Log24

Friday, June 10, 2022

Songlines.space

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 8:36 am

To me, the new URL "Songlines.space" suggests both the Outback
and the University of Western Australia. For the former, see
"'Max Barry' + Lexicon" in this journal. For the latter, see SymOmega.

The new URL forwards to a combination of these posts.

A related song

'The Eddington Song'

Wednesday, February 9, 2022

8!

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 12:03 am

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."

Thursday, December 19, 2019

The Black Swan

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:55 pm

See also Black Swan in this journal.

Wednesday, January 9, 2019

Valid States of Maximal Knowledge

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

"Few scripts would have the audacity
to have the deus ex machina be
Captain Midnight  decoder ring."

Review of "The House with
a Clock in Its Walls" (2018 film) 

Related mathematics (click to enlarge) . . .

The "uwa.edu.au" above is for the University of Western Australia.
See the black swan in its coat of arms (and in the above film).

Wednesday, November 1, 2017

Cameron on All Saints’ Day

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

"Nowdays, Halloween involves plastic figures of ghosts and bats
bought from the supermarket; this is driven by commerce and
in some people’s view is an American import. But it is clear that
this time of year was traditionally regarded as one where the barrier
between this world and the other was low, and supernatural
manifestations were to be expected."

Peter J. Cameron today.

Remarks related to another "barrier" and vértigo horizontal

See also a search for  Horizon + "Western Australia"  in this  journal.

From that search:  A sort of horizon, a "line at infinity," that is perhaps
more meaningful to most Cameron readers than the above remarks
by Borges —

Sunday, January 1, 2017

Like the Horizon

(Continued from a remark by art critic Peter Schjeldahl quoted here
last  year on New Year's Day in the post "Art as Religion.")

"The unhurried curve got me.
It was like the horizon of a world
that made a non-world of
all of the space outside it."

— Peter Schjeldahl, "Postscript: Ellsworth Kelly,"
The New Yorker , December 30, 2015

This suggests some further material from the paper
that was quoted here yesterday on New Year's Eve —

"In teaching a course on combinatorics I have found
students doubting the existence of a finite projective
plane geometry with thirteen points on the grounds
that they could not draw it (with 'straight' lines)
on paper although they had tried to do so. Such a
lack of appreciation of the spirit of the subject is but
a consequence of the elements of formal geometry
no longer being taught in undergraduate courses.
Yet these students were demanding the best proof of
existence, namely, production of the object described."

— Derrick Breach (See his obituary from 1996.)

A related illustration of the 13-point projective plane
from the University of Western Australia:

Projective plane of order 3

(The four points on the curve
at the right of the image are
the points on the line at infinity .)

The above image is from a post of August 7, 2012,
"The Space of Horizons."  A related image —

Click on the above image for further remarks.

Sunday, May 24, 2015

A Swan All Sable

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 10:20 pm

"'Arms:
  Party chevronwise sable and gold,
  in the chief two open books having
  buckles, straps and edges of gold
  and in the foot a swan all sable."

Wednesday, May 13, 2015

Motto

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 9:48 pm

See the previous post, "Space," as well as

SymOmega in this journal and a suggested motto
for The University of Western Australia.

Monday, November 18, 2013

The Four-Gated Song

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

In the spirit of Beckett:

"Bobbies on bicycles two by two…" — Roger Miller, 1965

The Literary Field

A mathematics weblog in Australia today—

Clearly, the full symmetric group contains elements
with no regular cycles, but what about other groups?  
Siemons and Zalesskii showed that for any group 
G 
between PSL(n,q) and PGL(n,q) other than for
(n,q)=(2,2) or (2,3), then in any action of 
G, every
element of 
 has a  regular cycle, except G=PSL(4,2)
acting on  8 points.  The exceptions are due to
isomorphisms with the symmetric or alternating groups. 

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."

Tuesday, August 7, 2012

The Space of Horizons

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 4:00 am

"In the space of horizons that neither love nor hate"
— Wallace Stevens, "Things of August"

Seven years ago yesterday—

IMAGE- 3x3 grid related to Borofsky's 'Four Gods'

For some context, see Rosetta Stone as a Metaphor.

Related material from the University of Western Australia

Projective plane of order 3

(The four points on the curve
at the right of the image are
the points on the line at infinity.)

Art critic Robert Hughes,  who nearly died in Western
Australia in a 1999 car crash, actually met his death
yesterday at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx.

See also Hughes on "slow art" in this journal.

Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Elementary Finite Geometry

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 7:16 pm

I. General finite geometry (without coordinates):

A finite affine plane of order has n^2 points.

A finite projective plane of order n  has n^2 + n + 1 

points because it is formed from an order-n finite affine 

plane by adding a line at infinity  that contains n + 1 points.

Examples—

Affine plane of order 3

Projective plane of order 3

II. Galois finite geometry (with coordinates over a Galois field):

A finite projective Galois plane of order n has n^2 + n + 1

points because it is formed from a finite affine Galois 3-space

of order n with n^3 points by discarding the point (0,0,0) and 

identifying the points whose coordinates are multiples of the

(n-1) nonzero scalars.

Note: The resulting Galois plane of order n has 

(n^3-1)/(n-1)= (n^2 + n + 1) points because 

(n^2 + n + 1)(n – 1) =

(n^3 + n^2 + n – n^2 – n – 1) = (n^3 – 1) .
 

III. Related art:

Another version of a 1994 picture that accompanied a New Yorker
article, "Atheists with Attitude," in the issue dated May 21, 2007:

IMAGE- 'Four Gods,' by Jonathan Borofsky

The Four Gods  of Borofsky correspond to the four axes of 
symmetry
  of a square and to the four points on a line at infinity 
in an order-3 projective plane as described in Part I above.

Those who prefer literature to mathematics may, if they like,
view the Borofsky work as depicting

"Blake's Four Zoas, which represent four aspects
of the Almighty God" —Wikipedia

Saturday, July 24, 2010

Playing with Blocks

"Many of the finite simple groups can be described as symmetries of finite geometries, and it remains a hot topic in group theory to expand our knowledge of the Classification of Finite Simple Groups using finite geometry."

Finite geometry page at the Centre for the Mathematics of
   Symmetry and Computation at the University of Western Australia
   (Alice Devillers, John Bamberg, Gordon Royle)

For such symmetries, see Robert A. WIlson's recent book The Finite Simple Groups.

The finite simple groups are often described as the "building blocks" of finite group theory.

At least some of these building blocks have their own building blocks. See Non-Euclidean Blocks.

For instance, a set of 24 such blocks (or, more simply, 24 unit squares) appears in the Miracle Octad Generator (MOG) of R.T. Curtis, used in the study of the finite simple group M24.

(The octads  of the MOG illustrate yet another sort of mathematical blocks— those of a block design.)

Thursday, July 22, 2010

Pilate Goes to Kindergarten, continued

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:02 pm

Barnes & Noble has an informative new review today of the recent Galois book Duel at Dawn.

It begins…

"In 1820, the Hungarian noble Farkas Bolyai wrote an impassioned cautionary letter to his son Janos:

'I know this way to the very end. I have traversed this bottomless night, which extinguished all light and joy in my life… It can deprive you of your leisure, your health, your peace of mind, and your entire happiness… I turned back when I saw that no man can reach the bottom of this night. I turned back unconsoled, pitying myself and all mankind. Learn from my example…'

Bolyai wasn't warning his son off gambling, or poetry, or a poorly chosen love affair. He was trying to keep him away from non-Euclidean geometry."

For a less dark view (obtained by simply redefining "non-Euclidean" in a more logical way*) see Non-Euclidean Blocks and Finite Geometry and Physical Space.

* Finite  geometry is not  Euclidean geometry— and is, therefore, non-Euclidean
  in the strictest sense (though not according to popular usage), simply because
  Euclidean  geometry has infinitely many points, and a finite  geometry does not.
  (This more logical definition of "non-Euclidean" seems to be shared by
  at least one other person.)

  And some  finite geometries are non-Euclidean in the popular-usage sense,
  related to Euclid's parallel postulate.

  The seven-point Fano plane has, for instance, been called
  "a non-Euclidean geometry" not because it is finite
  (though that reason would suffice), but because it has no parallel lines.

  (See the finite geometry page at the Centre for the Mathematics
   of Symmetry and Computation at the University of Western Australia.)

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