Log24

Continued from November 12, 2013. A post on that date
showed the tree from Waiting for Godot  along with the two
X-Men patriarchs. See also last night's Chapel post,
which shows a more interesting tree—

A recent book on the Langlands program by Edward Frenkel
repeats a metaphor about building a bridge  between unrelated
worlds within mathematics. A review of the Frenkel book by
Marcus du Sautoy replaces the bridge  metaphor with a wormhole .
Some users of such metaphors seem to feel they are justified, 
for maximum rhetorical effect, in lying about the unrelatedness of
the worlds being connected. The connections they discuss are
surprising (see the Eichler function discussed by Frenkel and
du Sautoy), but the connections occur, at least in the case of
elliptic curves and modular forms, between areas of mathematics
long known to be, in less subtle ways, related. See remarks
from 2005 by Diamond and Shurman below.

Related material:

• The Modular Group: A Brief Introduction
• St. Andrew's Day, 2003
• A First Course in Modular Forms—