Log24

This post was suggested by this morning's New York Times  story on the missing cornerstone of St. Patrick's Cathedral and by the recent design for an official T-shirt celebrating Harvard's 375th anniversary—

In Harvard's case, the missing piece beneath the cathedral-like spire* is the VERITAS on the college shield.

Possible sources for a shield image representing VERITAS—

1. "Patrick Blackburn" in this journal, which might be combined with

2. Reflections on Kurt Gödel ** by Hao Wang, Chapter 9, "To Fit All the Parts Together"—

"The metaphor of fitting parts together readily suggests
  the concrete image of solving a picture puzzle…." (p. 243)

Or the image of a Wang tiles puzzle.

A graphic image, colorful but garish, that summarizes these two sources—

  Shield with matching Wang tiles

* The Lowell House bell tower
** MIT Press, first published in 1987

"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.)

A film director's obituary in today's New York Times—

"Mr. Donner broke through as a director in 1963 with a low-budget black-and-white film of Harold Pinter’s play 'The Caretaker,' with Alan Bates, Donald Pleasence and Robert Shaw. Since he couldn’t find traditional backing for the film, a group of well-wishers that included Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Peter Sellers and Noël Coward financed it."

   A lower-budget version:

All work and no play 

makes Jack a dull boy.

See also "Patrick Blackburn, meet Gideon Summerfield" in Building a Mystery.