"Now a little trivial heuresis is in order."
— The late Waclaw Szymanski on p. 279 of
"Decompositions of operator-valued functions
in Hilbert spaces" (Studia Mathematica 50.3
(1974): 265-280.)
See "A Talisman for Finkelstein," from midnight
on the reported date of Szymanski's death. That post
refers to "the correspondence in the previous post
between Figures A and B" … as does this post.
Some images from the posts of last July 13
(Harrison Ford's birthday) may serve as funeral
ornaments for the late Prof. David Lavery.
See as well posts on "Silent Snow" and "Starlight Like Intuition."
The late physicist David Ritz Finkelstein on the magic square
in Dürer's "Melencolia I" —
"As a child I wondered why such a square was called magic.
The Occult Philosophy [of Agrippa] answers this question
at least. They were used as magical talismans."
The correspondence in the previous post between
Figures A and B may serve as a devotional talisman
in memory of Finkelstein, a physicist who, in the sort of
magical thinking enjoyed by traditional Catholics, might
still be lingering in Purgatory.
See also this journal on the date of Finkelstein's death —
The Cube and the Hexagram
The above illustration, by the late Harvey D. Heinz,
shows a magic cube* and a corresponding magic
hexagram, or Star of David, with the six cube faces
mapped to the six hexagram lines and the twelve
cube edges mapped to the twelve hexagram points.
The eight cube vertices correspond to eight triangles
in the hexagram (six small and two large).
Exercise: Is this noteworthy mapping** of faces to lines,
edges to points, and vertices to triangles an isolated
phenomenon, or can it be viewed in a larger context?
* See the discussion at magic-squares.net of
"perimeter-magic cubes"
** Apparently derived from the Cube + Hexagon figure
discussed here in various earlier posts. See also
"Diamonds and Whirls," a note from 1984.
The title is that of a large-scale British research project
in mathematics. On a more modest scale …
"Hanks + Cube" in this journal —
In memory of physicist David Ritz Finkelstein,
who reportedly died yesterday —
"His sense of irony and precision was appreciated" ….
Precision
Irony
An illustration of the song "Stuck in the Middle with You"
(from the Tarantino film "Reservoir Dogs") was posted by
an academic at Christmas 2015 —
See also, in this journal,
The Jewel in the Lotus Meets the Kernel in the Nutshell
(December 16, 2015).
"The ideal of a complete mathematical theory of beauty
lies on the same long line of distinguished fantasies of
mathematical wisdom as the number mysticism of
Pythagoras and Plato, the Ars Magna of Ramon Llull
(whom Agrippa studied) and Giordano Bruno
(who studied Llull and Agrippa), the vision of Mathesis
Universalis that Descartes and Leibniz shared, and the
Ars Combinatoria of Leibniz. Dürer does not deny the
existence of absolute beauty but despairs of knowing it."
— The late David Ritz Finkelstein in 2007.
He reportedly died today.
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