See also "Six-Set" in this journal
and "Cube Geometry Continues."
Friday, June 21, 2019
Cube Tales for Solstice Day
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Saturday, June 1, 2019
Cuboctahedron Labeling Update
See this evening's update to the May 31 post
"Working Sketch of Aitchison’s Mathieu Cuboctahedron" —
". . . And then of course there is the obvious labeling derived from
the … permutahedron —"
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Friday, May 31, 2019
Working Sketch of Aitchison’s Mathieu Cuboctahedron
The above sketch indicates one way to apply the elements of S4
to the Aitchison cuboctahedron . It is a rough sketch illustrating a
correspondence between four edge-hexagons and four label-sets.
The labeling is not as neat as that of a permutahedron by S4
shown below, but can perhaps be improved.
Permutahedron labeled by S4 .
Update of 9 PM EDT June 1, 2019 —
. . . And then of course there is the obvious labeling derived from
the above permutahedron —
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Tuesday, May 21, 2019
Cube Geometry Continues.
An illustration from the April 20, 2016, post
Symmetric Generation of a Simple Group —
"The geometry of unit cubes is a meeting point
of several different subjects in mathematics."
— Chuanming Zong, Bulletin of the American
Mathematical Society , January 2005
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Tuesday, January 1, 2019
Sunday, December 30, 2018
Also Sprach Aitchison
The New Yorker reviewing "Bumblebee" —
"There is one reliable source for superhero sublimity,
and it’s all the more surprising that it’s a franchise with
no sacred inspiration whatsoever but, rather, of purely
and unabashedly mercantile origins: the 'Transformers'
series, based on a set of toys, in which Michael Bay’s
exhilarating filmmaking offers phantasmagorical textures
of an uncanny unconscious resonance."
— Richard Brody on December 29, 2018
"Before time began, there was the Cube."
— Optimus Prime
Some backstory — A Riddle for Davos, Jan. 22, 2014.
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Sunday, December 9, 2018
Quaternions in a Small Space
The previous post, on the 3×3 square in ancient China,
suggests a review of group actions on that square
that include the quaternion group.
Click to enlarge —
Three links from the above finitegeometry.org webpage on the
quaternion group —
-
Visualizing GL(2,p) — A 1985 note illustrating group actions
on the 3×3 (ninefold) square. -
Another 1985 note showing group actions on the 3×3 square
transferred to the 2x2x2 (eightfold) cube. - Quaternions in an Affine Galois Plane — A webpage from 2010.
Related material —
See as well the two Log24 posts of December 1st, 2018 —
Character and In Memoriam.
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Sunday, December 2, 2018
Symmetric Generation …
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Saturday, September 22, 2018
Symmetric Generation, by Curtis
Norwegian artist Josefine Lyche —
Lyche's shirt honors the late Kurt Cobain.
"Here we are now, entertain us."
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Symmetric Generation, by Netflix
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Friday, September 21, 2018
Symmetric Generation, by Nao
"The creation of a new world
starts now.
Once again I am tied
to the logic of this
Hyper-symmetrical-dimension."
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Saturday, August 25, 2018
“Waugh, Orwell. Orwell, Waugh.”
Suggested by a review of Curl on Modernism —
Related material —
Waugh + Orwell in this journal and …
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Monday, June 4, 2018
The Trinity Stone Defined
“Unsheathe your dagger definitions.” — James Joyce, Ulysses
The “triple cross” link in the previous post referenced the eightfold cube
as a structure that might be called the trinity stone .
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Tuesday, January 2, 2018
Debs and Redhead
The above images were suggested in part by the birthdays
on Sept. 21, 2011, of Bill Murray and Stephen King.
More seriously, also in this journal on that date, from a post
titled Symmetric Generation —
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Wednesday, September 13, 2017
Summer of 1984
The previous two posts dealt, rather indirectly, with
the notion of "cube bricks" (Cullinane, 1984) —
Group actions on partitions —
Cube Bricks 1984 —
Another mathematical remark from 1984 —
For further details, see Triangles Are Square.
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Tuesday, June 20, 2017
Epic
Continuing the previous post's theme …
Group actions on partitions —
Cube Bricks 1984 —
Related material — Posts now tagged Device Narratives.
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Tuesday, March 28, 2017
Bit by Bit
From Log24, "Cube Bricks 1984" —
Also on March 9, 2017 —
For those who prefer graphic art —
Broken Symmetries in Diamond Space —
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Thursday, November 3, 2016
Triple Cross
(Continued … See the title in this journal, as well as Cube Bricks.)
Cube Bricks 1984 —
Related material —
Dirac and Geometry in this journal,
Kummer's Quartic Surface in this journal,
Nanavira Thera in this journal, and
The Razor's Edge and Nanavira Thera.
See as well Bill Murray's 1984 film "The Razor's Edge" …
Movie poster from 1984 —
"A thin line separates
love from hate,
success from failure,
life from death."
Three other dualities, from Nanavira Thera in 1959 —
"I find that there are, in every situation,
three independent dualities…."
(Click to enlarge.)
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Wednesday, October 5, 2016
Sources
From a Google image search yesterday —
Sources (left to right, top to bottom) —
Math Guy (July 16, 2014)
The Galois Tesseract (Sept. 1, 2011)
The Full Force of Roman Law (April 21, 2014)
A Great Moonshine (Sept. 25, 2015)
A Point of Identity (August 8, 2016)
Pascal via Curtis (April 6, 2013)
Correspondences (August 6, 2011)
Symmetric Generation (Sept. 21, 2011)
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Thursday, July 14, 2016
Meditation from an April 1
Related material from the same day —
See also …
Cube Bricks 1984 —
The above bricks appeared in some earlier Log24 posts.
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Wednesday, April 20, 2016
Symmetric Generation of a Simple Group
The reference in the previous post to the work of Guitart and
The Road to Universal Logic suggests a fiction involving
the symmetric generation of the simple group of order 168.
See The Diamond Archetype and a fictional account of the road to Hell …
The cover illustration below has been adapted to
replace the flames of PyrE with the eightfold cube.
For related symmetric generation of a much larger group, see Solomon’s Cube.
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Monday, April 4, 2016
Cube for Berlin
Foreword by Sir Michael Atiyah —
"Poincaré said that science is no more a collection of facts
than a house is a collection of bricks. The facts have to be
ordered or structured, they have to fit a theory, a construct
(often mathematical) in the human mind. . . .
… Mathematics may be art, but to the general public it is
a black art, more akin to magic and mystery. This presents
a constant challenge to the mathematical community: to
explain how art fits into our subject and what we mean by beauty.
In attempting to bridge this divide I have always found that
architecture is the best of the arts to compare with mathematics.
The analogy between the two subjects is not hard to describe
and enables abstract ideas to be exemplified by bricks and mortar,
in the spirit of the Poincaré quotation I used earlier."
— Sir Michael Atiyah, "The Art of Mathematics"
in the AMS Notices , January 2010
Judy Bass, Los Angeles Times , March 12, 1989 —
"Like Rubik's Cube, The Eight demands to be pondered."
As does a figure from 1984, Cullinane's Cube —
For natural group actions on the Cullinane cube,
see "The Eightfold Cube" and
"A Simple Reflection Group of Order 168."
See also the recent post Cube Bricks 1984 —
Related remark from the literature —
Note that only the static structure is described by Felsner, not the
168 group actions discussed by Cullinane. For remarks on such
group actions in the literature, see "Cube Space, 1984-2003."
(From Anatomy of a Cube, Sept. 18, 2011.)
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Friday, March 4, 2016
Cube Bricks 1984
Related aesthetics —
"Poincaré said that science is no more a collection of facts
than a house is a collection of bricks. The facts have to be
ordered or structured, they have to fit a theory, a construct
(often mathematical) in the human mind. . . .
… Mathematics may be art, but to the general public it is
a black art, more akin to magic and mystery. This presents
a constant challenge to the mathematical community: to
explain how art fits into our subject and what we mean by beauty.
In attempting to bridge this divide I have always found that
architecture is the best of the arts to compare with mathematics.
The analogy between the two subjects is not hard to describe
and enables abstract ideas to be exemplified by bricks and mortar,
in the spirit of the Poincaré quotation I used earlier."
— Sir Michael Atiyah, "The Art of Mathematics"
in the AMS Notices , January 2010
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Monday, October 19, 2015
Symmetric Generation of the Simple Order-168 Group
This post continues recent thoughts on the work of René Guitart.
A 2014 article by Guitart gives a great deal of detail on his
approach to symmetric generation of the simple group of order 168 —
“Hexagonal Logic of the Field F8 as a Boolean Logic
with Three Involutive Modalities,” pp. 191-220 in
The Road to Universal Logic:
Festschrift for 50th Birthday of
Jean-Yves Béziau, Volume I,
Editors: Arnold Koslow, Arthur Buchsbaum,
Birkhäuser Studies in Universal Logic, dated 2015
by publisher but Oct. 11, 2014, by Amazon.com.
See also the eightfold cube in this journal.
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Friday, March 27, 2015
Pursuit of Gestalt*
The art above is by the Copenhagen studio
Hvass & Hannibal. For a photo of the artists,
see a webpage on Beijing Design Week 2011.
Hvass and Hannibal were apparently in Beijing
for the "open workshop," Sept. 17-23, 2011.
Gestalt-related material from this journal that week —
- Objectivity
- Anatomy of a Cube
- Relativity Problem Revisited
- Symmetric Generation
- Sicilian Reflections
* Title suggested by that of a book by Quine.
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Thursday, February 28, 2013
Monday, June 18, 2012
Surface
"Poetry is an illumination of a surface…."
— Wallace Stevens
Some poetic remarks related to a different surface, Klein's Quartic—
This link between the Klein map κ and the Mathieu group M24
is a source of great delight to the author. Both objects were
found in the 1870s, but no connection between them was
known. Indeed, the class of maximal subgroups of M24
isomorphic to the simple group of order 168 (often known,
especially to geometers, as the Klein group; see Baker [8])
remained undiscovered until the 1960s. That generators for
the group can be read off so easily from the map is
immensely pleasing.
— R. T. Curtis, Symmetric Generation of Groups ,
Cambridge University Press, 2007, page 39
Other poetic remarks related to the simple group of order 168—
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Sunday, June 17, 2012
Congruent Group Actions
A Google search today yielded no results
for the phrase "congruent group actions."
Places where this phrase might prove useful include—
- Actions of the quaternion group in finite geometry
- Affine group actions in finite geometry
- The "symmetric generation" technique of R. T. Curtis
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Monday, October 3, 2011
Mathieu Symmetry
The following may help show why R.T. Curtis calls his approach
to sporadic groups symmetric generation—
Related material— Yesterday's Symmetric Generation Illustrated.
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Sunday, October 2, 2011
Emerson on Mathematics
From "The Poet" (1844)—
If the imagination intoxicates the poet, it is not inactive in other men. The metamorphosis excites in the beholder an emotion of joy.
The use of symbols has a certain power of emancipation and exhilaration for all men. We seem to be touched by a wand, which makes us dance and run about happily, like children. We are like persons who come out of a cave or cellar into the open air. This is the effect on us of tropes, fables, oracles, and all poetic forms. Poets are thus liberating gods. Men have really got a new sense, and found within their world, another world or nest of worlds; for the metamorphosis once seen, we divine that it does not stop. I will not now consider how much this makes the charm of algebra and the mathematics, which also have their tropes, but it is felt in every definition….
… Here is the difference betwixt the poet and the mystic, that the last nails a symbol to one sense, which was a true sense for a moment, but soon becomes old and false…. Mysticism consists in the mistake of an accidental and individual symbol for an universal one…. And the mystic must be steadily told,— All that you say is just as true without the tedious use of that symbol as with it. Let us have a little algebra, instead of this trite rhetoric,— universal signs, instead of these village symbols,— and we shall both be gainers.
See also Weyl on the use of symbols (in coordinate systems) and today's previous posts Birth of a Poet and Symmetric Generation Illustrated.
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Symmetric Generation Illustrated
R.T. Curtis in a 1990 paper* discussed his method of "symmetric generation" of groups as applied to the Mathieu groups
See Finite Relativity and the Log24 posts Relativity Problem Revisited (Sept. 20) and Symmetric Generation (Sept. 21).
Here is some exposition of how this works with
* "Geometric Interpretations of the ‘Natural’ Generators of the Mathieu groups," Mathematical Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society (1990), Vol. 107, Issue 01, pp. 19-26.
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Saturday, September 24, 2011
Ariadne and the Exorcist
The title describes two philosophical events (one major, one minor) from the same day— Thursday, July 5, 2007. Some background from 2001:
"Are the finite simple groups, like the prime numbers, jewels strung on an as-yet invisible thread? And will this thread lead us out of the current labyrinthine proof to a radically new proof of the Classification Theorem?" (p. 345)
— Ronald Solomon, "A Brief History of the Classification of Finite Simple Groups," Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society , Vol. 38 No. 3 (July 2001), pp. 315-352
The major event— On July 5, 2007, Cambridge University Press published Robert T. Curtis's Symmetric Generation of Groups.*
Curtis's book does not purport to lead us out of Solomon's labyrinth, but its publication date may furnish a Jungian synchronistic clue to help in exiting another nightmare labyrinth— that of postmodernist nominalism.
The minor event— The posting of Their Name is Legion in this journal on July 5, 2007.
* This is the date given by Amazon.co.uk and by BookDepository.com. Other sources give a later July date, perhaps applicable to the book's publication in the U.S. rather than Britain.
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Thursday, September 22, 2011
Sicilian Reflections
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Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Symmetric Generation
Suggested by yesterday's Relativity Problem Revisited and by Cassirer on Objectivity—
From Symmetric Generation of Groups , by R.T. Curtis (Cambridge U. Press, 2007)—
"… we are saying much more than that
some set of seven involutions, which would be a very weak
requirement. We are asserting that M 24 is generated by a set
of seven involutions which possesses all the symmetries of
acting on the points of the 7-point projective plane…."
— Symmetric Generation , p. 41
"It turns out that this approach is particularly revealing and that
many simple groups, both sporadic and classical, have surprisingly
simple definitions of this type."
— Symmetric Generation , p. 42
See also (click to enlarge)—
Cassirer's remarks connect the concept of objectivity with that of object .
The above quotations perhaps indicate how the Mathieu group
"This is the moment which I call epiphany. First we recognise that the object is one integral thing, then we recognise that it is an organised composite structure, a thing in fact: finally, when the relation of the parts is exquisite, when the parts are adjusted to the special point, we recognise that it is that thing which it is. Its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance. The soul of the commonest object, the structure of which is so adjusted, seems to us radiant. The object achieves its epiphany."
— James Joyce, Stephen Hero
For a simpler object "which possesses all the symmetries of
For symmetric generation of
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Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Relativity Problem Revisited
A footnote was added to Finite Relativity—
Background:
Weyl on what he calls the relativity problem—
“The relativity problem is one of central significance throughout geometry and algebra and has been recognized as such by the mathematicians at an early time.”
– Hermann Weyl, 1949, “Relativity Theory as a Stimulus in Mathematical Research“
“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, 1946, The Classical Groups , Princeton University Press, p. 16
…. A note of Feb. 20, 1986, supplied an example of such coordinatizations in finite geometry. In that note, the group of mediating transformations acted directly on coordinates within a 4×4 array. When the 4×4 array is embedded in a 4×6 array, a larger and more interesting group, M 24 (containing the original group), acts on the larger array. There is no obvious solution to Weyl’s relativity problem for M 24. That is, there is no obvious way* to apply exactly 24 distinct transformable coordinate-sets (or symbol-strings ) to the 24 array elements in such a way that the natural group of mediating transformations of the 24 symbol-strings is M 24. ….
Footnote of Sept. 20, 2011:
* R.T. Curtis has, it seems, a non-obvious way that involves strings of seven symbols. His abstract for a 1990 paper says that in his construction “The generators of M 24 are defined… as permutations of twenty-four 7-cycles in the action of PSL2(7) on seven letters….”
See “Geometric Interpretations of the ‘Natural’ Generators of the Mathieu groups,” by R.T. Curtis, Mathematical Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society (1990), Vol. 107, Issue 01, pp. 19-26. (Rec. Jan. 3, 1989, revised Feb. 3, 1989.) This paper was published online on Oct. 24, 2008.
Some related articles by Curtis:
R.T. Curtis, “Natural Constructions of the Mathieu groups,” Math. Proc. Cambridge Philos. Soc. (1989), Vol. 106, pp. 423-429
R.T. Curtis. “Symmetric Presentations I: Introduction, with Particular Reference to the Mathieu groups M 12 and M 24” In Proceedings of 1990 LMS Durham Conference ‘Groups, Combinatorics and Geometry’ (eds. M. W. Liebeck and J. Saxl), London Math. Soc. Lecture Note Series 165, Cambridge University Press, 1992, pp. 380–396
R.T. Curtis, “A Survey of Symmetric Generation of Sporadic Simple Groups,” in The Atlas of Finite Groups: Ten Years On , (eds. R.T. Curtis and R.A. Wilson), London Math. Soc. Lecture Note Series 249, Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 39–57
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Sunday, August 3, 2008
Sunday August 3, 2008
Kindergarten
Geometry
Geometry
Preview of a Tom Stoppard play presented at Town Hall in Manhattan on March 14, 2008 (Pi Day and Einstein's birthday):
The play's title, "Every Good Boy Deserves Favour," is a mnemonic for the notes of the treble clef EGBDF.
The place, Town Hall, West 43rd Street. The time, 8 p.m., Friday, March 14. One single performance only, to the tinkle– or the clang?– of a triangle. Echoing perhaps the clang-clack of Warsaw Pact tanks muscling into Prague in August 1968.
The “u” in favour is the British way, the Stoppard way, "EGBDF" being "a Play for Actors and Orchestra" by Tom Stoppard (words) and André Previn (music).
And what a play!– as luminescent as always where Stoppard is concerned. The music component of the one-nighter at Town Hall– a showcase for the Boston University College of Fine Arts– is by a 47-piece live orchestra, the significant instrument being, well, a triangle.
When, in 1974, André Previn, then principal conductor of the London Symphony, invited Stoppard "to write something which had the need of a live full-time orchestra onstage," the 36-year-old playwright jumped at the chance.
One hitch: Stoppard at the time knew "very little about 'serious' music… My qualifications for writing about an orchestra," he says in his introduction to the 1978 Grove Press edition of "EGBDF," "amounted to a spell as a triangle player in a kindergarten percussion band."
Review of the same play as presented at Chautauqua Institution on July 24, 2008:
"Stoppard's modus operandi– to teasingly introduce numerous clever tidbits designed to challenge the audience."
— Jane Vranish, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Saturday, August 2, 2008
"The leader of the band is tired
And his eyes are growing old
But his blood runs through
My instrument
And his song is in my soul."
— Dan Fogelberg
"He's watching us all the time."
|
Finnegans Wake, Book II, Episode 2, pp. 296-297:
I'll make you to see figuratleavely the whome of your eternal geomater. And if you flung her headdress on her from under her highlows you'd wheeze whyse Salmonson set his seel on a hexengown.1 Hissss!, Arrah, go on! Fin for fun! 1 The chape of Doña Speranza of the Nacion. |
|
Reciprocity From my entry of Sept. 1, 2003:
"…the principle of taking and giving, of learning and teaching, of listening and storytelling, in a word: of reciprocity…. … E. M. Forster famously advised his readers, 'Only connect.' 'Reciprocity' would be Michael Kruger's succinct philosophy, with all that the word implies." — William Boyd, review of Himmelfarb, a novel by Michael Kruger, in The New York Times Book Review, October 30, 1994 Last year's entry on this date:
The picture above is of the complete graph K6 … Six points with an edge connecting every pair of points… Fifteen edges in all. Diamond theory describes how the 15 two-element subsets of a six-element set (represented by edges in the picture above) may be arranged as 15 of the 16 parts of a 4×4 array, and how such an array relates to group-theoretic concepts, including Sylvester's synthematic totals as they relate to constructions of the Mathieu group M24. If diamond theory illustrates any general philosophical principle, it is probably the interplay of opposites…. "Reciprocity" in the sense of Lao Tzu. See Reciprocity and Reversal in Lao Tzu. For a sense of "reciprocity" more closely related to Michael Kruger's alleged philosophy, see the Confucian concept of Shu (Analects 15:23 or 24) described in Kruger's novel is in part about a Jew: the quintessential Jewish symbol, the star of David, embedded in the K6 graph above, expresses the reciprocity of male and female, as my May 2003 archives illustrate. The star of David also appears as part of a graphic design for cubes that illustrate the concepts of diamond theory:
Click on the design for details. Those who prefer a Jewish approach to physics can find the star of David, in the form of K6, applied to the sixteen 4×4 Dirac matrices, in
A Graphical Representation The star of David also appears, if only as a heuristic arrangement, in a note that shows generating partitions of the affine group on 64 points arranged in two opposing triplets.
Having thus, as the New York Times advises, paid tribute to a Jewish symbol, we may note, in closing, a much more sophisticated and subtle concept of reciprocity due to Euler, Legendre, and Gauss. See |
"Finn MacCool ate the Salmon of Knowledge."
Wikipedia:
"George Salmon spent his boyhood in Cork City, Ireland. His father was a linen merchant. He graduated from Trinity College Dublin at the age of 19 with exceptionally high honours in mathematics. In 1841 at age 21 he was appointed to a position in the mathematics department at Trinity College Dublin. In 1845 he was appointed concurrently to a position in the theology department at Trinity College Dublin, having been confirmed in that year as an Anglican priest."
Related material:
Arrangements for
56 Triangles.
For more on the
arrangement of
triangles discussed
in Finnegans Wake,
see Log24 on Pi Day,
March 14, 2008.
Happy birthday,
Martin Sheen.
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Wednesday, September 3, 2003
Wednesday September 3, 2003
Reciprocity
From my entry of Sept. 1, 2003:
"…the principle of taking and giving, of learning and teaching, of listening and storytelling, in a word: of reciprocity….
… E. M. Forster famously advised his readers, 'Only connect.' 'Reciprocity' would be Michael Kruger's succinct philosophy, with all that the word implies."
— William Boyd, review of Himmelfarb, New York Times Book Review, October 30, 1994
Last year's entry on this date:
|
Today's birthday:
"Mathematics is the music of reason."
Sylvester, a nineteenth-century mathematician, coined the phrase "synthematic totals" to describe some structures based on 6-element sets that R. T. Curtis has called "rather unwieldy objects." See Curtis's abstract, Symmetric Generation of Finite Groups, John Baez's essay, Some Thoughts on the Number 6, and my website, Diamond Theory. |
The picture above is of the complete graph
Diamond theory describes how the 15 two-element subsets of a six-element set (represented by edges in the picture above) may be arranged as 15 of the 16 parts of a 4×4 array, and how such an array relates to group-theoretic concepts, including Sylvester's synthematic totals as they relate to constructions of the Mathieu group M24.
If diamond theory illustrates any general philosophical principle, it is probably the interplay of opposites…. "Reciprocity" in the sense of Lao Tzu. See
Reciprocity and Reversal in Lao Tzu.
For a sense of "reciprocity" more closely related to Michael Kruger's alleged philosophy, see the Confucian concept of Shu (Analects 15:23 or 24) described in
Kruger's novel is in part about a Jew: the quintessential Jewish symbol, the star of David, embedded in the
Click on the design for details.
Those who prefer a Jewish approach to physics can find the star of David, in the form of
A Graphical Representation
of the Dirac Algebra.
The star of David also appears, if only as a heuristic arrangement, in a note that shows generating partitions of the affine group on 64 points arranged in two opposing triplets.
Having thus, as the New York Times advises, paid tribute to a Jewish symbol, we may note, in closing, a much more sophisticated and subtle concept of reciprocity due to Euler, Legendre, and Gauss. See
Tuesday, September 3, 2002
Tuesday September 3, 2002
Today's birthday: James Joseph Sylvester
"Mathematics is the music of reason." — J. J. Sylvester
Sylvester, a nineteenth-century mathematician, coined the phrase "synthematic totals" to describe some structures based on 6-element sets that R. T. Curtis has called "rather unwieldy objects." See Curtis's abstract, Symmetric Generation of Finite Groups, John Baez's essay, Some Thoughts on the Number 6, and my website, Diamond Theory. See also the abstract of a December 7, 2000, talk, Mathematics and the Art of M. C. Escher, in which Curtis notes that graphic designs can "often convey a mathematical idea more eloquently than pages of symbolism."
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