"Here was finality indeed, and cleavage!"
— Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano
Related— Rosetta Stone, today's Google Doodle, and Rock of Ages.
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Cleft
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Yonda* Lies** the Castle***
"…to seek one's true nature is, as one Zen master has said,
'a way to lead you to your long lost home.'"
— Peter Matthiessen, Nine-Headed Dragon River
See also Matthiessen in Dead Viking.
"It's a Barnum and Bailey world…"
* See Jazz Standards.
** "Just as phony as it can be"
*** A search for Jung and "the square inch space"
leads to March 15, 2009, and preceding posts.
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Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Film Director* Dies at 88
* "Bonnie and Clyde" director Arthur Penn, who died last night.
** See also Escher's "Inside St. Peter's" and some related images.
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Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Brightness at Noon (continued)
Happy birthday to Mira Sorvino (Harvard '89).
Related material: June 9 and June 10, 2008.
A more dramatic presentation, also done on June 9-10, 2008—
Alicia Keys, "Superwoman" video.
Happy dies natalis to Miles Davis—
"… nothing ever truly dies. The universe wastes nothing. Everything is simply… transformed."
— Keanu Reeves in the 2008 "Day the Earth Stood Still." (See today's 11:07 AM entry.)
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Midnight at the Still Point
From this journal —
Wednesday, Dec. 17, 2008The Dance
(continued) “… physicists are doing more than ‘discovering the endless diversity of nature.’ They are dancing with Kali….” Gary Zukav, |
A photo from that same day—
Jennifer Connelly, Jaden Smith (son of Will Smith),
and Keanu Reeves at a press conference for the
Tokyo premiere of "The Day the Earth Stood Still."
Photo taken on 17 December 2008. The film was
to premiere in Japan 19 December, 2008.
(Photo by Junko Kimura/Getty Images)
and Keanu Reeves at a press conference for the
Tokyo premiere of "The Day the Earth Stood Still."
Photo taken on 17 December 2008. The film was
to premiere in Japan 19 December, 2008.
(Photo by Junko Kimura/Getty Images)
Related material: The links from this journal given above —
Harvard '64 and continued.
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Monday, September 27, 2010
The Social Network…
… In the Age of Citation
1. INTRODUCTION TO THE PROBLEM
Social network analysis is focused on the patterning of the social
relationships that link social actors. Typically, network data take the
form of a square-actor by actor-binary adjacency matrix, where
each row and each column in the matrix represents a social actor. A
cell entry is 1 if and only if a pair of actors is linked by some social
relationship of interest (Freeman 1989).
— "Using Galois Lattices to Represent Network Data,"
by Linton C. Freeman and Douglas R. White,
Sociological Methodology, Vol. 23, pp. 127–146 (1993)
From this paper's CiteSeer page—
Citations
| 766 | Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications – WASSERMAN, FAUST – 1994 |
| 100 | The act of creation – Koestler – 1964 |
| 75 | Visual Thinking – Arnheim – 1969 |
Visual Image of the Problem—
From a Google search today:
Related material—
"It is better to light one candle…"
"… the early favorite for best picture at the Oscars" — Roger Moore
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Sunday, September 26, 2010
Where Credit Is Due…
The Dick Medal
Review of the film "Knowing" from 2009—
Nicolas Cage's character, an astrophysicist, looks at a chart (written 50 years earlier by a child) with a colleague and points out a chronologically correct prediction of the date and number of dead in world wide tragedies over the last fifty years, and his colleague's response is "Systems that find meaning in numbers are a dime a dozen. Why? Because people see what they want to see." Well that would be a pretty neat trick. You could build a career on that in a Vegas showroom.
Film Title: Next
Based on the 1954 short story
"The Golden Man" by Philip K. Dick
Release Date:
April 27, 2007
About the Film:
Nicolas Cage stars as Cris Johnson, a Las Vegas magician with a secret gift that is both a blessing and a curse: He has the uncanny ability to tell you what happens next.
Related material from this journal on the release date of "Next"— April 27, 2007—
|
Production Credits: Thanks to the
– and to
|
"It’s almost enough to make you think that time present and time past might both be present in time future. As someone may have said."
— David Orr, "The Age of Citation"
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After the Fall
The Harvard Crimson —Magic of Numbers:
|
Saturday night's game… Harvard vs. Brown at Providence—
Related philosophy about divine providence—
See also, from 2002, a note on "light inclosed in the dark" versus the late Harvard philosopher Barbara Johnson.
For some context on Harvard and "the Magic of Numbers" see Summer Reading from 2007.
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Saturday, September 25, 2010
Talking Rot at Harvard
"…as Jeremy R. Knowles, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, stated in his Fall 2006 address to the Harvard freshman class, being able to tell if a man is 'talking rot' is the ultimate goal of a liberal arts education."
— Yelena S. Mironova ’12 in The Harvard Crimson yesterday
Is Mironova talking rot? Apparently not, since Knowles did, it seems, use that phrase in such an address. (See an alleged transcript of his remarks by someone at Facebook identifying herself as Van Le, Harvard '10)
Was Knowles talking rot? Perhaps, since the alleged transcript of his remarks indicates he attributed the phrase to a 1914 lecture by one J. A. Smith, a philosopher at Oxford, but did not give a source for his quotation.
A Google web search for more accurate information yields no exact source. There are two notable hearsay sources—
The weblog Fairing's Parish on August 16, 2009, gives a version attributed to Smith in More Christmas Crackers by John Julius Norwich. (The hardcover first edition of this book was published by Viking on Oct. 14, 1991, according to Amazon.co.uk.)
An earlier book in the Christmas Crackers series was cited as a Smith source by Michael M. Thomas at Forbes.com on Oct. 24, 2008—
"I happened upon Professor Smith long years ago, in the 1980 edition of John Julius Norwich's Christmas Cracker [sic ]…."
The weblog Laudator Temporis Acti of Michael Gilleland on August 29, 2004, says…
The following quotation comes at second or third hand. John Alexander Smith (1863-1939), Waynflete Professor of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford, gave a lecture sometime before WWI, attended by Harold Macmillan. Macmillan reported Smith's words to Isaiah Berlin, and Isaiah Berlin told them to Ramin Jahanbegloo, who reproduced them in Conversations with Isaiah Berlin (London: Phoenix Press, 1993), p. 29….
Some further bibliographic notes on the Jahanbegloo book—
Ramin Jahanbegloo, Isaiah Berlin en toutes libertés: entretiens avec Isaiah Berlin (Paris, 1991: Éditions du Félin); repr. in its original English form as Ramin Jahanbegloo, Conversations with Isaiah Berlin (London, 1992: Peter Halban; New York, 1992: Scribner’s; London, 1993: Phoenix; 2nd ed., London, 2007: Halban); excerpted in Jewish Quarterly 38 No 3 (Autumn 1991), 15–26, Jewish Chronicle, 7 February 1992, Literary Supplement, ii, Guardian, 7 March 1992, 23, and (as ‘Philosophy and Life: An Interview’) New York Review of Books, 28 May 1992, 46–54; trans. Chinese (both scripts), German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish (complete and in part, by different translators)
— http://berlin.wolf.ox.ac.uk/lists/interviews/index.html
A Google books search yields some starting points for a paper chase that might, given library resources like Harvard's, finally nail down the rot quote.
Try smith oxford "talking rot".
The best citation I can find online is not very good. See The Oxford Book of Oxford (first edition 1978, new edition 2002), edited by Jan (formerly James) Morris, who gives as her source "J. A. Smith, Professor of Moral Philosophy, opening a lecture course in 1914 (quoted by Harold Macmillan in The Times, 1965)." This does not indicate whether Macmillan was quoting Smith from memory or from a written or printed record. Only the latter would clear Macmillan (and all subsequent purveyors of the alleged Smith quote who did not attribute it to Macmillan) from the suspicion of talking rot.
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Friday, September 24, 2010
Heisman Trophy
An Ecumenical Hymn
For those who observed Yom Kippur at
Harvard's Memorial Church on Saturday,
September 18, 2010—
Friday night and the lights are low…
NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day for
July 13, 2007— Manhattanhenge.
See also on July 13, 2007, in this journal, a post
for Harrison Ford's 65th birthday featuring the
ecumenical diamond-in-a-football religious symbol—
Related story: Harvard Defeats Holy Cross 34 – 6.
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Cartoon Graveyard continued
The New York Times today—
Stuart E. Hample,
|
Enlarge This Image
Hample died on Sunday.
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Thursday, September 23, 2010
Nunc Dimittis
Composer Geoffrey Burgon died on September 21. Roll credits.
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Shadow
"He can write, but he's got nothing to say."[42]
— Isaac Babel on Nabokov (Wikipedia)
Vladimir Nabokov
42. Ilya Ehrenburg, Memoirs: 1921-1941, page 110.
MIDRASH
"I was the shadow of the waxwing slain" — Nabokov
"Someday we’ll see each other" — Isaac Babel
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Evocation*
"Epistulae ad familiares" (adfamiliares for short) at livejournal.com—
"Prefatory notes evoke a Republic of Letters— or at least an academic support group— in which the writer claims membership. In fact, they often describe something much more tenuous, the group of those who the author wishes had read his work, offered him references, or at least given him the time of day. Hence they retain something of the literary— not to say fictional— quality of traditional poets' prayers." (Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History)
P.S. This book rules. Why did I wait so long to read it?
* See a definition. See also this journal's previous post, Patterns in the Carpets. As for "those who the author wishes had read his work," see a quotation from an author mentioned in that post, Greg Egan, that seems relevant to the suicide outside Harvard's Memorial Church last Saturday during the morning Yom Kippur service—
… The word "transhumanism" (or, even worse, "posthumanism") sounds like a suicide note for the species, which effectively renders it a political suicide note for any movement by that name. No doubt there are people prepared to spend 90% of their time and energy explaining that they didn't intend any negative connotations, but this is not one of those cases where other people will be to blame if "transhumanists" are reviled as the enemies of humanity on purely linguistic grounds. It's no use people proclaiming "Please, read my 1,000-page manifesto, don't just look at one word!"….
— Greg Egan on April 23, 2008,** at Metamagician and the Hellfire Club
Related material— A livejournal note on the Memorial Church suicide, nihilism, and a "final crux."
** Footnote to a footnote— See also Log24 on April 23, 2008— Shakespeare's birthday.
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Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Patterns in the Carpets
"I know no writing— except perhaps Henry James's introductory essays— which conveys so clearly and with such an absence of fuss the excitement of the creative artist."
— Graham Greene on A Mathematician's Apology , review in The Spectator , 20 December 1940
"The mere quality and play of an ironic consciousness in the designer left wholly alone, amid a chattering unperceiving world, with the thing he has most wanted to do, with the design more or less realised— some effectual glimpse of that might, by itself, for instance, reward one's experiment."
— Henry James, "Prefaces to the New York Edition," in The Figure in the Carpet and Other Stories, Penguin Books, 1986, with introduction and notes by Frank Kermode
"What? You've found a pattern?"
— Greg Egan, "Wang's Carpets"
See also Notes on Mathematics and Narrative, with its discussion of the tiles of the creative artist Patrick Blackburn in the recent (August 2010) Pythagorean novel The Thousand and the discussion of Wang tiles in Modal Logic, a book from November 2002 whose author also happens to be named Patrick Blackburn.
(Credit for the Greene bibliographic information is due to Janelle Robyn Humphreys, whose doctoral thesis, Shadows of Another Dimension, was published in 2009 by the University of Wollongong.)
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Sects, continued
Smarter Questions —
Smarter Answers —
From Sunday's Sermon for Harvard —
Sects
Each sexton has his sect. The bells have none.
….
Each truth is a sect though no bells ring for it.
— Wallace Stevens
See also Jill Johnston on Jung's Red Book (March 2010).
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Monday, September 20, 2010
The Unfolding
Two pictures suggested by recent comments on
Peter J. Cameron's Sept. 17 post about T.S. Eliot—
For some further background, see Symmetry of Walsh Functions.
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Sunday, September 19, 2010
Sermon for Harvard
Sects
Each sexton has his sect. The bells have none.
….
Each truth is a sect though no bells ring for it.
— Wallace Stevens
Related material —
The Thousand … A recent novel about Pythagorean sects
16 + 9 = 25 … A Pythagorean truth
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Saturday, September 18, 2010
The Public Square
There are "worrying signs of a failure to appreciate…
the legitimate role of religion in the public square."
— Pope Benedict XVI in Westminster Hall on Friday
Related material on the public square —
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Enigma Variation
Yesterday evening's Telegraph—
Didi Nearne was inspired by her strong Catholic faith
to believe that she would be well received, and the priest,
appalled at the state of the women, hid them in the bell tower.
In 1944 Nearne, an agent of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) who had
parachuted into France, was captured, interrogated and tortured by the Gestapo,
sent to a concentration camp, and later escaped.
She died at 89 on September 2, 2010. See this journal on that date.
See also Geheimnis des Glockenturms.
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Yom Kippur Special
John Hooper in The Guardian quotes the Pope in Westminster Cathedral this morning—
"Here too I think of the immense suffering caused by the abuse of children, especially within the church and by her ministers. Above all, I express my deep sorrow to the innocent victims of these unspeakable crimes.
"I also acknowledge, with you, the shame and humiliation which all of us have suffered because of these sins; and I invite you to offer it to the Lord with trust that this chastisement will contribute to the healing of the victims and the purification of the church and the renewal of her age-old commitment to the education and care of young people."
The pope made his comments at a service that was the occasion for religious pageantry of a sort rarely seen in Britain. He was preceded into the cathedral by more than 100 scarlet-robed priests and a constellation of bishops and cardinals. To a volley of applause from the congregation, he appeared at the climax of a musical build-up that could have come from the score for a sci-fi movie epic.
Related material— Childhood's Rear End.
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Friday, September 17, 2010
Fade to Blacker
From Peter J. Cameron's web journal today—
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… Eliot’s Four Quartets has been one of my favourite works of poetry since I was a student…. Of course, a poem doesn’t have a single meaning, especially one as long and complex as Four Quartets. But to me the primary meaning of the poem is about the relationship between time and eternity, which is something maybe of interest to mathematicians as well as to mystics. Curiously, the clearest explanation of what Eliot is saying that I have found is in a completely different work, Pilgrimage of Dreams by the artist Thetis Blacker, in which she describes a series of dreams she had which stood out as being completely different from the confusion of normal dreaming. In one of these dreams, “Mr Goad and the Cathedral”, we find the statements
and
In other words, eternity is not the same as infinity; it is not the time line stretched out to infinity. Rather, it is an intimation of a different dimension, which we obtain only because we are aware of the point at which that dimension intersects the familiar dimension of time. In a recurring motif in the second Quartet, “East Coker”, Eliot says,
and, in “Little Gidding”,
|
From this journal on the date of Blacker's death—
what would, if she were a Catholic saint, be called her dies natalis—
Monday December 18, 2006
|
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The Galois Window
Yesterday's excerpt from von Balthasar supplies some Catholic aesthetic background for Galois geometry.
That approach will appeal to few mathematicians, so here is another.
Euclid's Window: The Story of Geometry from Parallel Lines to Hyperspace is a book by Leonard Mlodinow published in 2002.
More recently, Mlodinow is the co-author, with Stephen Hawking, of The Grand Design (published on September 7, 2010).
A review of Mlodinow's book on geometry—
"This is a shallow book on deep matters, about which the author knows next to nothing."
— Robert P. Langlands, Notices of the American Mathematical Society, May 2002
The Langlands remark is an apt introduction to Mlodinow's more recent work.
It also applies to Martin Gardner's comments on Galois in 2007 and, posthumously, in 2010.
For the latter, see a Google search done this morning—
Here, for future reference, is a copy of the current Google cache of this journal's "paged=4" page.
Note the link at the bottom of the page in the May 5, 2010, post to Peter J. Cameron's web journal. Following the link, we find…
For n=4, there is only one factorisation, which we can write concisely as 12|34, 13|24, 14|23. Its automorphism group is the symmetric group S4, and acts as S3 on the set of three partitions, as we saw last time; the group of strong automorphisms is the Klein group.
This example generalises, by taking the factorisation to consist of the parallel classes of lines in an affine space over GF(2). The automorphism group is the affine group, and the group of strong automorphisms is its translation subgroup.
See also, in this journal, Window and Window, continued (July 5 and 6, 2010).
Gardner scoffs at the importance of Galois's last letter —
"Galois had written several articles on group theory, and was
merely annotating and correcting those earlier published papers."
— Last Recreations, page 156
For refutations, see the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society in March 1899 and February 1909.
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Thursday, September 16, 2010
For the Pope in Scotland
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Sixteen
— A sequel of sorts to yesterday's post on the number fifteen —
Today's date and the title of the recent Pythagorean novel "The Thousand" suggest a search for the title "The Sixteen." This yields a British music ensemble.
Listen, for instance, to the ensemble performing works by Purcell in honor (partly) of Scottish composer James MacMillan's fiftieth birthday on July 16, 2009.
A check on synchronicity yields the following Log24 posts —
- The White Itself (July 16, 2009)
- Mother of Beauty (July 16, 2009)
- Readings related to those July 16 posts and to
Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
(born on September 16, 1950)
Happy birthday, Professor Gates.
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Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Fifteen and Other Small Numbers
Today is the birthday of mathematician Jean-Pierre Serre.
Some remarks related to today's day number within the month, "15"—
The Wikipedia article on finite geometry has the following link—
Carnahan, Scott (2007-10-27), "Small finite sets", Secret Blogging Seminar, http://sbseminar.wordpress.com/2007/10/27/small-finite-sets/, notes on a talk by Jean-Pierre Serre on canonical geometric properties of small finite sets.
From Carnahan's notes (October 27, 2007)—
Serre has been giving a series of lectures at Harvard for the last month, on finite groups in number theory. It started off with some ideas revolving around Chebotarev density, and recently moved into fusion (meaning conjugacy classes, not monoidal categories) and mod p representations. In between, he gave a neat self-contained talk about small finite groups, which really meant canonical structures on small finite sets.
He started by writing the numbers 2,3,4,5,6,7,8, indicating the sizes of the sets to be discussed, and then he tackled them in order.
Related material on finite geometry and the indicated small numbers may, with one apparent exception, be found at my own Notes on Finite Geometry.
The apparent exception is "5." See, however, the role played in finite geometry by this number (and by "15") as sketched by Robert Steinberg at Yale in 1967—
See also …
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Special Olympics continued
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Holy Cross Day* Revisited
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