Log24

Friday, November 13, 2020

Raiders of the Lost Dorm Room

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 11:48 am

“That really is, really, I think, the Island of the Misfit Toys at that point.
You have crossed the Rubicon, you jumped on the crazy train and
you’re headed into the cliffs that guard the flat earth at that time, brother,”
said Rep. Denver Riggleman, a Republican congressman from Virginia,
in an interview."

— Jon Ward, political correspondent, Yahoo News , Nov. 12, 2020

The instinct for heaven had its counterpart:
The instinct for earth, for New Haven, for his room,
The gay tournamonde as of a single world

In which he is and as and is are one.

— Wallace Stevens, "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven"

 

Related material for comedians

See as well Sallows in this  journal.

“There exists a considerable literature
devoted to the Lo shu , much of it infected
with the kind of crypto-mystic twaddle
met with in Feng Shui.”

— Lee C. F. Sallows, Geometric Magic Squares ,
Dover Publications, 2013, page 121

Monday, May 9, 2016

Search for the Lost Theorem

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

The three Solomons of the previous post (LeWitt,
Marcus, and Golomb) suggest the three figures
-1, 0, and 1  symbols for the three elements
of the Galois field GF(3).  This in turn suggests a
Search for The Lost Theorem. Some cross-cultural
context:  The First of May, 2010.

Sunday, May 8, 2016

The Three Solomons

Earlier posts have dealt with Solomon Marcus and Solomon Golomb,
both of whom died this year — Marcus on Saint Patrick's Day, and
Golomb on Orthodox Easter Sunday. This suggests a review of
Solomon LeWitt, who died on Catholic Easter Sunday, 2007.

A quote from LeWitt indicates the depth of the word "conceptual"
in his approach to "conceptual art."

From Sol LeWitt: A Retrospective , edited by Gary Garrels, Yale University Press, 2000, p. 376:

 

THE SQUARE AND THE CUBE
by Sol LeWitt

"The best that can be said for either the square or the cube is that they are relatively uninteresting in themselves. Being basic representations of two- and three-dimensional form, they lack the expressive force of other more interesting forms and shapes. They are standard and universally recognized, no initiation being required of the viewer; it is immediately evident that a square is a square and a cube a cube. Released from the necessity of being significant in themselves, they can be better used as grammatical devices from which the work may proceed."

"Reprinted from Lucy R. Lippard et al ., “Homage to the Square,” Art in America  55, No. 4 (July-August 1967): 54. (LeWitt’s contribution was originally untitled.)"

See also the Cullinane models of some small Galois spaces

Some small Galois spaces (the Cullinane models)

Sunday, November 9, 2014

Twaddle

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

“There exists a considerable literature
devoted to the Lo shu , much of it infected
with the kind of crypto-mystic twaddle
met with in Feng Shui.”

— Lee C. F. Sallows, Geometric Magic Squares ,
Dover Publications, 2013, page 121

Cf. Raiders of the Lost Theorem, Oct. 13, 2014.

See also tonight’s previous post and
“Feng Shui” in this journal.

Friday, October 17, 2014

Mathematics and Narrative, continued:

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:01 pm

Raiders of the Lost Archetype

“… an unexpected development: the discovery of a lost archetype….”

— “The Lost Theorem,” by Lee Sallows, Mathematical Intelligencer, Fall 1997

Related material:

A scene from the 1954 film:

A check of this  journal on the above MetaFilter date — Jan. 24, 2012 —
yields a post tagged “in1954.”  From another post with that tag:

Medal of 9/15/06

Backstory:  Posts tagged Root Circle.

Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Diabolically Complex

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

The title is from a Log24 post, "Diabolically Complex Riddle," of Sept. 27, 2014.

(See also a search for "Diabolic"  in this journal, which yields an application to
"magic" squares.)

From 'The Lost Theorem,' by Lee Sallows

Monday, October 13, 2014

Sallows on “The Lost Theorem”

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 9:30 pm

Parallelograms and the structure of the 3×3 array —

Click to enlarge:

A different approach to parallelograms and arrays —

Click for original post:

Raiders of the Lost Theorem

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 12:05 pm

(Continued from Nov. 16, 2013.)

The 48 actions of GL(2,3) on a 3×3 array include the 8-element
quaternion group as a subgroup. This was illustrated in a Log24 post,
Hamilton’s Whirligig, of Jan. 5, 2006, and in a webpage whose
earliest version in the Internet Archive is from June 14, 2006.

One of these quaternion actions is pictured, without any reference
to quaternions, in a 2013 book by a Netherlands author whose
background in pure mathematics is apparently minimal:

In context (click to enlarge):

Update of later the same day —

Lee Sallows, Sept. 2011 foreword to Geometric Magic Squares —

“I first hit on the idea of a geometric magic square* in October 2001,**
and I sensed at once that I had penetrated some previously hidden portal
and was now standing on the threshold of a great adventure. It was going
to be like exploring Aladdin’s Cave. That there were treasures in the cave,
I was convinced, but how they were to be found was far from clear. The
concept of a geometric magic square is so simple that a child will grasp it
in a single glance. Ask a mathematician to create an actual specimen and
you may have a long wait before getting a response; such are the formidable
difficulties confronting the would-be constructor.”

* Defined by Sallows later in the book:

“Geometric  or, less formally, geomagic  is the term I use for
a magic square in which higher dimensional geometrical shapes
(or tiles  or pieces ) may appear in the cells instead of numbers.”

** See some geometric  matrices by Cullinane in a March 2001 webpage.

Earlier actual specimens — see Diamond Theory  excerpts published in
February 1977 and a brief description of the original 1976 monograph:

“51 pp. on the symmetries & algebra of
matrices with geometric-figure entries.”

— Steven H. Cullinane, 1977 ad in
Notices of the American Mathematical Society

The recreational topic of “magic” squares is of little relevance
to my own interests— group actions on such matrices and the
matrices’ role as models of finite geometries.

Saturday, November 16, 2013

Raiders of the Lost Theorem

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

IMAGE- The 'atomic square' in Lee Sallows's article 'The Lost Theorem'

Yes. See

The 48 actions of GL(2,3) on a 3×3 coordinate-array A,
when matrices of that group right-multiply the elements of A,
with A =

(1,1) (1,0) (1,2)
(0,1) (0,0) (0,2)
(2,1) (2,0) (2,2)

Actions of GL(2,p) on a pxp coordinate-array have the
same sorts of symmetries, where p is any odd prime.

Note that A, regarded in the Sallows manner as a magic square,
has the constant sum (0,0) in rows, columns, both diagonals, and  
all four broken diagonals (with arithmetic modulo 3).

For a more sophisticated approach to the structure of the
ninefold square, see Coxeter + Aleph.

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