Log24

Sunday, September 8, 2024

Mathematics and Narrative: T. S. Eliot Meets Stephen King

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 5:36 am

… in posts tagged Kummer-Sept-2013.

Musical accompaniment suggested by
tonight's earlier Paradise Dreams

Tuesday, November 21, 2023

Mathematics and Narrative: Symmetry and the Snow Queen

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 7:22 pm

The phrase "the mathematical concept of invariance of symmetry"
in the previous post suggests a Google search . . .

For those who prefer narrative to mathematics, the search result
"The Time Invariance of Snow" is not without interest.

See also "Snow Queen" in this  journal.

Wednesday, February 15, 2023

Mathematics and Narrative . . .

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 3:47 pm

Continues.
 

Mathematics:

From Log24 "Pyramid Game" posts —

The letter labels, but not the tetrahedron, are from Whitehead’s
The Axioms of Projective Geometry  (Cambridge U. Press, 1906), page 13.
 

Narrative:

Monday, December 19, 2022

Mathematics and Narrative, Continued . . .
“Apart from that, Mrs. Lincoln . . .”

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , , , — m759 @ 3:50 am

   Midrash from Philip Pullman . . .

"The 1929 Einstein-Carmichael Expedition"

    I prefer the 1929 Emch-Carmichael expedition —

This is from . . .

“By far the most important structure in design theory
is the Steiner system S(5, 8, 24).”

— “Block Designs,” by Andries E. Brouwer
(Ch. 14 (pp. 693-746) of Handbook of Combinatorics,
Vol. I, MIT Press, 1995, edited by Ronald L. Graham,
Martin Grötschel, and László Lovász, Section 16 (p. 716))

Thursday, March 24, 2022

Mathematics and Narrative: Solomon vs. the Wicked Queen

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 5:19 pm

"Solomon Golomb’s classic book Shift Register Sequences,
published in 1967—based on his work in the 1950s—
went out of print long ago. But its content lives on. . . ."

For part of that content, see Stencils .

A :Log24 post from the date of Golomb's death —

See as well other posts on Mathematics and Narrative.

Sunday, March 21, 2021

Mathematics and Narrative: The Unity

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 10:25 pm

“To conquer, three boxes* have to synchronize and join together into the Unity.”

―Wonder Woman in Zack Snyder’s Justice League

See also The Unity of Combinatorics  and The Miracle Octad Generator.

* Cf.  Aitchison’s Octads

Monday, May 25, 2020

Mathematics and Narrative

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 3:08 am

Mathematics:  This journal on September 1, 2011 —
Posts tagged September Morn.

Narrative:  Also on September 1, 2011 —

See as well  Nabokov’s Magic Carpet.

Monday, March 16, 2020

Mathematics and Narrative* Continues:

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:27 am

Expanding the Spielraum

Mathematics:  See Tetrahedron vs. Square in this journal
(Notes on two different models of schoolgirl space ).

Narrative:  Replacing the square  from the above posts by
a related cube 

… yields a merchandising inspiration

Dueling Holocrons: 

Jedi Cube vs. Sith Tetrahedron

.

* See also earlier posts on Mathematics and Narrative.

Tuesday, August 6, 2019

Mathematics and Narrative:  The Crosswicks Curse Continues.

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:03 pm

"There is  such a thing as a desktop."

— Saying adapted from a 1962 young-adult novel.

Thursday, November 15, 2018

Mathematics and Narrative

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 9:08 pm

Mathematics —

See (for instance) a research group at Ghent University.

For those who prefer narrative . . .

See also . . .

Sunday, August 26, 2018

Mathematics and Narrative: Queensland

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:56 am

Mathematics —

http://www.log24.com/log/pix18/180826-Cameron-on-U_of_Queensland-slide-500w.jpg

Narrative —

http://www.log24.com/log/pix18/180826-Huntsman-Winters-War-Billboard-Art-500w.jpg

See also other recent posts tagged Queensland.

Thursday, August 16, 2018

Mathematics and Narrative

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 11:00 pm

(Continued)

Mathematics:

Alperin, Groups and Representations, p. 61

Narrative:

The Tale of the Flux Capacitor

Wednesday, February 28, 2018

Mathematics and Narrative

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 9:00 am

(Continued)

Excerpts from a post of May 25, 2005 —

Above is an example I like of mathematics….

Here is an example I like of narrative:

Kate felt quite dizzy. She didn't know exactly what it was
that had just happened, but she felt pretty damn  certain  that
it  was  the  sort of experience that her mother would not have
approved of on a first date.
     "Is this all part of what we have to do to go to  Asgard?"
she said. "Or are you just fooling around?"
     "We will go to Asgard...now," he said.
     At that moment he raised his hand as if to pluck an apple,
but instead of plucking he made a tiny, sharp turning movement.
The effect  was as if he had twisted the entire world through a
billionth part of a billionth  part  of  a  degree.  Everything
shifted,  was  for  a  moment  minutely  out of focus, and then
snapped back again as a suddenly different world.

— Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

Image from a different  different world —

Hat-tip to a related Feb. 26 weblog post
at the American Mathematical Society.

Monday, February 20, 2017

Mathematics and Narrative

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 2:40 pm

Mathematics —

Hudson's parametrization of the
4×4 square, published in 1905:

A later parametrization, from this date in 1986:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110220-relativprob.jpg

A note from later in 1986 shows the equivalence of these
two parametrizations:

Narrative —

Posts tagged Memory-History-Geometry.

The mathematically challenged may prefer the narrative of the
Creation Matrix from the religion of the Transformers:

"According to religious legend, the core of the Matrix
was created from Solomus, the god of wisdom,
trapped in the form of a crystal by Mortilus, the god
of death. Following the defeat of Mortilus, Solomus
managed to transform his crystal prison into the Matrix—
a conduit for the energies of Primus, who had himself
transformed into the life-giving computer Vector Sigma."

Wednesday, June 1, 2016

Mathematics and Narrative

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:06 pm

Principles before Personalities — AA  Saying .

Principles —

See Schoolgirl Problem in Wikipedia.

Personalities — 

See Alexandra Alter in the May 26 online New York Times :

"With the proliferation of 'girl' titles,
there are signs that the trend may have peaked;
it already seems ripe for parody." 

Update of 12:40 PM ET on Wednesday, June 1, 2016 —

A note for the Church of Synchronology 
See a post from this  journal on the date of the Alter piece, May 26:

(Click image for the rest of the post .)

Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Mathematics and Narrative

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 10:00 pm

Mathematics:  Galois-Plane Models.

Narrative: "The Dreaming Jewels."

Friday, October 17, 2014

Mathematics and Narrative, continued:

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

Raiders of the Lost Archetype

“… an unexpected development: the discovery of a lost archetype….”

— “The Lost Theorem,” by Lee Sallows, Mathematical Intelligencer, Fall 1997

Related material:

A scene from the 1954 film:

A check of this  journal on the above MetaFilter date — Jan. 24, 2012 —
yields a post tagged “in1954.”  From another post with that tag:

Medal of 9/15/06

Backstory:  Posts tagged Root Circle.

Monday, October 13, 2014

Mathematics and Narrative, continued

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:03 pm

For those who prefer drama to mathematics:

See also Magic + Flute in this journal.

Saturday, September 21, 2013

Mathematics and Narrative (continued)

Mathematics:

A review of posts from earlier this month —

Wednesday, September 4, 2013

Moonshine

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 4:00 PM

Unexpected connections between areas of mathematics
previously thought to be unrelated are sometimes referred
to as "moonshine."  An example—  the apparent connections
between parts of complex analysis and groups related to the
large Mathieu group M24. Some recent work on such apparent
connections, by Anne Taormina and Katrin Wendland, among
others (for instance, Miranda C.N. Cheng and John F.R. Duncan),
involves structures related to Kummer surfaces .
In a classic book, Kummer's Quartic Surface  (1905),
R.W.H.T. Hudson pictured a set of 140 structures, the 80
Rosenhain tetrads and the 60 Göpel tetrads, as 4-element
subsets of a 16-element 4×4 array.  It turns out that these
140 structures are the planes of the finite affine geometry
AG(4,2) of four dimensions over the two-element Galois field.
(See Diamond Theory in 1937.)

Thursday, September 5, 2013

Moonshine II

Filed under: Uncategorized — Tags:  — m759 @ 10:31 AM

(Continued from yesterday)

The foreword by Wolf Barth in the 1990 Cambridge U. Press
reissue of Hudson's 1905 classic Kummer's Quartic Surface
covers some of the material in yesterday's post Moonshine.

The distinction that Barth described in 1990 was also described, and illustrated,
in my 1986 note "Picturing the smallest projective 3-space."  The affine 4-space
over the the finite Galois field GF(2) that Barth describes was earlier described—
within a 4×4 array like that pictured by Hudson in 1905— in a 1979 American
Mathematical Society abstract, "Symmetry invariance in a diamond ring."

"The distinction between Rosenhain and Goepel tetrads
is nothing but the distinction between isotropic and
non-isotropic planes in this affine space over the finite field."

The 1990 paragraph of Barth quoted above may be viewed as a summary
of these facts, and also of my March 17, 2013, note "Rosenhain and Göpel
Tetrads in PG(3,2)
."

 

 

 

 

Narrative:

Aooo.

Happy birthday to Stephen King.

Friday, July 5, 2013

Mathematics and Narrative (continued)

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , , — m759 @ 6:01 pm

Short Story — (Click image for some details.)

IMAGE- Andries Brouwer and the Galois Tesseract

Parts of a longer story —

The Galois Tesseract and Priority.

Thursday, May 9, 2013

Mathematics and Narrative (continued)

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:00 pm

"Why history?
Well, the essence of history  is story ,
and a good story is an end in itself."

— Barry Mazur, "History of Mathematics  as a tool,"
    February 17, 2013

This  journal on February 17, 2013:

FROM Christoph Waltz

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 12:12 AM 

"Currently in post-production": The Zero Theorem.

For Christoph Waltz

Filed under: Uncategorized — m759 @ 12:00 AM 

Raiders of the Lost Tesseract  continues…

SOCRATES: Is he not better off in knowing his ignorance?
MENO: I think that he is.
SOCRATES: If we have made him doubt, and given him the 'torpedo's shock,' have we done him any harm?
MENO: I think not.

Torpedo… LOS!

IMAGE- Theodore Sturgeon, 1972 reviews of Del Rey's 'Pstalemate' and Le Guin's 'Lathe of Heaven'   

See also today's previous post.

Sunday, April 28, 2013

Mathematics and Narrative (continued)

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:30 am

See Snakes on a Projective Plane  by Andrew Spann (Sept. 26, 2006):

'Snakes on a Plane' cartoon

Click image for some related posts.

"…what he was trying to get across was not that he was the Soldier of a Power that was fighting across all of time to change history, but simply that we men were creatures with imaginations and it was our highest duty to try to tell what it was really like to live in other times and places and bodies. Once he said to me, 'The growth of consciousness is everything… the seed of awareness sending its roots across space and time. But it can grow in so many ways, spinning its web from mind to mind like the spider or burrowing into the unconscious darkness like the snake. The biggest wars are the wars of thought.' "

— Fritz Leiber, Changewar , page 22

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

Mathematics and Narrative (continued)

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 10:18 am

Angels & Demons meet Hudson Hawk

Dan Brown's four-elements diamond in Angels & Demons :

IMAGE- Illuminati Diamond, pp. 359-360 in 'Angels & Demons,' Simon & Schuster Pocket Books 2005, 448 pages, ISBN 0743412397

The Leonardo Crystal from Hudson Hawk :

Hudson:

Mathematics may be used to relate (very loosely)
Dan Brown's fanciful diamond figure to the fanciful
Leonardo Crystal from Hudson Hawk 

"Giving himself a head rub, Hawk bears down on
the three oddly malleable objects. He TANGLES 
and BENDS and with a loud SNAP, puts them together,
forming the Crystal from the opening scene."

— A screenplay of Hudson Hawk

Happy birthday to Bruce Willis.

Thursday, February 7, 2013

Mathematics and Narrative, continued…

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

Primes Are Forever

"If diamonds are a girl's best friend,
prime numbers are a mathematician's….

A Mersenne prime is of the form 2P-1,
where the variable P is itself a prime—
making the Mersenne an elite sort of prime,
a James Bond among spies."

— Anonymous author at
    Fox News, Feb. 5, 2013

The author notes that the smaller
Mersenne primes include 7.

Related Material

April 7, 2003:

April is Math Awareness Month.

This year's theme is "mathematics and art."

Mathematics and Art: Totentanz from Seventh Seal

Update of 2:56 PM Feb. 7:

See also Paul Bateman and, in this journal, the date of Bateman's death.

For mathematics rather than narrative, see (for instance)

.

Thursday, September 27, 2012

Mathematics and Narrative (continued)

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 12:00 pm

In diamond-narrative news today…

IMAGE- Pink Panther actor dies at 95

"Among the low points of his career was his performance
in the disastrous 1985 remake of “King Solomon’s Mines….”

— David Belcher in today's online New York Times

Friday, January 27, 2012

Mathematics and Narrative (continued)

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 1:44 am

Princeton University Press on a book it will publish in March—

Circles Disturbed: The Interplay of Mathematics and Narrative

"Circles Disturbed  brings together important thinkers in mathematics, history, and philosophy to explore the relationship between mathematics and narrative. The book's title recalls the last words of the great Greek mathematician Archimedes before he was slain by a Roman soldier— 'Don't disturb my circles'— words that seem to refer to two radically different concerns: that of the practical person living in the concrete world of reality, and that of the theoretician lost in a world of abstraction. Stories and theorems are, in a sense, the natural languages of these two worlds–stories representing the way we act and interact, and theorems giving us pure thought, distilled from the hustle and bustle of reality. Yet, though the voices of stories and theorems seem totally different, they share profound connections and similarities."

Timeline of the Marvel Cinematic Universe — Norway, March 1942

"The Red Skull finds the Tesseract, a cube of strange power,
said to be the jewel of Odin’s treasure room, in Tonsberg Norway.
 (Captain America: The First Avenger)"

Tesseracts Disturbed — (Click to enlarge)

Detail of Tesseracts Disturbed —

Narrative of the detail—

See Tesseract in this journal and Norway, May 2010

The Oslo Version and Annals of Conceptual Art.

"Oh, what a tangled web we weave…"

Tuesday, December 13, 2011

Mathematics and Narrative, continued

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 11:01 pm

Mathematics —

(Some background for the Galois tesseract )

(Click to enlarge)

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11C/111213-Edge-geometry-heptads-500w.jpg

Narrative

An essay on science and philosophy in the January 2012
Notices of the American Mathematical Society .

Note particularly the narrative explanation of the double-slit experiment—

"The assertion that elementary particles have
free will and follow Quality very closely leads to
some startling consequences. For instance, the
wave-particle duality paradox, in particular the baffling
results of the famous double slit experiment,
may now be reconsidered. In that experiment, first
conducted by Thomas Young at the beginning
of the nineteenth century, a point light source
illuminated a thin plate with two adjacent parallel
slits in it. The light passing through the slits
was projected on a screen behind the plate, and a
pattern of bright and dark bands on the screen was
observed. It was precisely the interference pattern
caused by the diffraction patterns of waves passing
through adjacent holes in an obstruction. However,
when the same experiment was carried out much
later, only this time with photons being shot at
the screen one at a time—the same interference
pattern resulted! But the Metaphysics of Quality
can offer an explanation: the photons each follow
Quality in their actions, and so either individually
or en masse (i.e., from a light source) will do the
same thing, that is, create the same interference
pattern on the screen."

This is from "a Ph.D. candidate in mathematics at the University of Calgary."
His essay is titled "A Perspective on Wigner’s 'Unreasonable Effectiveness
of Mathematics.'" It might better be titled "Ineffective Metaphysics."

Thursday, October 13, 2011

Mathematics and Narrative, continued

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:56 am

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11C/111013-FrodoAndRing.jpg

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11C/111013-OxfordMurdersPoster-300w.jpg

"I've got a little story you oughta know…."

Friday, September 2, 2011

Mathematics and Narrative (continued)

Filed under: General — m759 @ 11:00 am

IMAGE- Death on 10/10/10

See also this journal on October 10, 2010.

Thursday, January 27, 2011

Mathematics and Narrative, continued…

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 10:30 am

Indiana Jones and the Magical Oracle

Mathematician Ken Ono in the December 2010 American Mathematical Society Notices

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101113-Ono.gif

The "dying genius" here is Ramanujan, not Galois. The story now continues at the AMS website—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110127-AMS-Ono-500w.jpg

      (Excerpt from Jan. 27 screenshot;
      the partitions story has been the top
      news item at the site all week.)

From a Jan. 20, 2011, Emory University press release —
"Finite formula found for partition numbers" —

"We found a function, that we call P, that is like a magical oracle," Ono says. "I can take any number, plug it into P, and instantly calculate the partitions of that number. P does not return gruesome numbers with infinitely many decimal places. It's the finite, algebraic formula that we have all been looking for."

For an introduction to the magical oracle, see a preprint, "Bruinier-Ono," at the American Institute of Mathematics website.

Ono also discussed the oracle in a video (see minute 25) recorded Jan. 21 and placed online today.

See as well "Exact formulas for the partition function?" at mathoverflow.net.

A Nov. 29, 2010, remark by Thomas Bloom on that page leads to a 2006 preprint by Ono and Kathrin Bringmann, "An Arithmetic Formula for the Partition Function*," that seems not unrelated to Ono's new "magical oracle" formula—

Click to enlarge

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110127-Preprints500w.jpg

The Bruinier-Ono paper does not mention the earlier Bringmann-Ono work.

(Both the 2011 Bruinier-Ono paper and the 2006 Bringmann-Ono paper mention their debt to a 2002 work by Zagier—  Don Zagier, "Traces of singular moduli," in Motives, Polylogarithms and Hodge theory, Part II  (Irvine, CA, 1998), International Press Lecture Series 3 (International Press, Somerville, MA, 2002),   pages 211-244.)

Some background for those who prefer mathematics to narrative
The Web of Modularity: Arithmetic of the Coefficients of Modular Forms and q-Series ,
by Ken Ono, American Mathematical Society CBMS Series, 2004.

* Proc. Amer. Math. Soc. 135 (2007), 3507-3514.

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