Tuesday, October 31, 2006
"The show has an endgame, end-time mood….
I would call all these strategies fear of form…. the dismissal of originality is perhaps the oldest ploy in the postmodern playbook. To call yourself an artist at all is by definition to announce a faith, however unacknowledged, in some form of originality, first for yourself, second, perhaps, for the rest of us.
Fear of form above all means fear of compression– of an artistic focus that condenses experiences, ideas and feelings into something whole, committed and visually comprehensible."
— Roberta Smith
It is doubtful that Smith
would consider the
following "found" art an
example of originality.
It nevertheless does
"announce a faith."
"First for yourself"
Today's mid-day
Pennsylvania number:
707
See Log24 on 7/07
and the above review.
"Second, perhaps,
for the rest of us"
Today's evening
Pennsylvania number:
384
This number is an
example of what the
reviewer calls "compression"–
"an artistic focus that condenses
experiences, ideas and feelings
into something
whole, committed
and visually comprehensible."
"Experiences"
See (for instance)
Joan Didion's writings
(1160 pages, 2.35 pounds)
on "the shifting phantasmagoria
which is our actual experience."
Comments Off on Tuesday October 31, 2006
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Monday, October 30, 2006
Religion at Harvard
From The Harvard Crimson,
Monday, October 30, 2006 6:09 AM
By ADAM A. SOLOMON and
CHRISTOPHER J. SULLIVAN
“Why is the Task Force on General Education afraid of teaching religion? True, their report did recommend a reason and faith requirement, but the committee has clearly shied away from teaching religious principles and has treated the study of religion itself with contempt….
In the general education report… there is no mention of the fundamental principles of religious thought, even though the general education report stresses that students are affected by religion and should think critically about it.”
Here is one approach
to religious thought–
Scientism— exemplified
by Harvard’s
Emperor of Math.
Screenshot of doctoryau.com
Here is a rather different
approach to religious thought–
Yesterday’s numbers in the Empire State:
|
For more on Harvard’s
real religion, Scientism,
and the political background
in which it thrives,
click on the picture below.
.
Comments Off on Monday October 30, 2006
Sunday, October 29, 2006
Decrease
Locating Hell
"Noi siam venuti al loco ov' i' t'ho detto
che tu vedrai le genti dolorose
c'hanno perduto il ben de l'intelletto."
— Dante, Inferno, Canto 3, 16-18
"We have come to where
I warned you we would find
Those wretched souls
who no longer have
The intellectual benefits of the mind."
— Dante, Hell, Canto 3, 16-18
From a Harvard student's weblog:
Heard in Mather I hope you get gingivitis You want me to get oral cancer?! Goodnight fartface Turd. Turd. Turd. Turd. Turd. Make your own waffles!! Blah blah blah starcraft blah blah starcraft blah starcraft. It's da email da email. And some blue hair! Oohoohoo Izod! 10 gigs! Yeah it smells really bad. Only in the stairs though. Starcraft blah blah Starcraft fartface. Yeah it's hard. You have to get a bunch of battle cruisers. 40 kills! So good! Oh ho ho grunt grunt squeal. I'm getting sick again. You have a final tomorrow? In What?! Um I don't even know. Next year we're draggin him there and sticking the needle in ourselves.
" … one more line/ unravelling from the dark design/ spun by God and Cotton Mather"
— Robert Lowell
|
To honor Harvard's Oct. 28 founding,
here are yesterday's numbers from
the state of Grace (Kelly, of Philadelphia):
Related material:
Log24 on 1/16,
and Hexagram 41,
Decrease
At the foot of the mountain, the lake:
The image of Decrease.
Thus the superior man controls his anger
And restrains his instincts.
This suggests thoughts of
the novel Cold Mountain
(see yesterday morning)
and the following from
Log24 on St. Luke's Day
this year:
|
|
Established in 1916,
Montreat College
is a private, Christian
college located in a
beautiful valley in the
Blue Ridge Mountains
of North Carolina.
|
From Nell:
Comments Off on Sunday October 29, 2006
Saturday, October 28, 2006
Recommended.
Comments Off on Saturday October 28, 2006
Recommended.
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Friday, October 27, 2006
Shem the Penman
Excerpt from Harvard Magazine:
“The people who intermediate between lunatics and the world used to be called alienists; the go-betweens for mathematicians are called teachers. Many a student may rightly have wondered if the terms shouldn’t be reversed.”
— Review of The Magic of Numbers, a book by Benedict H. Gross, Leverett Professor of Mathematics and Dean of Harvard College
For the full review, see
On Mathematical Imagination–
Harvard Magazine
(January-February 2004):
… part of a New Instauration
that will bring mathematics, at last, …
Wednesday, December 31, 2003,
7:00pm EST • 26.1k •
http://www.harvardmagazine.com/
on-line/010442.html
From today’s Harvard Crimson:
Leverett resident in
critical condition, ‘improving’
Published On Friday,
October 27, 2006 4:35 AM
Crimson Staff Writer
An undergraduate fell from a ninth-floor window in Leverett House Tower F yesterday morning, suffering serious injuries, according to University officials.
The 25-year-old student, Steven R. Snyder ’04-’08, was in critical condition at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center as of yesterday….
Rooms in the Leverett Towers typically have one large window that doesn’t open and at least one smaller window that can be cranked open. The smaller windows are each about two feet wide and four feet high….
Snyder– who is from Avon Lake, Ohio– is a mathematics concentrator….
Dean of the College Benedict H. Gross ’71, in an e-mail sent to undergraduates at about 12:30 p.m. yesterday, said a student “apparently fell from a window,” and an “investigation is underway.”
“A time like this can be very difficult for everyone, especially those who live in Leverett. I would like to remind all students and staff that there are many people on campus who can help you through this difficult time,” Gross added. He directed students to the University’s Mental Health Services and the Bureau of Study Counsel. |
Related material:
The Crimson Passion,
the previous entry,
Hall of Shem,
and the link, in the
Ash Wednesday, 2006,
entry, Deaconess,
to The House of God,
a novel by
Samuel Shem.
Shem is the pen-name
of Stephen J. Bergman,
Clinical Instructor in Psychiatry
at Harvard Medical School.
Comments Off on Friday October 27, 2006
Thursday, October 26, 2006
Hardy & Wright 
“When he was taken to church
he amused himself by factorizing
the numbers of the hymns.”
— C. P. Snow, foreword to
A Mathematician’s Apology,
by G. H. Hardy
An application of
lottery hermeneutics:
420 –> 4/20 –>
Hall of Shame,
Easter Sunday,
April 20, 2003;
145 –> 5*29 –> 5/29 –>
The Shining of May 29.
The Rev. Wright may also
be interested in the following
Related material:
“Shem was a sham….”
(FW I.7, 170 and Log24 Oct. 13),
and The Hebrew Word Shem:
“When I teach introductory Hebrew, the first word I typically teach is the common noun
SHEM. It’s pronounced exactly like our English word ‘shame,’ means almost exactly the opposite, and seems to me to be a key….” — Glen Penton
This word occurs, notably, in Psalm (or “hymn”) 145.
See http://scripturetext.com/psalms/145-1.htm:
thy name
shem (shame)
an appellation, as a mark or memorial of individuality; by implication honor, authority, character — + base, (in-)fame(-ous), named(-d), renown, report.
Update of 12:25 PM 10/26
from the online Crimson:
Comments Off on Thursday October 26, 2006
Wednesday, October 25, 2006
“… there is some virtue in tracking cultural trends in terms of their relation to the classic Trinitarian framework of Christian thought.”
— Description of lectures to be given Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of this week (on Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, respectively, and their relationship to “cultural trends”) at Harvard’s Memorial Church
I prefer more-classic trinitarian frameworks– for example,
and the structural trinity
underlying
classic quilt patterns:
Click on pictures for further details.
These mathematical trinities are
conceits in the sense of concepts
or notions; examples of the third
kind of conceit are easily
found, especially at Harvard.
For a possible corrective to
examples of the third kind,
see
To Measure the Changes.
Comments Off on Wednesday October 25, 2006
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Here is an interpretation
of those numbers:
"The geometrization conjecture, also known as Thurston's geometrization conjecture, concerns the geometric structure of compact 3-manifolds.
The geometrization conjecture can be considered an analogue for 3-manifolds of the uniformization theorem for surfaces. It was proposed by William Thurston in the late 1970s. It 'includes' other conjectures, such as the Poincaré conjecture and the Thurston elliptization conjecture."
The second sentence, in bold type, was added on 8/21 by yours truly. No deep learning or original thought was required to make this important improvement in the article; the sentence was simply copied from the then-current version of the article on Grigori Perelman (who has, it seems, proved the geometrization conjecture).
This may serve as an example of the "mathematics" part of the above phrase "Mathematics and Narrative" — a phrase which served, with associated links, as the Log24 entry for 8/21.
7/23 — Narrative:
"Each step in the story is a work of art, and the story as a whole is a sequence of episodes of rare beauty, a drama built out of nothing but numbers and imagination." –Freeman Dyson
This quotation appeared in the Log24 entry for 7/23, "Dance of the Numbers." What Dyson calls a "story" or "drama" is in fact mathematics. (Dyson calls the "steps" in the story "works of art," so it is clear that Dyson (a former student of G. H. Hardy) is discussing mathematical steps, not paragraphs in someone's account– perhaps a work of art, perhaps not– of mathematical history.) I personally regard the rhetorical trick of calling the steps leading to a mathematical result a "story" as contemptible vulgarization, but Dyson, as someone whose work (pdf) led to the particular result he is discussing, is entitled to dramatize it as he pleases.
For related material on mathematics, narrative, and vulgarization, click here.
The art of interpretation (applied above to a lottery) is relevant to narrative and perhaps also, in some sense, to the arts of mathematical research and exposition (if not to mathematics itself). This art is called hermeneutics.
For more on the subject, see the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Hans-Georg Gadamer, "the decisive figure in the development of twentieth-century hermeneutics."
"Foreword" in Gian-Carlo Rota,
Indiscrete Thoughts,
Boston: Birkhäuser Verlag,
1996, xiii-xvii, and
"Gadamer's Theory of Hermeneutics" in
The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer,
edited by Lewis E. Hahn,
The Library of Living Philosophers, Vol. 24,
Chicago: Open Court Publishers,
1997, 223-34.
Comments Off on Tuesday October 24, 2006
Critical Mass
Thanks to University Diaries for
yesterday's entry on Harvard:
"I wonder if there's just been a critical mass of creepy stories about Harvard in the last couple of years… A kind of piling on of nastiness and creepiness…"
See also the previous Log24 entry, on yesterday's Pennsylvania lottery, and this description of an experiment I remember fondly from my youth:
"The floor in a large room was covered with mouse traps that were 'cocked' and on each was placed a ping pong ball. At the key moment an additional ping pong ball was tossed out and triggered a single mouse trap to go off. The net result after the balls started bouncing was a classic chain reaction."
"I thought Christmas
comes but once a year."
—
James Bond
Comments Off on Tuesday October 24, 2006
Monday, October 23, 2006
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Sunday, October 22, 2006
Comments Off on Sunday October 22, 2006
Comments Off on Sunday October 22, 2006
Go Tigers!
On this date:
“In 1746,
Princeton University
in New Jersey received
its charter.”
— Today in History
by The Associated Press
“The charter… authorized
the erection of a college….”
— Princeton University
Comments Off on Sunday October 22, 2006
"Every great magic trick consists of three acts. The first act is called 'The Pledge.' The magician shows you something ordinary, but of course… it probably isn't. The second act is called 'The Turn.' The magician makes his ordinary 'some thing' do something extraordinary. Now if you're looking for the secret… you won't find it. That's why there's a third act, called 'The Prestige.' This is the part with the twists and turns, where lives hang in the balance, and you see something shocking you've never seen before."
The Associated Press
Thought for Today,
Oct. 22, 2006:
"You can fool
too many of the people
too much of the time."
— James Thurber,
American humorist
(1894-1961)
For more detail,
click on the above
Comments Off on Sunday October 22, 2006
Phyllis Kirk and Keenan Wynn in
“A World of His Own”
Twilight Zone
Season 1, Episode 36
First aired: July 1, 1960
“The best Twilight Zone
twist ending ever?”
— Amazon.com
reviewer “Alexiel”
Here are the lottery
numbers in Pennsylvania
(state of Grace)
on Thursday, Oct. 19,
the day that
Phyllis Kirk died:
“I’ve got a little story*
you oughta know…”
— Sinatra
* 3/23, 37:
Comments Off on Sunday October 22, 2006
Saturday, October 21, 2006
An application of the finite geometry underlying the diamond theorem:
“Qubits in phase space: Wigner function approach to quantum error correction and the mean king problem,” by Juan Pablo Paz, Augusto Jose Roncaglia, and Marcos Saraceno (arXiv:quant-ph/0410117 v2 4 Nov 2004) (pdf)
Comments Off on Saturday October 21, 2006
Friday, October 20, 2006
“At present, such relationships can
at best be heuristically described
in terms that invoke some notion
of an ‘intelligent user standing
outside the system.'”
— Gian-Carlo Rota in
Indiscrete Thoughts, p. 152
Comments Off on Friday October 20, 2006
“Halmos”
For one definition, see
Tombstone (typography) at Wikipedia.
A halmos, according to
the Wikipedia definition:
Click on the halmos
for further details from
today’s New York Times.
Comments Off on Friday October 20, 2006
Thursday, October 19, 2006
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Wednesday, October 18, 2006
Tuesday, October 17, 2006
To Measure
the Changes
(continued
from midnight)
“To measure the changes
of time and space
the smartest are nothing.” |
— Shing-Tung Yau,
The Emperor of Math
and Harvard philosopher
Illustrations —
To measure the changes:
The smartest are nothing:
Comments Off on Tuesday October 17, 2006
For interpretations
of 621, see 6/21’s
Beijing String and
Go with the Flow.
For an interpretation
of 596, see Wikipedia,
596 (nuclear test):
“596 is the codename of the
People’s Republic of China’s
first nuclear weapons test,
detonated on
October 16, 1964.”
Related material:
“‘In China he is a movie star,’ said Ronnie Chan, a Hong Kong real estate developer and an old friend…. And last summer Dr. Yau played the part…. He ushered Stephen Hawking into the Great Hall of the People in Tiananmen Square to kick off a meeting of some of the world’s leading physicists on string theory, and beamed as a poem he had written was performed by a music professor on the conference stage. It reads in part:
Beautiful indeed
is the source of truth.
To measure the changes
of time and space
the smartest are nothing.” |
— The Emperor of Math
Comments Off on Tuesday October 17, 2006
Monday, October 16, 2006
Characters
Two items from a Wikipedia watchlist today:
1. User Loyola added a list of central characters to the article on The Glass Bead Game.
2. A dialogue between the Wikipedia characters Prof02 and Charles Matthews continues.
Item 2 seems almost to echo item 1.
The Bead Game, a classic novel by Hermann Hesse, is, in part, a commentary on German cultural history, and the Prof02-Matthews dialogue concerns the Wikipedia article on Erich Heller, a noted scholar of German cultural history.
Matthews is an expert on the game of Go. The Bead Game article says that
“The Game derives its name from the fact that it was originally played with tokens, perhaps analogous to those of an abacus or the game Go….
Although invented after Hesse’s death, Conway’s Game of Life can be seen as an example of a Go-like glass bead game with surprisingly deep properties; since it can encode Turing machines, it contains in some sense everything.”
For some related thoughts on cellular automata (i.e., Conway’s game) and Go, see The Field of Reason with its links Deep Game, And So To Bed.
For some related thoughts on Turing, see the November 2006 Notices of the American Mathematical Society (special issue on Turing).
For some related religious reflections, see Wolfram’s Theory of Everything and the Gameplayers of Zan, as well as the Log24 entries of last Halloween.
Comments Off on Monday October 16, 2006
Sunday, October 15, 2006
Cleavage Term
Snow is mainly remembered as the author of The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959).
According to Orrin Judd, we can now see “how profoundly wrong Snow was in everything except for his initial metaphor, of a divide between science and the rest of the culture.”
For more on that metaphor, see the previous entry, “The Line.”
I prefer a lesser-known work of Snow– his long biographical foreword to G. H. Hardy’s A Mathematician’s Apology. The foreword, like the book itself, is an example of what Robert M. Pirsig calls “Quality.” It begins with these words:
“It was a perfectly ordinary night at Christ’s high table, except that Hardy was dining as a guest.”
Related material:
Wallace Stevens, “The Sail of Ulysses,” Canto V
Comments Off on Sunday October 15, 2006
Saturday, October 14, 2006
The Line
Continued
from Aug. 15, 2004:
Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Part III:
“The wave of crystallization rolled ahead. He was seeing two worlds, simultaneously. On the intellectual side, the square side, he saw now that Quality was a cleavage term. What every intellectual analyst looks for. You take your analytic knife, put the point directly on the term Quality and just tap, not hard, gently, and the whole world splits, cleaves, right in two…
The Line,
by S. H. Cullinane
hip and square, classic and romantic, technological and humanistic…and the split is clean. There’s no mess. No slop. No little items that could be one way or the other. Not just a skilled break but a very lucky break. Sometimes the best analysts, working with the most obvious lines of cleavage, can tap and get nothing but a pile of trash. And yet here was Quality; a tiny, almost unnoticeable fault line; a line of illogic in our concept of the universe; and you tapped it, and the whole universe came apart, so neatly it was almost unbelievable. He wished Kant were alive. Kant would have appreciated it. That master diamond cutter. He would see. Hold Quality undefined. That was the secret.”
See also the discussion of
subjective and objective
by Robert M. Pirsig in
Zen and the Art of
Motorcycle Maintenance,
Part III,
followed by this dialogue:
Are We There Yet?
Chris shouts, “When are we
going to get to the top?”
“Probably quite a way yet,”
I reply.
“Will we see a lot?”
“I think so. Look for blue sky
between the trees. As long as we
can’t see sky we know it’s a way yet.
The light will come through the trees
when we round the top.”
Related material:
The Boys from Uruguay,
Lichtung!,
The Shining of May 29,
A Guiding Philosophy,
Ticket Home.
The philosophy of Heidegger
discussed and illustrated
in the above entries may
be regarded as honoring
today’s 100th anniversary
of the birth of Heidegger’s
girlfriend, Hannah Arendt.
See also
Hannah and Martin
and
Snowblind.
Comments Off on Saturday October 14, 2006
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