of four 4-element subsets, appeared earlier
in the Miracle Octad Generator (MOG) of R. T. Curtis (published in 1976).
They were not at that time presented as constituting a finite geometry,
either affine (AG(4,2)) or projective (PG(3,2)).
Thursday, February 28, 2019
Wikipedia Scholarship
Besides omitting the name Cullinane, the anonymous Wikipedia author
also omitted the step of representing the hypercube by a 4×4 array —
an array called in this journal a Galois tesseract.
Monday, February 20, 2017
Mathematics and Narrative
Mathematics —
Hudson's parametrization of the
4×4 square, published in 1905:
A later parametrization, from this date in 1986:
A note from later in 1986 shows the equivalence of these
two parametrizations:
Narrative —
Posts tagged Memory-History-Geometry.
The mathematically challenged may prefer the narrative of the
Creation Matrix from the religion of the Transformers:
"According to religious legend, the core of the Matrix
was created from Solomus, the god of wisdom,
trapped in the form of a crystal by Mortilus, the god
of death. Following the defeat of Mortilus, Solomus
managed to transform his crystal prison into the Matrix—
a conduit for the energies of Primus, who had himself
transformed into the life-giving computer Vector Sigma."
Friday, November 25, 2016
Priority
Before the monograph "Diamond Theory" was distributed in 1976,
two (at least) notable figures were published that illustrate
symmetry properties of the 4×4 square:
Hudson in 1905 —
Golomb in 1967 —
It is also likely that some figures illustrating Walsh functions as
two-color square arrays were published prior to 1976.
Update of Dec. 7, 2016 —
The earlier 1950's diagrams of Veitch and Karnaugh used the
1's and 0's of Boole, not those of Galois.
Tuesday, September 13, 2016
Parametrizing the 4×4 Array
The previous post discussed the parametrization of
the 4×4 array as a vector 4-space over the 2-element
Galois field GF(2).
The 4×4 array may also be parametrized by the symbol
0 along with the fifteen 2-subsets of a 6-set, as in Hudson's
1905 classic Kummer's Quartic Surface —
Hudson in 1905:
These two ways of parametrizing the 4×4 array — as a finite space
and as an array of 2-element sets — were related to one another
by Cullinane in 1986 in describing, in connection with the Curtis
"Miracle Octad Generator," what turned out to be 15 of Hudson's
1905 "Göpel tetrads":
A recap by Cullinane in 2013:
Click images for further details.
Monday, September 12, 2016
The Kummer Lattice
The previous post quoted Tom Wolfe on Chomsky's use of
the word "array."
An example of particular interest is the 4×4 array
(whether of dots or of unit squares) —
.
Some context for the 4×4 array —
The following definition indicates that the 4×4 array, when
suitably coordinatized, underlies the Kummer lattice .
Further background on the Kummer lattice:
Alice Garbagnati and Alessandra Sarti,
"Kummer Surfaces and K3 surfaces
with $(Z/2Z)^4$ symplectic action."
To appear in Rocky Mountain J. Math. —
The above article is written from the viewpoint of traditional
algebraic geometry. For a less traditional view of the underlying
affine 4-space from finite geometry, see the website
Finite Geometry of the Square and Cube.
Some further context …
"To our knowledge, the relation of the Golay code
to the Kummer lattice … is a new observation."
— Anne Taormina and Katrin Wendland,
"The overarching finite symmetry group of
Kummer surfaces in the Mathieu group M24 "
As noted earlier, Taormina and Wendland seem not to be aware of
R. W. H. T. Hudson's use of the (uncoordinatized*) 4×4 array in his
1905 book Kummer's Quartic Surface. The array was coordinatized,
i.e. given a "vector space structure," by Cullinane eight years prior to
the cited remarks of Curtis.
* Update of Sept. 14: "Uncoordinatized," but parametrized by 0 and
the 15 two-subsets of a six-set. See the post of Sept. 13.
Wednesday, May 25, 2016
Framework
"Studies of spin-½ theories in the framework of projective geometry
have been undertaken before." — Y. Jack Ng and H. van Dam,
February 20, 2009
For one such framework,* see posts from that same date
four years earlier — February 20, 2005.
* A 4×4 array. See the 1977, 1978, and 1986 versions by
Steven H. Cullinane, the 1987 version by R. T. Curtis, and
the 1988 Conway-Sloane version illustrated below —
Cullinane, 1977
Cullinane, 1978
Cullinane, 1986
Curtis, 1987
Update of 10:42 PM ET on Sunday, June 19, 2016 —
The above images are precursors to …
Conway and Sloane, 1988
Update of 10 AM ET Sept. 16, 2016 — The excerpt from the
1977 "Diamond Theory" article was added above.
Sunday, May 1, 2016
Sunday Appetizer from 1984
Judith Shulevitz in The New York Times
on Sunday, July 18, 2010
(quoted here Aug. 15, 2010) —
“What would an organic Christian Sabbath look like today?”
The 2015 German edition of Beautiful Mathematics ,
a 2011 Mathematical Association of America (MAA) book,
was retitled Mathematische Appetithäppchen —
Mathematical Appetizers . The German edition mentions
the author's source, omitted in the original American edition,
for his section 5.17, "A Group of Operations" (in German,
5.17, "Eine Gruppe von Operationen") —
Mathematische Appetithäppchen: Autor: Erickson, Martin —
"Weitere Informationen zu diesem Themenkreis finden sich |
That source was a document that has been on the Web
since 2002. The document was submitted to the MAA
in 1984 but was rejected. The German edition omits the
document's title, and describes it as merely a source for
"further information on this subject area."
The title of the document, "Binary Coordinate Systems,"
is highly relevant to figure 11.16c on page 312 of a book
published four years after the document was written: the
1988 first edition of Sphere Packings, Lattices and Groups ,
by J. H. Conway and N. J. A. Sloane —
A passage from the 1984 document —
Monday, February 1, 2016
Historical Note
Possible title:
A new graphic approach
to an old geometric approach
to a new combinatorial approach
to an old algebraic approach
to M24
Thursday, December 3, 2015
Overarching Symmetry
From p. 34 of the preprint "Snapshots of Conformal Field Theory,"
by Katrin Wendland, arXiv, 11 April 2014 —
50. Gannon, T.: Much ado about Mathieu (arXiv:1211.5531 [math.RT])
85. Taormina, A., Wendland, K.: The overarching finite symmetry group
of Kummer surfaces in the Mathieu group M24. JHEP 08, 125 (2013)
86. Taormina, A., Wendland, K.: Symmetry-surfing the moduli space
of Kummer K3s (arXiv:1303.2931 [hep-th])
87. Taormina, A., Wendland, K.: A twist in the M24 moonshine story
(arXiv:1303.3221 [hep-th])
The Wendland paper was published on Jan. 7, 2015, in
Mathematical Aspects of Quantum Field Theories ,
edited by Damien Calaque and Thomas Strobl
(Springer Mathematical Physics Studies), pages 89-129.
Saturday, July 4, 2015
Context
Some context for yesterday's post on a symplectic polarity —
This 1986 note may or may not have inspired some remarks
of Wolf Barth in his foreword to the 1990 reissue of Hudson's
1905 Kummer's Quartic Surface .
See also the diamond-theorem correlation.
Wednesday, June 17, 2015
Slow Art, Continued
The title of the previous post, "Slow Art," is a phrase
of the late art critic Robert Hughes.
Example from mathematics:
-
Göpel tetrads as subsets of a 4×4 square in the classic
1905 book Kummer's Quartic Surface by R. W. H. T. Hudson.
These subsets were constructed as helpful schematic diagrams,
without any reference to the concept of finite geometry they
were later to embody.
-
Göpel tetrads (not named as such), again as subsets of
a 4×4 square, that form the 15 isotropic projective lines of the
finite projective 3-space PG(3,2) in a note on finite geometry
from 1986 — -
Göpel tetrads as these figures of finite geometry in a 1990
foreword to the reissued 1905 book of Hudson:
Click the Barth passage to see it with its surrounding text.
Related material:
Monday, June 15, 2015
Omega Matrix
See that phrase in this journal.
See also last night's post.
The Greek letter Ω is customarily used to
denote a set that is acted upon by a group.
If the group is the affine group of 322,560
transformations of the four-dimensional
affine space over the two-element Galois
field, the appropriate Ω is the 4×4 grid above.
Monday, May 25, 2015
A Stitch in Time
The most recent version of a passage
quoted in posts tagged "May 19 Gestalt" —
"You've got to pick up every stitch." — Donovan
Tuesday, March 24, 2015
Brouwer on the Galois Tesseract
Yesterday's post suggests a review of the following —
Andries Brouwer, preprint, 1982:
"The Witt designs, Golay codes and Mathieu groups" Pages 8-9: Substructures of S(5, 8, 24) An octad is a block of S(5, 8, 24). Theorem 5.1
Let B0 be a fixed octad. The 30 octads disjoint from B0
the design of the points and affine hyperplanes in AG(4, 2), Proof…. … (iv) We have AG(4, 2).
(Proof: invoke your favorite characterization of AG(4, 2) An explicit construction of the vector space is also easy….) |
Related material: Posts tagged Priority.
Wednesday, August 13, 2014
Symplectic Structure continued
Some background for the part of the 2002 paper by Dolgachev and Keum
quoted here on January 17, 2014 —
Related material in this journal (click image for posts) —
Sunday, August 3, 2014
The Omega Matrix
Shown below is the matrix Omega from notes of Richard Evan Schwartz.
See also earlier versions (1976-1979) by Steven H. Cullinane.
Backstory: The Schwartz Notes (June 1, 2011), and Schwartz on
the American Mathematical Society's current home page:
Friday, March 21, 2014
Three Constructions 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 Relativity, Galois 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, not by hand (such as Turyn’s), 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 —
Thursday, March 20, 2014
Classical Galois
Thursday, February 6, 2014
The Representation of Minus One
For the late mathematics educator Zoltan Dienes.
“There comes a time when the learner has identified
the abstract content of a number of different games
and is practically crying out for some sort of picture
by means of which to represent that which has been
gleaned as the common core of the various activities.”
— Article by “Melanie” at Zoltan Dienes’s website
Dienes reportedly died at 97 on Jan. 11, 2014.
From this journal on that date —
A star figure and the Galois quaternion.
The square root of the former is the latter.
Update of 5:01 PM ET Feb. 6, 2014 —
An illustration by Dienes related to the diamond theorem —
See also the above 15 images in …
… and versions of the 4×4 coordinatization in The 4×4 Relativity Problem
(Jan. 17, 2014).
Friday, January 17, 2014
The 4×4 Relativity Problem
The sixteen-dot square array in yesterday’s noon post suggests
the following remarks.
“This is the relativity problem: to fix objectively a class of
equivalent coordinatizations and to ascertain the group of
transformations S mediating between them.”
— Hermann Weyl, The Classical Groups ,
Princeton University Press, 1946, p. 16
The Galois tesseract appeared in an early form in the journal
Computer Graphics and Art , Vol. 2, No. 1, February 1977—
The 1977 matrix Q is echoed in the following from 2002—
A different representation of Cullinane’s 1977 square model of the
16-point affine geometry over the two-element Galois field GF(2)
is supplied by Conway and Sloane in Sphere Packings, Lattices and Groups
(first published in 1988) :
Here a, b, c, d are basis vectors in the vector 4-space over GF(2).
(For a 1979 version of this vector space, see AMS Abstract 79T-A37.)
See also a 2011 publication of the Mathematical Association of America —
Friday, December 20, 2013
For Emil Artin
(On His Dies Natalis )…
This is asserted in an excerpt from…
"The smallest non-rank 3 strongly regular graphs
which satisfy the 4-vertex condition"
by Mikhail Klin, Mariusz Meszka, Sven Reichard, and Alex Rosa,
BAYREUTHER MATHEMATISCHE SCHRIFTEN 73 (2005), 152-212—
(Click for clearer image)
Note that Theorem 46 of Klin et al. describes the role
of the Galois tesseract in the Miracle Octad Generator
of R. T. Curtis (original 1976 version). The tesseract
(a 4×4 array) supplies the geometric part of the above
exceptional geometric-combinatorial isomorphism.
Saturday, September 21, 2013
Geometric Incarnation
The Kummer 166 configuration is the configuration of sixteen
6-sets within a 4×4 square array of points in which each 6-set
is determined by one of the 16 points of the array and
consists of the 3 other points in that point's row and the
3 other points in that point's column.
See Configurations and Squares.
The Wikipedia article Kummer surface uses a rather poetic
phrase* to describe the relationship of the 166 to a number
of other mathematical concepts — "geometric incarnation."
Related material from finitegeometry.org —
* Apparently from David Lehavi on March 18, 2007, at Citizendium .
Thursday, September 5, 2013
Friday, July 5, 2013
Mathematics and Narrative (continued)
Short Story — (Click image for some details.)
Parts of a longer story —
Monday, June 10, 2013
Galois Coordinates
Today's previous post on coordinate systems
suggests a look at the phrase "Galois coordinates."
A search shows that the phrase, though natural,
has apparently not been used before 2011* for solutions
to what Hermann Weyl called "the relativity problem."
A thorough historical essay on Galois coordinatization
in this sense would require more academic resources
than I have available. It would likely describe a number
of applications of Galois-field coordinates to square
(and perhaps to cubical) arrays that were studied before
1976, the date of my Diamond Theory monograph.
But such a survey might not find any such pre-1976
coordinatization of a 4×4 array by the 16 elements
of the vector 4-space over the Galois field with two
elements, GF(2).
Such coordinatizations are important because of their
close relationship to the Mathieu group M 24 .
See a preprint by Anne Taormina and Katrin Wendland,
"The overarching finite symmetry group of Kummer
surfaces in the Mathieu group M 24 ," with its remark
denying knowledge of any such coordinatization
prior to a 1989 paper by R. T. Curtis.
Related material:
Some images related to Galois coordinates, excerpted
from a Google search today (click to enlarge)—
* A rather abstract 2011 paper that uses the phrase
"Galois coordinates" may have some implications
for the naive form of the relativity problem
related to square and cubical arrays.
Saturday, June 1, 2013
Permanence
"What we do may be small, but it has
a certain character of permanence."
— G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology
The diamond theorem group, published without acknowledgment
of its source by the Mathematical Association of America in 2011—
Tuesday, May 28, 2013
Codes
The hypercube model of the 4-space over the 2-element Galois field GF(2):
The phrase Galois tesseract may be used to denote a different model
of the above 4-space: the 4×4 square.
MacWilliams and Sloane discussed the Miracle Octad Generator
(MOG) of R. T. Curtis further on in their book (see below), but did not
seem to realize in 1977 that the 4×4 structures within the MOG are
based on the Galois-tesseract model of the 4-space over GF(2).
The thirty-five 4×4 structures within the MOG:
Curtis himself first described these 35 square MOG patterns
combinatorially, (as his title indicated) rather than
algebraically or geometrically:
A later book co-authored by Sloane, first published in 1988,
did recognize the 4×4 MOG patterns as based on the 4×4
Galois-tesseract model.
Between the 1977 and 1988 Sloane books came the diamond theorem.
Update of May 29, 2013:
The Galois tesseract appeared in an early form in the journal
Computer Graphics and Art , Vol. 2, No. 1, February 1977
(the year the above MacWilliams-Sloane book was first published):
Sunday, May 19, 2013
Priority Claim
From an arXiv preprint submitted July 18, 2011,
and last revised on March 11, 2013 (version 4):
"By our construction, this vector space is the dual
of our hypercube F24 built on I \ O9. The vector space
structure of the latter, to our knowledge, is first
mentioned by Curtis in [Cur89]. Hence altogether
our proposition 2.3.4 gives a novel geometric
meaning in terms of Kummer geometry to the known
vector space structure on I \ O9."
[Cur89] reference:
R. T. Curtis, "Further elementary techniques using
the miracle octad generator," Proc. Edinburgh
Math. Soc. 32 (1989), 345-353 (received on
July 20, 1987).
— Anne Taormina and Katrin Wendland,
"The overarching finite symmetry group of Kummer
surfaces in the Mathieu group M 24 ,"
arXiv.org > hep-th > arXiv:1107.3834
"First mentioned by Curtis…."
No. I claim that to the best of my knowledge, the
vector space structure was first mentioned by me,
Steven H. Cullinane, in an AMS abstract submitted
in October 1978, some nine years before the
Curtis article.
Update of the above paragraph on July 6, 2013—
No. The vector space structure was described by
The vector space structure as it occurs in a 4×4 array |
See Notes on Finite Geometry for some background.
See in particular The Galois Tesseract.
For the relationship of the 1978 abstract to Kummer
geometry, see Rosenhain and Göpel Tetrads in PG(3,2).
Friday, April 26, 2013
Symmetry
Anne Taormina on Mathieu Moonshine —
This is, of course, the same group (of order 322,560) underlying the Diamond 16 Puzzle.
Saturday, January 5, 2013
Vector Addition in a Finite Field
The finite (i.e., Galois) field GF(16),
according to J. J. Seidel in 1974—
The same field according to Steven H. Cullinane in 1986,
in its guise as the affine 4-space over GF(2)—
The same field, again disguised as an affine 4-space,
according to John H. Conway and N.J.A. Sloane in
Sphere Packings, Lattices, and Groups , first published in 1988—
The above figure by Conway and Sloane summarizes, using
a 4×4 array, the additive vector-space structure of the finite
field GF(16).
This structure embodies what in Euclidean space is called
the parallelogram rule for vector addition—
(Thanks to June Lester for the 3D (uvw) part of the above figure.)
For the transition from this colored Euclidean hypercube
(used above to illustrate the parallelogram rule) to the
4×4 Galois space (illustrated by Cullinane in 1979 and
Conway and Sloane in 1988— or later… I do not have
their book’s first edition), see Diamond Theory in 1937,
Vertex Adjacency in a Tesseract and in a 4×4 Array,
Spaces as Hypercubes, and The Galois Tesseract.
For some related narrative, see tesseract in this journal.
(This post has been added to finitegeometry.org.)
Update of August 9, 2013—
Coordinates for hypercube vertices derived from the
parallelogram rule in four dimensions were better
illustrated by Jürgen Köller in a web page archived in 2002.
Update of August 13, 2013—
The four basis vectors in the 2002 Köller hypercube figure
are also visible at the bottom of the hypercube figure on
page 7 of “Diamond Theory,” excerpts from a 1976 preprint
in Computer Graphics and Art , Vol. 2, No. 1, February 1977.
A predecessor: Coxeter’s 1950 hypercube figure from
“Self-Dual Configurations and Regular Graphs.”
Monday, January 23, 2012
How It Works
J. H. Conway in 1971 discussed the role of an elementary abelian group
of order 16 in the Mathieu group M24. His approach at that time was
purely algebraic, not geometric—
For earlier (and later) discussions of the geometry (not the algebra )
of that order-16 group (i.e., the group of translations of the affine space
of 4 dimensions over the 2-element field), see The Galois Tesseract.
Thursday, September 1, 2011
How It Works
“Design is how it works.” — Steven Jobs (See Symmetry and Design.)
“By far the most important structure in design theory is the Steiner system S(5, 8, 24).”
— “Block Designs,” by Andries E. Brouwer
The name Carmichael is not to be found in Booher’s thesis. A book he does cite for the history of S(5,8,24) gives the date of Carmichael’s construction of this design as 1937. It should be dated 1931, as the following quotation shows—
From Log24 on Feb. 20, 2010—
“The linear fractional group modulo 23 of order 24•23•11 is often represented as a doubly transitive group of degree 24 on the symbols ∞, 0, 1, 2,…, 22. This transitive group contains a subgroup of order 8 each element of which transforms into itself the set ∞, 0, 1, 3, 12, 15, 21, 22 of eight elements, while the whole group transforms this set into 3•23•11 sets of eight each. This configuration of octuples has the remarkable property that any given set of five of the 24 symbols occurs in one and just one of these octuples. The largest permutation group Γ on the 24 symbols, each element of which leaves this configuration invariant, is a five-fold transitive group of degree 24 and order 24•23•22•21•20•48. This is the Mathieu group of degree 24.”
– R. D. Carmichael, “Tactical Configurations of Rank Two,” in American Journal of Mathematics, Vol. 53, No. 1 (Jan., 1931), pp. 217-240
Epigraph from Ch. 4 of Design Theory , Vol. I:
“Es is eine alte Geschichte,
doch bleibt sie immer neu ”
—Heine (Lyrisches Intermezzo XXXIX)
See also “Do you like apples?“
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
Piracy Project
Recent piracy of my work as part of a London art project suggests the following.
From http://www.trussel.com/rls/rlsgb1.htm
The 2011 Long John Silver Award for academic piracy
goes to ….
Hermann Weyl, for the remark on objectivity and invariance
in his classic work Symmetry that skillfully pirated
the much earlier work of philosopher Ernst Cassirer.
And the 2011 Parrot Award for adept academic idea-lifting
goes to …
Richard Evan Schwartz of Brown University, for his
use, without citation, of Cullinane’s work illustrating
Weyl’s “relativity problem” in a finite-geometry context.
For further details, click on the above names.
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
The Schwartz Notes
A Google search today for material on the Web that puts the diamond theorem
in context yielded a satisfyingly complete list. (See the first 21 results.)
(Customization based on signed-out search activity was disabled.)
The same search limited to results from only the past month yielded,
in addition, the following—
This turns out to be a document by one Richard Evan Schwartz,
Chancellor’s Professor of Mathematics at Brown University.
Pages 12-14 of the document, which is untitled, undated, and
unsigned, discuss the finite-geometry background of the R.T.
Curtis Miracle Octad Generator (MOG) . As today’s earlier search indicates,
this is closely related to the diamond theorem. The section relating
the geometry to the MOG is titled “The MOG and Projective Space.”
It does not mention my own work.
See Schwartz’s page 12, page 13, and page 14.
Compare to the web pages from today’s earlier search.
There are no references at the end of the Schwartz document,
but there is this at the beginning—
These are some notes on error correcting codes. Two good sources for
this material are
• From Error Correcting Codes through Sphere Packings to Simple Groups ,
by Thomas Thompson.
• Sphere Packings, Lattices, and Simple Groups by J. H. Conway and N.
Sloane
Planet Math (on the internet) also some information.
It seems clear that these inadequate remarks by Schwartz on his sources
can and should be expanded.
Thursday, October 14, 2010
Diamond Theory and Magic Squares
"A world of made
is not a world of born— pity poor flesh
and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical
ultraomnipotence."
— e. e. cummings, 1944
For one such specimen, see The Matrix of Abraham—
a 5×5 square that is hypermagical… indeed, diabolical.
Related material on the algebra and geometry underlying some smaller structures
that have also, unfortunately, become associated with the word "magic"—
- Finite Geometry of the Square and Cube
- Clifford Pickover on a 4×4 square
-
Christopher J. Henrich on the geometry of 4×4 magic squares
(without any mention of [1] above or related work dating back to 1976)
" … listen: there's a hell
of a good universe next door; let's go"
— e. e. cummings
Happy birthday, e. e.