Log24

Monday, June 27, 2011

Galois Cube Revisited

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 1:00 pm

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11A/110427-Cube27.jpg
   The 3×3×3 Galois Cube

    See Unity and Multiplicity.

   This cube, unlike Rubik's, is a
    purely mathematical structure.

    Its properties may be compared
    with those of the order-2  Galois
    cube (of eight subcubes, or
    elements ) and the order-4  Galois
    cube (of 64 elements). The
    order-3  cube (of 27 elements)
    lacks, because it is based on
    an odd  prime, the remarkable
    symmetry properties of its smaller
    and larger cube neighbors.

Sunday, June 4, 2023

The Galois Core

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:24 pm
 

  Rubik core:

 

Swarthmore Cube Project, 2008


Non- Rubik core:

Illustration for weblog post 'The Galois Core'

Central structure from a Galois plane

    (See image below.)

Some small Galois spaces (the Cullinane models)

Sunday, November 22, 2020

The Galois-Fano Plane

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:52 pm

A figure adapted from “Magic Fano Planes,” by
Ben Miesner and David Nash, Pi Mu Epsilon Journal
Vol. 14, No. 1, 1914, CENTENNIAL ISSUE 3 2014
(Fall 2014), pp. 23-29 (7 pages) —

Related material — The Eightfold Cube.

Update at 10:51 PM ET the same day —

Essentially the same figure as above appears also in
the second arXiv version (11 Jan. 2016) of . . .

DAVID A. NASH, and JONATHAN NEEDLEMAN.
“When Are Finite Projective Planes Magic?”
Mathematics Magazine, vol. 89, no. 2, 2016, pp. 83–91.
JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.4169/math.mag.89.2.83.

The arXiv versions

Sunday, November 19, 2017

Galois Space

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 8:00 pm

This is a sequel to yesterday's post Cube Space Continued.

Monday, August 1, 2016

Cube

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 10:28 pm

From this journal —

See (for instance) Sacred Order, July 18, 2006 —

The finite Galois affine space with 64 points

From a novel published July 26, 2016, and reviewed
in yesterday's (print) New York Times Book Review —

The doors open slowly. I step into a hangar. From the rafters high above, lights blaze down, illuminating a twelve-foot cube the color of gunmetal. My pulse rate kicks up. I can’t believe what I’m looking at. Leighton must sense my awe, because he says, “Beautiful, isn’t it?” It is exquisitely beautiful. At first, I think the hum inside the hangar is coming from the lights, but it can’t be. It’s so deep I can feel it at the base of my spine, like the ultralow-frequency vibration of a massive engine. I drift toward the box, mesmerized.

— Crouch, Blake. Dark Matter: A Novel
(Kindle Locations 2004-2010).
Crown/Archetype. Kindle Edition. 

See also Log24 on the publication date of Dark Matter .

Thursday, June 30, 2016

Rubik vs. Galois: Preconception vs. Pre-conception

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:20 pm

From Psychoanalytic Aesthetics: The British School ,
by Nicola Glover, Chapter 4  —

In his last theoretical book, Attention and Interpretation  (1970), Bion has clearly cast off the mathematical and scientific scaffolding of his earlier writings and moved into the aesthetic and mystical domain. He builds upon the central role of aesthetic intuition and the Keats's notion of the 'Language of Achievement', which

… includes language that is both
a prelude to action and itself a kind of action;
the meeting of psycho-analyst and analysand
is itself an example of this language.29.

Bion distinguishes it from the kind of language which is a substitute  for thought and action, a blocking of achievement which is lies [sic ] in the realm of 'preconception' – mindlessness as opposed to mindfulness. The articulation of this language is possible only through love and gratitude; the forces of envy and greed are inimical to it..

This language is expressed only by one who has cast off the 'bondage of memory and desire'. He advised analysts (and this has caused a certain amount of controversy) to free themselves from the tyranny of the past and the future; for Bion believed that in order to make deep contact with the patient's unconscious the analyst must rid himself of all preconceptions about his patient – this superhuman task means abandoning even the desire to cure . The analyst should suspend memories of past experiences with his patient which could act as restricting the evolution of truth. The task of the analyst is to patiently 'wait for a pattern to emerge'. For as T.S. Eliot recognised in Four Quartets , 'only by the form, the pattern / Can words or music reach/ The stillness'.30. The poet also understood that 'knowledge' (in Bion's sense of it designating a 'preconception' which blocks  thought, as opposed to his designation of a 'pre -conception' which awaits  its sensory realisation), 'imposes a pattern and falsifies'

For the pattern is new in every moment
And every moment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have ever been.31.

The analyst, by freeing himself from the 'enchainment to past and future', casts off the arbitrary pattern and waits for new aesthetic form to emerge, which will (it is hoped) transform the content of the analytic encounter.

29. Attention and Interpretation  (Tavistock, 1970), p. 125

30. Collected Poems  (Faber, 1985), p. 194.

31. Ibid., p. 199.

See also the previous posts now tagged Bion.

Preconception  as mindlessness is illustrated by Rubik's cube, and
"pre -conception" as mindfulness is illustrated by n×n×n Froebel  cubes
for n= 1, 2, 3, 4. 

Suitably coordinatized, the Froebel  cubes become Galois  cubes,
and illustrate a new approach to the mathematics of space .

Thursday, March 26, 2015

The Möbius Hypercube

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 12:31 am

The incidences of points and planes in the
Möbius 8 configuration (8 points and 8 planes,
with 4 points on each plane and 4 planes on each point),
were described by Coxeter in a 1950 paper.* 
A table from Monday's post summarizes Coxeter's
remarks, which described the incidences in
spatial terms, with the points and planes as the vertices
and face-planes of two mutually inscribed tetrahedra —

Monday's post, "Gallucci's Möbius Configuration,"
may not be completely intelligible unless one notices
that Coxeter has drawn some of the intersections in his 
Fig. 24, a schematic representation of the point-plane
incidences, as dotless, and some as hollow dots.  The figure,
"Gallucci's version of Möbius's 84," is shown below.
The hollow dots, representing the 8 points  (as opposed
to the 8 planes ) of the configuration, are highlighted in blue.

Here a plane  (represented by a dotless intersection) contains
the four points  that are represented in the square array as lying
in the same row or same column as the plane. 

The above Möbius incidences appear also much earlier in
Coxeter's paper, in figures 6 and 5, where they are shown
as describing the structure of a hypercube. 

In figures 6 and 5, the dotless intersections representing
planes have been replaced by solid dots. The hollow dots
have again been highlighted in blue.

Figures 6 and 5 demonstrate the fact that adjacency in the set of
16 vertices of a hypercube is isomorphic to adjacency in the set
of 16 subsquares of a square 4×4 array, provided that opposite
sides of the array are identified, as in Fig. 6. The digits in 
Coxeter's labels above may be viewed as naming the positions 
of the 1's in (0,1) vectors (x4, x3, x2, x1) over the two-element
Galois field.  In that context, the 4×4 array may be called, instead
of a Möbius hypercube , a Galois tesseract .

*  "Self-Dual Configurations and Regular Graphs," 
    Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society,
    Vol. 56 (1950), pp. 413-455

The subscripts' usual 1-2-3-4 order is reversed as a reminder
    that such a vector may be viewed as labeling a binary number 
    from 0  through 15, or alternately as labeling a polynomial in
    the 16-element Galois field GF(24).  See the Log24 post
     Vector Addition in a Finite Field (Jan. 5, 2013).

Tuesday, November 25, 2014

Euclidean-Galois Interplay

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

For previous remarks on this topic, as it relates to
symmetry axes of the cube, see previous posts tagged Interplay.

The above posts discuss, among other things, the Galois
projective plane of order 3, with 13 points and 13 lines.

Oxley's 2004 drawing of the 13-point projective plane

These Galois points and lines may be modeled in Euclidean geometry
by the 13 symmetry axes and the 13 rotation planes
of the Euclidean cube. They may also be modeled in Galois geometry
by subsets of the 3x3x3 Galois cube (vector 3-space over GF(3)).

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11A/110427-Cube27.jpg

   The 3×3×3 Galois Cube 

Exercise: Is there any such analogy between the 31 points of the
order-5 Galois projective plane and the 31 symmetry axes of the
Euclidean dodecahedron and icosahedron? Also, how may the
31 projective points  be naturally pictured as lines  within the 
5x5x5 Galois cube (vector 3-space over GF(5))?

Update of Nov. 30, 2014 —

For background to the above exercise, see
pp. 16-17 of A Geometrical Picture Book ,
by Burkard Polster (Springer, 1998), esp.
the citation to a 1983 article by Lemay.

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Cube Review

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 3:00 pm

Last Wednesday's 11 PM post mentioned the
adjacency-isomorphism relating the 4-dimensional 
hypercube over the 2-element Galois field GF(2) to
the 4×4 array made up of 16 square cells, with
opposite edges of the 4×4 array identified.

A web page illustrates this property with diagrams that
enjoy the Karnaugh property— adjacent vertices, or cells,
differ in exactly one coordinate. A brief paper by two German
authors relates the Karnaugh property to the construction
of a magic square like that of Dürer (see last Wednesday).

In a similar way (search the Web for Karnaugh + cube ),
vertex adjacency in the 6-dimensional hypercube over GF(2) 
is isomorphic to cell adjacency in the 4x4x4 cube, with
opposite faces of the 4x4x4 cube identified.

The above cube may be used to illustrate some properties
of the 64-point Galois 6-space that are more advanced
than those studied by enthusiasts of "magic" squares
and cubes.

See

Those who prefer narrative to mathematics may
consult posts in this journal containing the word "Cuber."

Thursday, September 27, 2012

Kummer and the Cube

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 7:11 pm

Denote the d-dimensional hypercube by  γd .

"… after coloring the sixty-four vertices of  γ6
alternately red and blue, we can say that
the sixteen pairs of opposite red vertices represent
the sixteen nodes of Kummer's surface, while
the sixteen pairs of opposite blue vertices
represent the sixteen tropes."

— From "Kummer's 16," section 12 of Coxeter's 1950
    "Self-dual Configurations and Regular Graphs"

Just as the 4×4 square represents the 4-dimensional
hypercube  γ4  over the two-element Galois field GF(2),
so the 4x4x4 cube represents the 6-dimensional
hypercube  γ6  over GF(2).

For religious interpretations, see
Nanavira Thera (Indian) and
I Ching  geometry (Chinese).

See also two professors in The New York Times
discussing images of the sacred in an op-ed piece
dated Sept. 26 (Yom Kippur).

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Cuber

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 11:00 am

(Continued)

For Pete Rustan, space recon expert, who died on June 28—

(Click to enlarge.)

See also Galois vs. Rubik and Group Theory Template.

Friday, December 30, 2011

Quaternions on a Cube

The following picture provides a new visual approach to
the order-8 quaternion  group's automorphisms.

IMAGE- Quaternion group acting on an eightfold cube

Click the above image for some context.

Here the cube is called "eightfold" because the eight vertices,
like the eight subcubes of a 2×2×2 cube,* are thought of as
independently movable. See The Eightfold Cube.

See also…

Related material: Robin Chapman and Karen E. Smith
on the quaternion group's automorphisms.

* See Margaret Wertheim's Christmas Eve remarks on mathematics
and the following eightfold cube from an institute she co-founded—

Froebel's third gift, the eightfold cube
© 2005 The Institute for Figuring

Photo by Norman Brosterman
fom the Inventing Kindergarten
exhibit at The Institute for Figuring
(co-founded by Margaret Wertheim)

Friday, September 9, 2011

Galois vs. Rubik

(Continued from Abel Prize, August 26)

IMAGE- Elementary Galois Geometry over GF(3)

The situation is rather different when the
underlying Galois field has two rather than
three elements… See Galois Geometry.

Image-- Sugar cube in coffee, from 'Bleu'

The coffee scene from “Bleu”

Related material from this journal:

The Dream of
the Expanded Field

Image-- 4x4 square and 4x4x4 cube

Saturday, August 27, 2011

Cosmic Cube*

IMAGE- Anthony Hopkins exorcises a Rubik cube

Prequel (Click to enlarge)

IMAGE- Galois vs. Rubik: Posters for Abel Prize, Oslo, 2008

Background —

IMAGE- 'Group Theory' Wikipedia article with Rubik's cube as main illustration and argument by a cuber for the image's use

See also Rubik in this journal.

* For the title, see Groups Acting.

Monday, June 21, 2010

Cube Spaces

Cubic models of finite geometries
display an interplay between
Euclidean and Galois geometry.

 

Example 1— The 2×2×2 Cube—

also known as the eightfold  cube

2x2x2 cube

Group actions on the eightfold cube, 1984—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10A/100621-diandwh-detail.GIF

Version by Laszlo Lovasz et al., 2003—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10A/100621-LovaszCubeSpace.gif

Lovasz et al. go on to describe the same group actions
as in the 1984 note, without attribution.

Example 2— The 3×3×3 Cube

A note from 1985 describing group actions on a 3×3 plane array—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10A/100621-VisualizingDetail.gif

Undated software by Ed Pegg Jr. displays
group actions on a 3×3×3 cube that extend the
3×3 group actions from 1985 described above—

Ed Pegg Jr.'s program at Wolfram demonstrating concepts of a 1985 note by Cullinane

Pegg gives no reference to the 1985 work on group actions.

Example 3— The 4×4×4 Cube

A note from 27 years ago today—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10A/100621-Cube830621.gif

As far as I know, this version of the
group-actions theorem has not yet been ripped off.

Sunday, March 21, 2010

Galois Field of Dreams

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 10:01 am

It is well known that the seven (22 + 2 +1) points of the projective plane of order 2 correspond to 2-point subspaces (lines) of the linear 3-space over the two-element field Galois field GF(2), and may be therefore be visualized as 2-cube subsets of the 2×2×2 cube.

Similarly, recent posts* have noted that the thirteen (32 + 3 + 1) points of the projective plane of order 3 may be seen as 3-cube subsets in the 3×3×3 cube.

The twenty-one (42 + 4 +1) points of the (unique) projective plane of order 4 may also be visualized as subsets of a cube– in this case, the 4×4×4 cube. This visualization is somewhat more complicated than the 3×3×3 case, since the 4×4×4 cube has no central subcube, and each projective-plane point corresponds to four, not three, subcubes.

These three cubes, with 8, 27, and 64 subcubes, thus serve as geometric models in a straightforward way– first as models of finite linear spaces, hence as models for small Galois geometries derived from the linear spaces. (The cubes with 8 and 64 subcubes also serve in a less straightforward, and new, way as finite-geometry models– see The Eightfold Cube, Block Designs, and Solomon's Cube.)

A group of collineations** of the 21-point plane is one of two nonisomorphic simple groups of order 20,160. The other is the linear group acting on the linear 4-space over the two-element Galois field  GF(2). The 1899 paper establishing the nonisomorphism notes that "the expression Galois Field is perhaps not yet in general use."

Coordinates of the 4×4×4 cube's subcubes can, of course, be regarded as elements of the Galois field GF(64).

The preceding remarks were purely mathematical. The "dreams" of this post's title are not. See…

Number and Time, by Marie-Louise von Franz

See also Geometry of the I Ching and a search in this journal for "Galois + Ching."

* February 27 and March 13

** G20160 in Mitchell 1910,  LF(3,22) in Edge 1965

— Mitchell, Ulysses Grant, "Geometry and Collineation Groups
   of the Finite Projective Plane PG(2,22),"
   Princeton Ph.D. dissertation (1910)

— Edge, W. L., "Some Implications of the Geometry of
   the 21-Point Plane," Math. Zeitschr. 87, 348-362 (1965)

Monday, July 12, 2021

Educational Series

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 11:06 am

(Continued from St. Luke's Day, 2014)


 

Tablet:

 

The Lo Shu as a Finite Space
 

Cube:

 

IMAGE- A Galois cube: model of the 27-point affine 3-space

Wednesday, December 27, 2017

For Day 27 of December 2017

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 3:57 am

See the 27-part structure of
the 3x3x3 Galois cube

IMAGE- The 3x3x3 Galois cube
as well as Autism Sunday 2015.

Monday, April 3, 2017

Odd Core

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

 

3x3x3 Galois cube, gray and white

Saturday, September 17, 2016

Interior/Exterior

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 12:25 am


3x3x3 Galois cube, gray and white

Wednesday, June 29, 2016

Space Jews

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

For the Feast of SS. Peter and Paul

In memory of Alvin Toffler and Simon Ramo,
a review of figures from the midnight that began
the date of their deaths, June 27, 2016 —

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11A/110427-Cube27.jpg

   The 3×3×3 Galois Cube

See also Rubik in this journal.

Monday, June 27, 2016

Interplay

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 12:00 am

From a search in this journal for Euclid + Galois + Interplay

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11A/110427-Cube27.jpg

   The 3×3×3 Galois Cube
 

A tune suggested by the first image above —

Monday, April 4, 2016

The Bauersfeld Structure*

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 8:31 pm

"If you would be a poet, create works capable of
answering the challenge of apocalyptic times,
even if this meaning sounds apocalyptic."

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

"It's a trap!"

Ferlinghetti's friend Erik Bauersfeld,
     who reportedly died yesterday at 93

* See also, in this journal, Galois Cube and Deathtrap.

Friday, April 27, 2012

An April 27–

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 11:09 am

IMAGE- The 3x3x3 Galois cube
The 3×3×3 Galois Cube

Backstory— The Talented, from April 26 last year,
and Atlas Shrugged, from April 27 last year.

Tuesday, February 14, 2012

The Ninth Configuration

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

The showmanship of Nicki Minaj at Sunday's
Grammy Awards suggested the above title, 
that of a novel by the author of The Exorcist .

The Ninth Configuration 

The ninth* in a list of configurations—

"There is a (2d-1)d  configuration
  known as the Cox configuration."

MathWorld article on "Configuration"

For further details on the Cox 326 configuration's Levi graph,
a model of the 64 vertices of the six-dimensional hypercube γ6  ,
see Coxeter, "Self-Dual Configurations and Regular Graphs,"
Bull. Amer. Math. Soc.  Vol. 56, pages 413-455, 1950.
This contains a discussion of Kummer's 166 as it 
relates to  γ6  , another form of the 4×4×4 Galois cube.

See also Solomon's Cube.

* Or tenth, if the fleeting reference to 113 configurations is counted as the seventh—
  and then the ninth  would be a 153 and some related material would be Inscapes.

Saturday, January 14, 2012

Defining Form (continued)

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

Detail of Sylvie Donmoyer picture discussed
here on January 10

http://www.log24.com/log/pix12/120114-Donmoyer-Still-Life-CubeDetail.jpg

The "13" tile may refer to the 13 symmetry axes
in the 3x3x3 Galois cube, or the corresponding
13 planes through the center in that cube. (See
this morning's post and Cubist Geometries.)

Sunday, June 26, 2011

Sunday Dinner

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:22 pm

From "Sunday Dinner" in this journal—

"'If Jesus were to visit us, it would have been
the Sunday dinner he would have insisted on
being a part of, not the worship service at the church.'"

Judith Shulevitz at The New York Times
    on Sunday, July 18, 2010

The image “http://www.log24.com/log/pix06/060410-HotelAdlon2.jpg” cannot be displayed, because it contains errors.

Some table topics—

Today's midday New York Lottery numbers were 027 and 7002.

The former suggests a Galois cube, the latter a course syllabus—

CSC 7002
Graduate Computer Security (Spring 2011)
University of Colorado at Denver
Department of Computer Science

An item from that syllabus:

Six 22 February 2011   DES History of DES; Encryption process; Decryption; Expander function; S-boxes and their output; Key; the function f  that takes the modified key and part of the text as input; mulitple Rounds of DES; Present-day lack of Security in DES, which led to the new Encryption Standard, namely AES. Warmup for AES: the mathematics of Fields: Galois Fields, particularly the one of order 256 and its relation to the irreducible polynomial x^8 + x^4 + x^3 + x + 1 with coefficients from the field Z_2.

Related material: A novel, PopCo , was required reading for the course.

Discuss a different novel by the same author—

The End of Mr. Y .

Discuss the author herself, Scarlett Thomas.

Background for the discussion—

Derrida in this journal versus Charles Williams in this journal.

Related topics from the above syllabus date—

Metaphor and Gestell and Quadrat.

Some context— Midsummer Eve's Dream.

Saturday, April 30, 2011

Crimson Walpurgisnacht

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

Part I — Unity and Multiplicity
              (Continued from The Talented and Galois Cube)

On Husserl's 'Philosophie der Arithmetik'- 'A feeling, an angel, the moon, and Italy'

Part II — "A feeling, an angel, the moon, and Italy"—

Click for details

Dean Martin and Peter Lawford in Crimson ad for 2011 Quincy House Q-Ball

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

Unity and Multiplicity

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 5:48 pm

Today's earlier post mentions one approach to the concepts of unity and multiplicity. Here is another.

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11A/110427-Cube27.jpg
Unity:
The 3×3×3 Galois Cube

Ed Pegg Jr.'s program at Wolfram demonstrating concepts of a 1985 note by Cullinane

Multiplicity:

One of a group, GL(3,3), of 11,232
natural transformations of the 3×3×3 Cube

See also the earlier 1985 3×3 version by Cullinane.

Thursday, March 10, 2011

Paradigms Lost

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 5:48 pm

(Continued from February 19)

The cover of the April 1, 1970 second edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions , by Thomas S. Kuhn—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110310-KuhnCover.jpg

This journal on January 19, 2011

IMAGE- A Galois cube: model of the 27-point affine 3-space

If Galois geometry is thought of as a paradigm shift from Euclidean geometry,
both images above— the Kuhn cover and the nine-point affine plane—
may be viewed, taken together, as illustrating the shift. The nine subcubes
of the Euclidean  3x3x3 cube on the Kuhn cover do not  form an affine plane
in the coordinate system of the Galois  cube in the second image, but they
at least suggest  such a plane. Similarly, transformations of a
non-mathematical object, the 1974 Rubik  cube, are not Galois  transformations,
but they at least suggest  such transformations.

See also today's online Harvard Crimson  illustration of problems of translation
not unrelated to the problems of commensurability  discussed by Kuhn.

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110310-CrimsonSm.jpg

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Intermediate Cubism

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:22 pm

The following is a new illustration for Cubist Geometries

IMAGE- A Galois cube: model of the 27-point affine 3-space

(For elementary cubism, see Pilate Goes to Kindergarten and The Eightfold Cube.
 For advanced, see Solomon's Cube and Geometry of the I Ching .)

Cézanne's Greetings.

Saturday, November 6, 2010

A Better Story

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 6:00 pm

Continued from June 4, 2010

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101106-GardnerGalois.jpg

See also Jon Han's fanciful illustration in today's New York Times  and "Galois Cube" in this journal.

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101106-JonHanCube.jpg

Tuesday, October 24, 2023

A Bond with Reality:  The Geometry of Cuts

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


Illustrations of object and gestures
from finitegeometry.org/sc/ —

Object

Gestures

An earlier presentation of the above
seven partitions of the eightfold cube:

Seven partitions of the 2x2x2 cube in a book from 1906

Related mathematics:

The use  of binary coordinate systems
as a conceptual tool

Natural physical  transformations of square or cubical arrays
of actual physical cubes (i.e., building blocks) correspond to
natural algebraic  transformations of vector spaces over GF(2).
This was apparently not previously known.

See "The Thing and I."

and . . .

Galois.space .

 

Related entertainment:

Or Matt Helm by way of a Jedi cube.

Saturday, January 14, 2023

Châtelet on Weil — A “Space of Gestures”

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 2:21 pm
 

From Gilles Châtelet, Introduction to Figuring Space
(Springer, 1999) —

Metaphysics does have a catalytic effect, which has been described in a very beautiful text by the mathematician André Weil:

Nothing is more fertile, all mathematicians know, than these obscure analogies, these murky reflections of one theory in another, these furtive caresses, these inexplicable tiffs; also nothing gives as much pleasure to the researcher. A day comes when the illusion vanishes: presentiment turns into certainty … Luckily for researchers, as the fogs clear at one point, they form again at another.4

André Weil cuts to the quick here: he conjures these 'murky reflections', these 'furtive caresses', the 'theory of Galois that Lagrange touches … with his finger through a screen that he does not manage to pierce.' He is a connoisseur of these metaphysical 'fogs' whose dissipation at one point heralds their reforming at another. It would be better to talk here of a horizon that tilts thereby revealing a new space of gestures which has not as yet been elucidated and cut out as structure.

4 A. Weil, 'De la métaphysique aux mathématiques', (Oeuvres, vol. II, p. 408.)

For gestures as fogs, see the oeuvre of  Guerino Mazzola.

For some clearer remarks, see . . .


Illustrations of object and gestures
from finitegeometry.org/sc/ —

 

Object

 

Gestures

An earlier presentation
of the above seven partitions
of the eightfold cube:

Seven partitions of the 2x2x2 cube in a book from 1906

Related material: Galois.space .

Saturday, September 10, 2022

Orthogonal Latin Triangles

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:38 am

From a 1964 recreational-mathematics essay —

Note that the first two triangle-dissections above are analogous to
mutually orthogonal Latin squares . This implies a connection to
affine transformations within Galois geometry. See triangle graphics
in this  journal.

Affine transformation of 'magic' squares and triangles: the triangle Lo Shu 

Update of 4:40 AM ET —

Other mystical figures —

Magic cube and corresponding hexagram, or Star of David, with faces mapped to lines and edges mapped to points

"Before time began, there was the Cube."

— Optimus Prime in "Transformers" (Paramount, 2007)

Saturday, September 3, 2022

1984 Revisited

Filed under: General — m759 @ 2:46 pm

Cube Bricks 1984 —

An Approach to Symmetric Generation of the Simple Group of Order 168

Related material

Note the three quadruplets of parallel edges  in the 1984 figure above.

Further Reading

The above Gates article appeared earlier, in the June 2010 issue of
Physics World , with bigger illustrations. For instance —

Exercise: Describe, without seeing the rest of the article,
the rule used for connecting the balls above.

Wikipedia offers a much clearer picture of a (non-adinkra) tesseract —

      And then, more simply, there is the Galois tesseract

For parts of my own  world in June 2010, see this journal for that month.

The above Galois tesseract appears there as follows:

Image-- The Dream of the Expanded Field

See also the Klein correspondence in a paper from 1968
in yesterday's 2:54 PM ET post

Monday, August 1, 2022

Enowning

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 3:26 pm

Related material — The Eightfold Cube.

See also . . .

"… Mathematics may be art, but to the general public it is
a black art, more akin to magic and mystery. This presents
a constant challenge to the mathematical community: to 
explain how art fits into our subject and what we mean by beauty."

— Sir Michael Atiyah, “The Art of Mathematics”
in the AMS Notices , January 2010

Friday, May 27, 2022

Plan 9 from Disney

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:00 am

 "With the Tablet of Ahkmenrah and the Cube of Rubik,
my power will know no bounds!"
— Kahmunrah in a novelization of Night at the Museum:
Battle of the Smithsonian , Barron's Educational Series

Scholium

Abstracting from narrative to structure, and from structure
to pure number, the Tablet of Ahkmenrah represents the
number 9 and the Cube of Rubik represents the number 27.

Returning from pure abstract numbers to concrete representations,
9 yields the structures in Log24 posts tagged Triangle.graphics,
and 27 yields a Galois  cube .

Tuesday, May 24, 2022

Playing the Palace

Filed under: General — m759 @ 9:54 am

From a Jamestown (NY) Post-Journal  article yesterday on
"the sold-out 10,000 Maniacs 40th anniversary concert at
The Reg Lenna Center Saturday" —

" 'The theater has a special place in our hearts. It’s played
a big part in my life,' Gustafson said.

Before being known as The Reg Lenna Center for The Arts,
it was formerly known as The Palace Theater. He recalled
watching movies there as a child…."

This, and the band's name, suggest some memories perhaps
better suited to the cinematic philosophy behind "Plan 9 from
Outer Space."

IMAGE- The Tablet of Ahkmenrah, from 'Night at the Museum'

 "With the Tablet of Ahkmenrah and the Cube of Rubik,
my power will know no bounds!"
— Kahmunrah in a novelization of Night at the Museum:
Battle of the Smithsonian , Barron's Educational Series

The above 3×3 Tablet of Ahkmenrah  image comes from
a Log24 search for the finite (i.e., Galois) field GF(3) that 
was, in turn, suggested by last night's post "Making Space."

See as well a mysterious document from a website in Slovenia
that mentions a 3×3 array "relating to nine halls of a mythical
palace where rites were performed in the 1st century AD" —

Friday, April 8, 2022

Souls at Stanford

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 6:00 am

Saturday, March 26, 2022

Box Geometry: Space, Group, Art  (Work in Progress)

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 2:06 am

Many structures of finite geometry can be modeled by
rectangular or cubical arrays ("boxes") —
of subsquares or subcubes (also "boxes").

Here is a draft for a table of related material, arranged
as internet URL labels.

Finite Geometry Notes — Summary Chart
 

Name Tag .Space .Group .Art
Box4

2×2 square representing the four-point finite affine geometry AG(2,2).

(Box4.space)

S4 = AGL(2,2)

(Box4.group)

 

(Box4.art)

Box6 3×2 (3-row, 2-column) rectangular array
representing the elements of an arbitrary 6-set.
S6  
Box8 2x2x2 cube or  4×2 (4-row, 2-column) array. S8 or Aor  AGL(3,2) of order 1344, or  GL(3,2) of order 168  
Box9 The 3×3 square. AGL(2,3) or  GL(2,3)  
Box12 The 12 edges of a cube, or  a 4×3  array for picturing the actions of the Mathieu group M12. Symmetries of the cube or  elements of the group M12  
Box13 The 13 symmetry axes of the cube. Symmetries of the cube.  
Box15 The 15 points of PG(3,2), the projective geometry
of 3 dimensions over the 2-element Galois field.
Collineations of PG(3,2)  
Box16 The 16 points of AG(4,2), the affine geometry
of 4 dimensions over the 2-element Galois field.

AGL(4,2), the affine group of 
322,560 permutations of the parts
of a 4×4 array (a Galois tesseract)

 
Box20 The configuration representing Desargues's theorem.    
Box21 The 21 points and 21 lines of PG(2,4).    
Box24 The 24 points of the Steiner system S(5, 8, 24).    
Box25 A 5×5 array representing PG(2,5).    
Box27 The 3-dimensional Galois affine space over the
3-element Galois field GF(3).
   
Box28 The 28 bitangents of a plane quartic curve.    
Box32 Pair of 4×4 arrays representing orthogonal 
Latin squares.
Used to represent
elements of AGL(4,2)
 
Box35 A 5-row-by-7-column array representing the 35
lines in the finite projective space PG(3,2)
PGL(3,2), order 20,160  
Box36 Eurler's 36-officer problem.    
Box45 The 45 Pascal points of the Pascal configuration.    
Box48 The 48 elements of the group  AGL(2,3). AGL(2,3).  
Box56

The 56 three-sets within an 8-set or
56 triangles in a model of Klein's quartic surface or
the 56 spreads in PG(3,2).

   
Box60 The Klein configuration.    
Box64 Solomon's cube.    

— Steven H. Cullinane, March 26-27, 2022

Friday, December 31, 2021

Aesthetics in Academia

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 9:33 am

Related art — The non-Rubik 3x3x3 cube —

The above structure illustrates the affine space of three dimensions
over the three-element finite (i.e., Galois) field, GF(3). Enthusiasts
of Judith Brown's nihilistic philosophy may note the "radiance" of the
13 axes of symmetry within the "central, structuring" subcube.

I prefer the radiance  (in the sense of Aquinas) of the central, structuring 
eightfold cube at the center of the affine space of six dimensions over
the two-element field GF(2).

Wednesday, November 11, 2020

Qube

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 8:30 pm

The new domain qube.link  forwards to . . .
http://finitegeometry.org/sc/64/solcube.html .

More generally, qubes.link  forwards to this post,
which defines qubes .

Definition: A qube  is a positive integer that is
a prime-power cube , i.e. a cube that is the order
of a Galois field. (Galois-field orders in general are
customarily denoted by the letter q .)

Examples:  8, 27, 64.  See qubes.site.

Update on Nov. 18, 2020, at about 9:40 PM ET —

Problem:

For which qubes, visualized as n×n×n arrays,
is it it true that the actions of the two-dimensional
galois-geometry affine group on each n×n face, extended
throughout the whole array, generate the affine group
on the whole array? (For the cases 8 and 64, see Binary
Coordinate Systems and  Affine Groups on Small
Binary Spaces.)

Thursday, March 5, 2020

“Generated by Reflections”

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 8:42 pm

See the title in this journal.

Such generation occurs both in Euclidean space 

Order-8 group generated by reflections in midplanes of cube parallel to faces

… and in some Galois spaces —

Generating permutations for the Klein simple group of order 168 acting on the eightfold cube .

In Galois spaces, some care must be taken in defining "reflection."

Tuesday, January 28, 2020

Very Stable Kool-Aid

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 2:16 pm

Two of the thumbnail previews
from yesterday's 1 AM  post

"Hum a few bars"

"For 6 Prescott Street"

Further down in the "6 Prescott St." post, the link 5 Divinity Avenue
leads to

A Letter from Timothy Leary, Ph.D., July 17, 1961

Harvard University
Department of Social Relations
Center for Research in Personality
Morton Prince House
5 Divinity Avenue
Cambridge 38, Massachusetts

July 17, 1961

Dr. Thomas S. Szasz
c/o Upstate Medical School
Irving Avenue
Syracuse 10, New York

Dear Dr. Szasz:

Your book arrived several days ago. I've spent eight hours on it and realize the task (and joy) of reading it has just begun.

The Myth of Mental Illness is the most important book in the history of psychiatry.

I know it is rash and premature to make this earlier judgment. I reserve the right later to revise and perhaps suggest it is the most important book published in the twentieth century.

It is great in so many ways–scholarship, clinical insight, political savvy, common sense, historical sweep, human concern– and most of all for its compassionate, shattering honesty.

. . . .

The small Morton Prince House in the above letter might, according to
the above-quoted remarks by Corinna S. Rohse, be called a "jewel box."
Harvard moved it in 1978 from Divinity Avenue to its current location at
6 Prescott Street.

Related "jewel box" material for those who
prefer narrative to mathematics —

"In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test , Tom Wolfe writes about encountering 
'a young psychologist,' 'Clifton Fadiman’s nephew, it turned out,' in the
waiting room of the San Mateo County jail. Fadiman and his wife were
'happily stuffing three I-Ching coins into some interminable dense volume*
of Oriental mysticism' that they planned to give Ken Kesey, the Prankster-
in-Chief whom the FBI had just nabbed after eight months on the lam.
Wolfe had been granted an interview with Kesey, and they wanted him to
tell their friend about the hidden coins. During this difficult time, they
explained, Kesey needed oracular advice."

— Tim Doody in The Morning News  web 'zine on July 26, 2012**

Oracular advice related to yesterday evening's
"jewel box" post …

A 4-dimensional hypercube H (a tesseract ) has 24 square
2-dimensional faces
.  In its incarnation as a Galois  tesseract
(a 4×4 square array of points for which the appropriate transformations
are those of the affine 4-space over the finite (i.e., Galois) two-element
field GF(2)), the 24 faces transform into 140 4-point "facets." The Galois 
version of H has a group of 322,560 automorphisms. Therefore, by the
orbit-stabilizer theorem, each of the 140 facets of the Galois version has
a stabilizer group of  2,304 affine transformations.

Similar remarks apply to the I Ching  In its incarnation as  
a Galois hexaract , for which the symmetry group — the group of
affine transformations of the 6-dimensional affine space over GF(2) —
has not 322,560 elements, but rather 1,290,157,424,640.

* The volume Wolfe mentions was, according to Fadiman, the I Ching.

** See also this  journal on that date — July 26, 2012.

Tuesday, July 2, 2019

Depth Psychology Meets Inscape Geometry

Filed under: General — m759 @ 3:00 am

An illustration from the previous post may be interpreted
as an attempt to unbokeh  an inscape

The 15 lines above are Euclidean  lines based on pairs within a six-set. 
For examples of Galois  lines so based, see Six-Set Geometry:

Thursday, March 21, 2019

Geometry of Interstices

Filed under: General — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 10:18 pm

Finite Galois geometry with the underlying field the simplest one possible —
namely, the two-element field GF(2) — is a geometry of  interstices :

For some less precise remarks, see the tags Interstice and Interality.

The rationalist motto "sincerity, order, logic and clarity" was quoted
by Charles Jencks in the previous post.

This  post was suggested by some remarks from Queensland that
seem to exemplify these qualities —

Monday, March 11, 2019

Ant-Man Meets Doctor Strange

Filed under: General — m759 @ 1:22 pm

IMAGE- Concepts of Space

The 4×4 square may also be called the Galois Tesseract .
By analogy, the 4x4x4 cube may be called the Galois Hexeract .

"Think outside the tesseract.

Thursday, February 28, 2019

Wikipedia Scholarship

Filed under: General — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:31 pm

Cullinane's Square Model of PG(3,2)

Besides omitting the name Cullinane, the anonymous Wikipedia author
also omitted the step of representing the hypercube by a 4×4 array —
an array called in this  journal a Galois  tesseract.

Sunday, December 9, 2018

Quaternions in a Small Space

Filed under: G-Notes,General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 2:00 pm

The previous post, on the 3×3 square in ancient China,
suggests a review of group actions on that square
that include the quaternion group.

Click to enlarge

Three links from the above finitegeometry.org webpage on the
quaternion group —

Related material —

Iain Aitchison on the 'symmetric generation' of R. T. Curtis

See as well the two Log24 posts of December 1st, 2018 —

Character and In Memoriam.

Monday, October 15, 2018

History at Bellevue

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:38 pm

The previous post, "Tesserae for a Tesseract," contains the following
passage from a 1987 review of a book about Finnegans Wake

"Basically, Mr. Bishop sees the text from above
and as a whole — less as a sequential story than
as a box of pied type or tesserae for a mosaic,
materials for a pattern to be made."

A set of 16 of the Wechsler cubes below are tesserae that 
may be used to make patterns in the Galois tesseract.

Another Bellevue story —

“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare
from which I am trying to awake.”

— James Joyce, Ulysses

Wednesday, June 27, 2018

Taken In

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 9:36 am

A passage that may or may not have influenced Madeleine L'Engle's
writings about the tesseract :

From Mere Christianity , by C. S. Lewis (1952) —

"Book IV – Beyond Personality:
or First Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity"
. . . .

I warned you that Theology is practical. The whole purpose for which we exist is to be thus taken into the life of God. Wrong ideas about what that life is, will make it harder. And now, for a few minutes, I must ask you to follow rather carefully.

You know that in space you can move in three ways—to left or right, backwards or forwards, up or down. Every direction is either one of these three or a compromise between them. They are called the three Dimensions. Now notice this. If you are using only one dimension, you could draw only a straight line. If you are using two, you could draw a figure: say, a square. And a square is made up of four straight lines. Now a step further. If you have three dimensions, you can then build what we call a solid body, say, a cube—a thing like a dice or a lump of sugar. And a cube is made up of six squares.

Do you see the point? A world of one dimension would be a straight line. In a two-dimensional world, you still get straight lines, but many lines make one figure. In a three-dimensional world, you still get figures but many figures make one solid body. In other words, as you advance to more real and more complicated levels, you do not leave behind you the things you found on the simpler levels: you still have them, but combined in new ways—in ways you could not imagine if you knew only the simpler levels.

Now the Christian account of God involves just the same principle. The human level is a simple and rather empty level. On the human level one person is one being, and any two persons are two separate beings—just as, in two dimensions (say on a flat sheet of paper) one square is one figure, and any two squares are two separate figures. On the Divine level you still find personalities; but up there you find them combined in new ways which we, who do not live on that level, cannot imagine.

In God's dimension, so to speak, you find a being who is three Persons while remaining one Being, just as a cube is six squares while remaining one cube. Of course we cannot fully conceive a Being like that: just as, if we were so made that we perceived only two dimensions in space we could never properly imagine a cube. But we can get a sort of faint notion of it. And when we do, we are then, for the first time in our lives, getting some positive idea, however faint, of something super-personal—something more than a person. It is something we could never have guessed, and yet, once we have been told, one almost feels one ought to have been able to guess it because it fits in so well with all the things we know already.

You may ask, "If we cannot imagine a three-personal Being, what is the good of talking about Him?" Well, there isn't any good talking about Him. The thing that matters is being actually drawn into that three-personal life, and that may begin any time —tonight, if you like.

. . . .

But beware of being drawn into the personal life of the Happy Family .

https://www.jstor.org/stable/24966339

"The colorful story of this undertaking begins with a bang."

And ends with

Martin Gardner on Galois

"Galois was a thoroughly obnoxious nerd,
suffering from what today would be called
a 'personality disorder.'  His anger was
paranoid and unremitting."

Monday, June 11, 2018

Arty Fact

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , , — m759 @ 10:35 pm

The title was suggested by the name "ARTI" of an artificial
intelligence in the new film 2036: Origin Unknown.

The Eye of ARTI —

See also a post of May 19, "Uh-Oh" —

— and a post of June 6, "Geometry for Goyim" — 

Mystery box  merchandise from the 2011  J. J. Abrams film  Super 8 

An arty fact I prefer, suggested by the triangular computer-eye forms above —

IMAGE- Hyperplanes (square and triangular) in PG(3,2), and coordinates for AG(4,2)

This is from the July 29, 2012, post The Galois Tesseract.

See as well . . .

Monday, June 4, 2018

The Trinity Stone Defined

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 8:56 pm

“Unsheathe your dagger definitions.” — James Joyce, Ulysses

The “triple cross” link in the previous post referenced the eightfold cube
as a structure that might be called the trinity stone .

An Approach to Symmetric Generation of the Simple Group of Order 168

Some small Galois spaces (the Cullinane models)

Friday, May 4, 2018

Art & Design

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 4:00 pm

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110219-SquareRootQuaternion.jpg

A star figure and the Galois quaternion.

The square root of the former is the latter.

See also a passage quoted here a year ago today
(May the Fourth, "Star Wars Day") —

Cube symmetry subgroup of order 8 from 'Geometry and Symmetry,' Paul B. Yale, 1968, p.21

Sunday, April 8, 2018

Design

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

From a Log24 post of Feb. 5, 2009 —

Design Cube 2x2x2 for demonstrating Galois geometry

An online logo today —

See also Harry Potter and the Lightning Bolt.

 

Saturday, February 17, 2018

The Binary Revolution

Michael Atiyah on the late Ron Shaw

Phrases by Atiyah related to the importance in mathematics
of the two-element Galois field GF(2) —

  • “The digital revolution based on the 2 symbols (0,1)”
  • “The algebra of George Boole”
  • “Binary codes”
  • “Dirac’s spinors, with their up/down dichotomy”

These phrases are from the year-end review of Trinity College,
Cambridge, Trinity Annual Record 2017 .

I prefer other, purely geometric, reasons for the importance of GF(2) —

  • The 2×2 square
  • The 2x2x2 cube
  • The 4×4 square
  • The 4x4x4 cube

See Finite Geometry of the Square and Cube.

See also today’s earlier post God’s Dice and Atiyah on the theology of
(Boolean) algebra vs. (Galois) geometry:

Tuesday, May 2, 2017

Image Albums

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 1:05 pm

Pinterest boards uploaded to the new m759.net/piwigo

Diamond Theorem 

Diamond Theorem Correlation

Miracle Octad Generator

The Eightfold Cube

Six-Set Geometry

Diamond Theory Cover

Update of May 2 —

Four-Color Decomposition

Binary Galois Spaces

The Galois Tesseract

Update of May 3 —

Desargues via Galois

The Tetrahedral Model

Solomon's Cube

Update of May 8 —

Art Space board created at Pinterest

Thursday, April 20, 2017

Stone Logic

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 9:48 pm

See also “Romancing the Omega” —

Image- Josefine Lyche work (with 1986 figures by Cullinane) in a 2009 exhibition in Oslo

Related mathematics — Guitart in this journal —

From 'Moving Logic, from Boole to Galois,' by René Guitart, 2005

See also Weyl + Palermo in this journal —

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/110922-TriquetrumCube.jpg

Thursday, December 1, 2016

What’s in a Name

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 11:23 pm

Design Cube 2x2x2 for demonstrating Galois geometry

   Backstory Aug. 21, 2016, and Quora.com.

Saturday, September 24, 2016

The Seven Seals

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 7:23 am

From Hermann Weyl's 1952 classic Symmetry —

"Galois' ideas, which for several decades remained
a book with seven seals  but later exerted a more
and more profound influence upon the whole
development of mathematics, are contained in
a farewell letter written to a friend on the eve of
his death, which he met in a silly duel at the age of
twenty-one. This letter, if judged by the novelty and
profundity of ideas it contains, is perhaps the most
substantial piece of writing in the whole literature
of mankind."

Some Galois geometry —

See the previous post for more narrative.

Sunday, August 21, 2016

Imperium Emporium

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 11:30 pm

Design Cube 2x2x2 for demonstrating Galois geometry

Harry Potter with lightning-bolt scar

Harry Potter, star of the new film
"Imperium," with lightning-bolt
scar on his forehead

Sunday, May 8, 2016

The Three Solomons

Earlier posts have dealt with Solomon Marcus and Solomon Golomb,
both of whom died this year — Marcus on Saint Patrick's Day, and
Golomb on Orthodox Easter Sunday. This suggests a review of
Solomon LeWitt, who died on Catholic Easter Sunday, 2007.

A quote from LeWitt indicates the depth of the word "conceptual"
in his approach to "conceptual art."

From Sol LeWitt: A Retrospective , edited by Gary Garrels, Yale University Press, 2000, p. 376:

 

THE SQUARE AND THE CUBE
by Sol LeWitt

"The best that can be said for either the square or the cube is that they are relatively uninteresting in themselves. Being basic representations of two- and three-dimensional form, they lack the expressive force of other more interesting forms and shapes. They are standard and universally recognized, no initiation being required of the viewer; it is immediately evident that a square is a square and a cube a cube. Released from the necessity of being significant in themselves, they can be better used as grammatical devices from which the work may proceed."

"Reprinted from Lucy R. Lippard et al ., “Homage to the Square,” Art in America  55, No. 4 (July-August 1967): 54. (LeWitt’s contribution was originally untitled.)"

See also the Cullinane models of some small Galois spaces

Some small Galois spaces (the Cullinane models)

Saturday, October 31, 2015

Raiders of the Lost Crucible

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 10:15 am

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
on the date Friday, April 5, 2013 —

Paraconsistent Logic

“First published Tue Sep 24, 1996;
substantive revision Fri Apr 5, 2013”

This  journal on the date Friday, April 5, 2013 —

The object most closely resembling a “philosophers’ stone”
that I know of is the eightfold cube .

For some related philosophical remarks that may appeal
to a general Internet audience, see (for instance) a website
by I Ching  enthusiast Andreas Schöter that displays a labeled
eightfold cube in the form of a lattice diagram —

Related material by Schöter —

A 20-page PDF, “Boolean Algebra and the Yi Jing.”
(First published in The Oracle: The Journal of Yijing Studies ,
Vol 2, No 7, Summer 1998, pp. 19–34.)

I differ with Schöter’s emphasis on Boolean algebra.
The appropriate mathematics for I Ching  studies is,
I maintain, not Boolean algebra  but rather Galois geometry.

See last Saturday’s post Two Views of Finite Space.
Unfortunately, that post is, unlike Schöter’s work, not
suitable for a general Internet audience.

Friday, August 14, 2015

Discrete Space

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 7:24 am

(A review)

Galois space:

Image-- examples from Galois affine geometry

Counting symmetries of  Galois space:
IMAGE - The Diamond Theorem

The reason for these graphic symmetries in affine Galois space —

symmetries of the underlying projective Galois space:

Thursday, June 11, 2015

Omega

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

Omega is a Greek letter, Ω , used in mathematics to denote
a set on which a group acts. 

For instance, the affine group AGL(3,2) is a group of 1,344
actions on the eight elements of the vector 3-space over the
two-element Galois field GF(2), or, if you prefer, on the Galois
field  Ω = GF(8).

Related fiction:  The Eight , by Katherine Neville.

Related non-fiction:  A remark by Werner Heisenberg
in this journal on Saturday, June 6, 2015, the eightfold cube ,
and the illustrations below —

Mathematics

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11A/110505-WikipediaFanoPlane.jpg

The Fano plane block design

Magic

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11A/110505-DeathlyHallows.jpg

The Deathly Hallows symbol—
Two blocks short of  a design.

Wednesday, May 13, 2015

Space

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 2:00 pm

Notes on space for day 13 of May, 2015 —

The 13 symmetry axes of the cube may be viewed as
the 13 points of the Galois projective space PG(2,3).
This space (a plane) may also be viewed as the nine points
of the Galois affine space AG(2,3) plus the four points on
an added "line at infinity."

Related poetic material:

The ninefold square and Apollo, as well as 

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11A/110426-ApolloAndDionysus.jpg

Monday, March 23, 2015

Gallucci’s Möbius Configuration

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 12:05 pm

From H. S. M. Coxeter's 1950 paper
"Self-Dual Configurations and Regular Graphs," 
a 4×4 array and a more perspicuous rearrangement—

(Click image to enlarge.) 

The above rearrangement brings Coxeter's remarks into accord
with the webpage The Galois Tesseract.

Update of Thursday, March 26, 2015 —

For an explanation of Coxeter's Fig. 24, see Thursday's later
post titled "The Möbius Hypercube."

Monday, January 26, 2015

Savior for Atheists…

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 5:26 pm

Continued from June 17, 2013
(
John Baez as a savior for atheists):

As an atheists-savior, I prefer Galois

The geometry underlying a figure that John Baez
posted four days ago, "A Hypercube of Bits," is
Galois  geometry —

See The Galois Tesseract and an earlier
figure from Log24 on May 21, 2007:

IMAGE- Tesseract from Log24 on May 21, 2007

For the genesis of the figure,
see The Geometry of Logic.

Thursday, December 18, 2014

Platonic Analogy

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 2:23 pm

(Five by Five continued)

As the 3×3 grid underlies the order-3 finite projective plane,
whose 13 points may be modeled by
the 13 symmetry axes of the cube,
so the 5×5 grid underlies the order-5 finite projective plane,
whose 31 points may be modeled by
the 31 symmetry axes of the dodecahedron.

See posts tagged Galois-Plane Models.

Friday, December 5, 2014

Wittgenstein’s Picture

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 12:00 pm

From Zettel  (repunctuated for clarity):

249. « Nichts leichter, als sich einen 4-dimensionalen Würfel
vorstellen! Er schaut so aus… »

"Nothing easier than to imagine a 4-dimensional cube!
It looks like this… 

[Here the editor supplied a picture of a 4-dimensional cube
that was omitted by Wittgenstein in the original.]

« Aber das meine ich nicht, ich meine etwas wie…

"But I don't mean that, I mean something like…

…nur mit 4 Ausdehnungen! » 

but with four dimensions!

« Aber das ist nicht, was ich dir gezeigt habe,
eben etwas wie…

"But isn't  what I showed you like

…nur mit 4 Ausdehnungen? » 

…only with four dimensions?"

« Nein; das meine  ich nicht! » 

"No, I don't mean  that!"

« Was aber meine ich? Was ist mein Bild?
Nun der 4-dimensionale Würfel, wie du ihn gezeichnet hast,
ist es nicht ! Ich habe jetzt als Bild nur die Worte  und
die Ablehnung alles dessen, was du mir zeigen kanst. »

"But what do I mean? What is my picture?
Well, it is not  the four-dimensional cube
as you drew it. I have now for a picture only
the words  and my rejection of anything
you can show me."

"Here's your damn Bild , Ludwig —"

Context: The Galois Tesseract.

Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Class Act

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 7:18 am

Update of Nov. 30, 2014 —

For further information on the geometry in
the remarks by Eberhart below, see
pp. 16-17 of A Geometrical Picture Book ,
by Burkard Polster (Springer, 1998). Polster
cites a different article by Lemay.

A search for background to the exercise in the previous post
yields a passage from the late Stephen Eberhart:

The first three primes p = 2, 3, and 5 therefore yield finite projective planes with 7, 13, and 31 points and lines, respectively. But these are just the numbers of symmetry axes of the five regular solids, as described in Plato's Timaeus : The tetrahedron has 4 pairs of face planes and corner points + 3 pairs of opposite edges, totalling 7 axes; the cube has 3 pairs of faces + 6 pairs of edges + 4 pairs of corners, totalling 13 axes (the octahedron simply interchanges the roles of faces and corners); and the pentagon dodecahedron has 6 pairs of faces + 15 pairs of edges + 10 pairs of corners, totalling 31 axes (the icosahedron again interchanging roles of faces and corners). This is such a suggestive result, one would expect to find it dealt with in most texts on related subjects; instead, while "well known to those who well know such things" (as Richard Guy likes to quip), it is scarcely to be found in the formal literature [9]. The reason for the common numbers, it turns out, is that the groups of symmetry motions of the regular solids are subgroups of the groups of collineations of the respective finite planes, a face axis being different from an edge axis of a regular solid but all points of a projective plane being alike, so the latter has more symmetries than the former.

[9] I am aware only of a series of in-house publications by Fernand Lemay of the Laboratoire de Didactique, Faculté des Sciences de I 'Éducation, Univ. Laval, Québec, in particular those collectively titled Genèse de la géométrie  I-X.

— Stephen Eberhart, Dept. of Mathematics,
California State University, Northridge, 
"Pythagorean and Platonic Bridges between
Geometry and Algebra," in BRIDGES: Mathematical
Connections in Art, Music, and Science 
, 1998,
archive.bridgesmathart.org/1998/bridges1998-121.pdf

Eberhart died of bone cancer in 2003. A memorial by his
high school class includes an Aug. 7, 2003, transcribed
letter from Eberhart to a classmate that ends…


… I earned MA’s in math (UW, Seattle) and history (UM, Missoula) where a math/history PhD program had been announced but canceled.  So 1984 to 2002 I taught math (esp. non-Euclidean geometry) at C.S.U. Northridge.  It’s been a rich life.  I’m grateful. 
 
Steve
 

See also another informative BRIDGES paper by Eberhart
on mathematics and the seven traditional liberal arts.

Tuesday, October 21, 2014

Tools

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 12:00 am

(Night at the Museum continues.)

"Strategies for making or acquiring tools

While the creation of new tools marked the route to developing the social sciences,
the question remained: how best to acquire or produce those tools?"

— Jamie Cohen-Cole, “Instituting the Science of Mind: Intellectual Economies
and Disciplinary Exchange at Harvard’s Center for Cognitive Studies,”
British Journal for the History of Science  vol. 40, no. 4 (2007): 567-597.

Obituary of a co-founder, in 1960, of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard:

"Disciplinary Exchange" —

In exchange for the free Web tools of HTML and JavaScript,
some free tools for illustrating elementary Galois geometry —

The Kaleidoscope Puzzle,  The Diamond 16 Puzzle
The 2x2x2 Cube, and The 4x4x4 Cube

"Intellectual Economies" —

In exchange for a $10 per month subscription, an excellent
"Quilt Design Tool" —

This illustrates not geometry, but rather creative capitalism.

Related material from the date of the above Harvard death:  Art Wars.

Saturday, October 18, 2014

Educational Series

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 1:01 pm

Barron's Educational Series (click to enlarge):

The Tablet of Ahkmenrah:

IMAGE- The Tablet of Ahkmenrah, from 'Night at the Museum'

 "With the Tablet of Ahkmenrah and the Cube of Rubik,
my power will know no bounds!"
— Kahmunrah in a novelization of Night at the Museum:
Battle of the Smithsonian , Barron's Educational Series

Another educational series (this journal):

Image-- Rosalind Krauss and The Ninefold Square

Art theorist Rosalind Krauss and The Ninefold Square

IMAGE- Elementary Galois Geometry over GF(3)

Sunday, September 14, 2014

Sensibility

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 9:26 am

Structured gray matter:

Graphic symmetries of Galois space:
IMAGE - The Diamond Theorem

The reason for these graphic symmetries in affine  Galois space —

symmetries of the underlying projective  Galois space:

Sunday, July 20, 2014

Sunday School

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 9:29 am

Paradigms of Geometry:
Continuous and Discrete

The discovery of the incommensurability of a square’s
side with its diagonal contrasted a well-known discrete 
length (the side) with a new continuous  length (the diagonal).
The figures below illustrate a shift in the other direction.
The essential structure of the continuous  configuration at
left is embodied in the discrete  unit cells of the square at right.

IMAGE- Concepts of Space: The Large Desargues Configuration, the Related 4x4 Square, and the 4x4x4 Cube

See Desargues via Galois (August 6, 2013).

Thursday, July 17, 2014

Paradigm Shift:

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

Continuous Euclidean space to discrete Galois space*

Euclidean space:

Point, line, square, cube, tesseract

From a page by Bryan Clair

Counting symmetries in Euclidean space:

Galois space:

Image-- examples from Galois affine geometry

Counting symmetries of  Galois space:
IMAGE - The Diamond Theorem

The reason for these graphic symmetries in affine Galois space —

symmetries of the underlying projective Galois space:

* For related remarks, see posts of May 26-28, 2012.

Saturday, July 12, 2014

Sequel

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

A sequel to the 1974 film
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot :

Contingent and Fluky

Some variations on a thunderbolt  theme:

Design Cube 2x2x2 for demonstrating Galois geometry

These variations also exemplify the larger
Verbum  theme:

Image-- Escher's 'Verbum'

Escher’s Verbum

Image-- Solomon's Cube

Solomon’s Cube

A search today for Verbum  in this journal yielded
a Georgetown 
University Chomskyite, Professor
David W. Lightfoot.

"Dr. Lightfoot writes mainly on syntactic theory,
language acquisition and historical change, which
he views as intimately related. He argues that
internal language change is contingent and fluky,
takes place in a sequence of bursts, and is best
viewed as the cumulative effect of changes in
individual grammars, where a grammar is a
'language organ' represented in a person's
mind/brain and embodying his/her language
faculty."

Some syntactic work by another contingent and fluky author
is related to the visual patterns illustrated above.

See Tecumseh Fitch  in this journal.

For other material related to the large Verbum  cube,
see posts for the 18th birthday of Harry Potter.

That birthday was also the upload date for the following:

See esp. the comments section.

Wednesday, May 21, 2014

Through the Vanishing Point*

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 9:48 am

Marshall McLuhan in "Annie Hall" —

"You know nothing of my work."

Related material — 

"I need a photo opportunity
I want a shot at redemption
Don't want to end up a cartoon
In a cartoon graveyard"

— Paul Simon

It was a dark and stormy night…

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11/110420-DarkAndStormy-Logicomix.jpg

— Page 180, Logicomix

A photo opportunity for Whitehead
(from Romancing the Cube, April 20, 2011)—

IMAGE- Whitehead on Fano's construction of the 15-point projective Galois space over GF(2)

See also Absolute Ambition (Nov. 19, 2010).

* For the title, see Vanishing Point in this journal.

Tuesday, May 20, 2014

Play

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 7:47 pm

From a recreational-mathematics weblog yesterday:

"This appears to be the arts section of the post,
so I’ll leave Martin Probert’s page on
The Survival, Origin and Mathematics of String Figures
here. I’ll be back to pick it up at the end. Maybe it’d like
to play with Steven H. Cullinane’s pages on the
Finite Geometry of the Square and Cube."

I doubt they would play well together.

Perhaps the offensive linking of  the purely recreational topic
of string figures to my own work was suggested by the
string figures' resemblance to figures of projective geometry.

A pairing I prefer:  Desargues and Galois —

IMAGE- Concepts of Space: The large Desargues configuration and two figures illustrating Cullinane models of Galois geometry

For further details, see posts on Desargues and Galois.

Sunday, April 27, 2014

Sunday School

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

Galois and Abel vs. Rubik

(Continued)

“Abel was done to death by poverty, Galois by stupidity.
In all the history of science there is no completer example
of the triumph of crass stupidity….”

— Eric Temple Bell,  Men of Mathematics

Gray Space  (Continued)

… For The Church of Plan 9.

Thursday, March 27, 2014

Diamond Space

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 2:28 pm

(Continued)

Definition:  A diamond space  — informal phrase denoting
a subspace of AG(6, 2), the six-dimensional affine space
over the two-element Galois field.

The reason for the name:

IMAGE - The Diamond Theorem, including the 4x4x4 'Solomon's Cube' case

Click to enlarge.

Friday, March 7, 2014

Kummer Varieties

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 11:20 am

The Dream of the Expanded Field continues

Image-- The Dream of the Expanded Field

From Klein's 1893 Lectures on Mathematics —

"The varieties introduced by Wirtinger may be called Kummer varieties…."
E. Spanier, 1956

From this journal on March 10, 2013 —

From a recent paper on Kummer varieties,
arXiv:1208.1229v3 [math.AG] 12 Jun 2013,
"The Universal Kummer Threefold," by
Qingchun Ren, Steven V Sam, Gus Schrader, and Bernd Sturmfels —

IMAGE- 'Consider the 6-dimensional vector space over the 2-element field,' from 'The Universal Kummer Threefold'

Two such considerations —

IMAGE- 'American Hustle' and Art Cube

IMAGE- Cube for study of I Ching group actions, with Jackie Chan and Nicole Kidman 

Update of 10 PM ET March 7, 2014 —

The following slides by one of the "Kummer Threefold" authors give
some background related to the above 64-point vector space and
to the Weyl group of type E7(E7):

The Cayley reference is to "Algorithm for the characteristics of the
triple ϑ-functions," Journal für die Reine und Angewandte
Mathematik  87 (1879): 165-169. <http://eudml.org/doc/148412>.
To read this in the context of Cayley's other work, see pp. 441-445
of Volume 10 of his Collected Mathematical Papers .

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

Mystery Box II

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 4:07 pm

Continued from previous post and from Sept. 8, 2009.

Box containing Froebel's Third Gift-- The Eightfold Cube

Examination of the box's contents does not solve
the contents' real mystery. That requires knowledge
of the non-Euclidean geometry of Galois space.

In this case, without that knowledge, prattle (as in
today's online New York Times ) about creativity and
"thinking outside the box" is pointless.

Friday, January 17, 2014

The 4×4 Relativity Problem

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

The sixteen-dot square array in yesterday’s noon post suggests
the following remarks.

“This is the relativity problem:  to fix objectively a class of
equivalent coordinatizations and to ascertain the group of
transformations S mediating between them.”

— Hermann Weyl, The Classical Groups ,
Princeton University Press, 1946, p. 16

The Galois tesseract  appeared in an early form in the journal
Computer Graphics and Art , Vol. 2, No. 1, February 1977—

IMAGE- Hypercube and 4x4 matrix from the 1976 'Diamond Theory' preprint, as excerpted in 'Computer Graphics and Art'

The 1977 matrix Q is echoed in the following from 2002—

IMAGE- Dolgachev and Keum, coordinatization of the 4x4 array in 'Birational Automorphisms of Quartic Hessian Surfaces,' AMS Transactions, 2002

A different representation of Cullinane’s 1977 square model of the
16-point affine geometry over the two-element Galois field GF(2)
is supplied by Conway and Sloane in Sphere Packings, Lattices and Groups   
(first published in 1988) :

IMAGE- The Galois tesseract as a four-dimensional vector space, from a diagram by Conway and Sloane in 'Sphere Packings, Lattices, and Groups'

Here a, b, c, d   are basis vectors in the vector 4-space over GF(2).
(For a 1979 version of this vector space, see AMS Abstract 79T-A37.)

See also a 2011 publication of the Mathematical Association of America —

From 'Beautiful Mathematics,' by Martin Erickson, an excerpt on the Cullinane diamond theorem (with source not mentioned)

Monday, October 14, 2013

Dream of the Expanded Field

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 8:28 pm

(Continued)

IMAGE- Cube for study of I Ching group actions, with Jackie Chan and Nicole Kidman

Further context: Galois I Ching

Monday, August 12, 2013

Form

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

The Galois tesseract  appeared in an early form in the journal
Computer Graphics and Art , Vol. 2, No. 1, February 1977—

IMAGE- Hypercube and 4x4 matrix from the 1976 'Diamond Theory' preprint, as excerpted in 'Computer Graphics and Art'

The Galois tesseract is the basis for a representation of the smallest
projective 3-space, PG(3,2), that differs from the representation at
Wolfram Demonstrations Project. For the latter, see yesterday’s post.

The tesseract representation underlies the diamond theorem, illustrated
below in its earliest form, also from the above February 1977 article—

IMAGE- Steven H. Cullinane, diamond theorem, from 'Diamond Theory,' Computer Graphics and Art, Vol. 2 No. 1, Feb. 1977, pp. 5-7

As noted in a more recent version, the group described by
the diamond theorem is also the group of the 35 square
patterns within the 1976 Miracle Octad Generator  (MOG) of
R. T. Curtis.

Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Vril Chick

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 4:30 am

Profile picture of "Jo Lyxe" (Josefine Lyche) at Vimeo

Profile picture for "Jo Lyxe" (Josefine Lyche) at Vimeo

Compare to an image of Vril muse Maria Orsitsch.

From the catalog of a current art exhibition
(25 May – 31 August, 2013) in Norway,
I DE LANGE NÆTTER —

Josefine Lyche
Born in 1973 in Bergen, Norway.
Lives and works in Oslo and Berlin.

Keywords (to help place my artwork in the
proper context): Aliens, affine geometry, affine
planes, affine spaces, automorphisms, binary
codes, block designs, classical groups, codes,
coding theory, collineations, combinatorial,
combinatorics, conjugacy classes, the Conwell
correspondence, correlations, Cullinane,
R. T. Curtis, design theory, the diamond theorem,
diamond theory, duads, duality, error correcting
codes, esoteric, exceptional groups,
extraterrestrials, finite fields, finite geometry, finite
groups, finite rings, Galois fields, generalized
quadrangles, generators, geometry, GF(2),
GF(4), the (24,12) Golay code, group actions,
group theory, Hadamard matrices, hypercube,
hyperplanes, hyperspace, incidence structures,
invariance, Karnaugh maps, Kirkman’s schoolgirls
problem, Latin squares, Leech lattice, linear
groups, linear spaces, linear transformations,
Magick, Mathieu groups, matrix theory, Meno,
Miracle Octad Generator, MOG, multiply transitive
groups, occultism, octahedron, the octahedral
group, Orsic, orthogonal arrays, outer automorphisms,
parallelisms, partial geometries,
permutation groups, PG(3,2), Plato, Platonic
solids, polarities, Polya-Burnside theorem, projective
geometry, projective planes, projective
spaces, projectivities, Pythagoras, reincarnation,
Reed-Muller codes, the relativity problem,
reverse engineering, sacred geometry, Singer
cycle, skew lines, Socrates, sporadic simple
groups, Steiner systems, Sylvester, symmetric,
symmetry, symplectic, synthemes, synthematic,
Theosophical Society tesseract, Tessla, transvections,
Venn diagrams, Vril society, Walsh
functions, Witt designs.

(See also the original catalog page.)

Clearly most of this (the non-highlighted parts) was taken
from my webpage Diamond Theory. I suppose I should be
flattered, but I am not thrilled to be associated with the
(apparently fictional) Vril Society.

For some background, see (for instance) 
Conspiracy Theories and Secret Societies for Dummies .

Thursday, June 13, 2013

Gate

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 2:13 pm

"Eight is a Gate." — Mnemonic rhyme

Today's previous post, Window, showed a version
of the Chinese character for "field"—

This suggests a related image

The related image in turn suggests

Unlike linear perspective, axonometry has no vanishing point,
and hence it does not assume a fixed position by the viewer.
This makes axonometry 'scrollable'. Art historians often speak of
the 'moving' or 'shifting' perspective in Chinese paintings.

Axonometry was introduced to Europe in the 17th century by
Jesuits returning from China.

Jan Krikke

As was the I Ching.  A related structure:

Tuesday, May 28, 2013

Codes

The hypercube  model of the 4-space over the 2-element Galois field GF(2):

IMAGE- A hyperspace model of the 4D vector space over GF(2)

The phrase Galois tesseract  may be used to denote a different model
of the above 4-space: the 4×4 square.

MacWilliams and Sloane discussed the Miracle Octad Generator
(MOG) of R. T. Curtis further on in their book (see below), but did not
seem to realize in 1977 that the 4×4 structures within the MOG are
based on the Galois-tesseract model of the 4-space over GF(2).

IMAGE- Octads within the Curtis MOG, which uses a 4x4-array model of the 4D vector space over GF(2)

The thirty-five 4×4 structures within the MOG:

IMAGE- The 35 square patterns within the Curtis MOG

Curtis himself first described these 35 square MOG patterns
combinatorially, (as his title indicated) rather than
algebraically or geometrically:

IMAGE- R. T. Curtis's combinatorial construction of 4x4 patterns within the Miracle Octad Generator

A later book co-authored by Sloane, first published in 1988,
did  recognize the 4×4 MOG patterns as based on the 4×4
Galois-tesseract model.

Between the 1977 and 1988 Sloane books came the diamond theorem.

Update of May 29, 2013:

The Galois tesseract appeared in an early form in the journal
Computer Graphics and Art , Vol. 2, No. 1, February 1977
(the year the above MacWilliams-Sloane book was first published):

IMAGE- Hypercube and 4x4 matrix from the 1976 'Diamond Theory' preprint, as excerpted in 'Computer Graphics and Art'

Sunday, May 19, 2013

Priority Claim

From an arXiv preprint submitted July 18, 2011,
and last revised on March 11, 2013 (version 4):

"By our construction, this vector space is the dual
of our hypercube F24 built on I \ O9. The vector space
structure of the latter, to our knowledge, is first
mentioned by Curtis
in [Cur89]. Hence altogether
our proposition 2.3.4 gives a novel geometric
meaning in terms of Kummer geometry to the known
vector space structure on I \ O9."

[Cur89] reference:
 R. T. Curtis, "Further elementary techniques using
the miracle octad generator," Proc. Edinburgh
Math. Soc. 
32 (1989), 345-353 (received on
July 20, 1987).

— Anne Taormina and Katrin Wendland,
    "The overarching finite symmetry group of Kummer
      surfaces in the Mathieu group 24 ,"
     arXiv.org > hep-th > arXiv:1107.3834

"First mentioned by Curtis…."

No. I claim that to the best of my knowledge, the 
vector space structure was first mentioned by me,
Steven H. Cullinane, in an AMS abstract submitted
in October 1978, some nine years before the
Curtis article.

Update of the above paragraph on July 6, 2013—

No. The vector space structure was described by
(for instance) Peter J. Cameron in a 1976
Cambridge University Press book —
Parallelisms of Complete Designs .
See the proof of Theorem 3A.13 on pages 59 and 60.

The vector space structure as it occurs in a 4×4 array
of the sort that appears in the Curtis Miracle Octad
Generator may first have been pointed out by me,
Steven H. Cullinane,
 in an AMS abstract submitted in
October 1978, some nine years before the Curtis article.

See Notes on Finite Geometry for some background.

See in particular The Galois Tesseract.

For the relationship of the 1978 abstract to Kummer
geometry, see Rosenhain and Göpel Tetrads in PG(3,2).

Saturday, March 16, 2013

The Crosswicks Curse

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 4:00 pm

Continues.

From the prologue to the new Joyce Carol Oates
novel Accursed

"This journey I undertake with such anticipation
is not one of geographical space but one of Time—
for it is the year 1905 that is my destination.

1905!—the very year of the Curse."

Today's previous post supplied a fanciful link
between the Crosswicks Curse of Oates and
the Crosswicks tesseract  of Madeleine L'Engle.

The Crosswicks Curse according to L'Engle
in her classic 1962 novel A Wrinkle in Time —

"There is  such a thing as a tesseract."

A tesseract is a 4-dimensional hypercube that
(as pointed out by Coxeter in 1950) may also 
be viewed as a 4×4 array (with opposite edges
identified).

Meanwhile, back in 1905

For more details, see how the Rosenhain and Göpel tetrads occur naturally
in the diamond theorem model of the 35 lines of the 15-point projective
Galois space PG(3,2).

See also Conwell in this journal and George Macfeely Conwell in the
honors list of the Princeton Class of 1905.

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Configurations

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:24 pm

Yesterday's post Permanence dealt with the cube
as a symmetric model of the finite projective plane
PG(2,3), which has 13 points and 13 lines. The points
and lines of the finite geometry occur in the cube as
the 13 axes of symmetry and the 13 planes through
the center perpendicular to those axes. If the three
axes lying in  a plane that cuts the cube in a hexagon
are supplemented by the axis perpendicular  to that
plane, each plane is associated with four axes and,
dually, each axis is associated with four planes.

My web page on this topic, Cubist Geometries, was
written on February 27, 2010, and first saved to the
Internet Archive on Oct. 4, 2010

For a more recent treatment of this topic that makes
exactly the same points as the 2010 page, see p. 218
of Configurations from a Graphical Viewpoint , by
Tomaž Pisanski and Brigitte Servatius, published by
Springer on Sept. 23, 2012 (date from both Google
Books
and Amazon.com):

For a similar 1998 treatment of the topic, see Burkard Polster's 
A Geometrical Picture Book  (Springer, 1998), pp. 103-104.

The Pisanski-Servatius book reinforces my argument of Jan. 13, 2013,
that the 13 planes through the cube's center that are perpendicular
to the 13 axes of symmetry of the cube should be called the cube's 
symmetry planes , contradicting the usual use of of that term.

That argument concerns the interplay  between Euclidean and
Galois geometry. Pisanski and Servatius (and, in 1998, Polster)
emphasize the Euclidean square and cube as guides* to
describing the structure of a Galois space. My Jan. 13 argument
uses Galois  structures as a guide to re-describing those of Euclid .
(For a similar strategy at a much more sophisticated level,
see a recent Harvard Math Table.)

Related material:  Remarks on configurations in this journal
during the month that saw publication of the Pisanski-Servatius book.

* Earlier guides: the diamond theorem (1978), similar theorems for
  2x2x2 (1984) and 4x4x4 cubes (1983), and Visualizing GL(2,p)
  (1985). See also Spaces as Hypercubes (2012).

Monday, February 18, 2013

Permanence

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 2:00 pm

Inscribed hexagon (1984)

The well-known fact that a regular hexagon
may be inscribed in a cube was the basis
in 1984 for two ways of coloring the faces
of a cube that serve to illustrate some graphic
aspects of embodied Galois geometry

Inscribed hexagon (2013)

A redefinition of the term "symmetry plane"
also uses the well-known inscription
of a regular hexagon in the cube—

IMAGE- Redefining the cube's symmetry planes: 13 planes, not 9.

Related material

"Here is another way to present the deep question 1984  raises…."

— "The Quest for Permanent Novelty," by Michael W. Clune,
     The Chronicle of Higher Education , Feb. 11, 2013

“What we do may be small, but it has a certain character of permanence.”

— G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician’s Apology

Saturday, January 5, 2013

Vector Addition in a Finite Field

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

The finite (i.e., Galois) field GF(16),
according to J. J. Seidel in 1974—

The same field according to Steven H. Cullinane in 1986,
in its guise as the affine 4-space over GF(2)—


The same field, again disguised as an affine 4-space,
according to John H. Conway and N.J.A. Sloane in
Sphere Packings, Lattices, and Groups , first published in 1988—

The above figure by Conway and Sloane summarizes, using
a 4×4 array, the additive vector-space structure of the finite
field GF(16).

This structure embodies what in Euclidean space is called
the parallelogram rule for vector addition—

(Thanks to June Lester for the 3D (uvw) part of the above figure.)

For the transition from this colored Euclidean hypercube
(used above to illustrate the parallelogram rule) to the
4×4 Galois space (illustrated by Cullinane in 1979 and
Conway and Sloane in 1988— or later… I do not have
their book’s first edition), see Diamond Theory in 1937,
Vertex Adjacency in a Tesseract and in a 4×4 Array,
Spaces as Hypercubes, and The Galois Tesseract.

For some related narrative, see tesseract  in this journal.

(This post has been added to finitegeometry.org.)

Update of August 9, 2013—

Coordinates for hypercube vertices derived from the
parallelogram rule in four dimensions were better
illustrated by Jürgen Köller in a web page archived in 2002.

Update of August 13, 2013—

The four basis vectors in the 2002 Köller hypercube figure
are also visible at the bottom of the hypercube figure on
page 7 of “Diamond Theory,” excerpts from a 1976 preprint
in Computer Graphics and Art , Vol. 2, No. 1, February 1977.
A predecessor:  Coxeter’s 1950 hypercube figure from
Self-Dual Configurations and Regular Graphs.”

Thursday, April 12, 2012

Mythopoetic*

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 9:29 pm

"Is Space Digital?" 

Cover storyScientific American  magazine, February 2012

"The idea that space may be digital
  is a fringe idea of a fringe idea
  of a speculative subfield of a subfield."

— Physicist Sabine Hossenfelder
     at her weblog on Feb. 5, 2012

"A quantization of space/time
 is a holy grail for many theorists…."

— Peter Woit in a comment at his physics weblog today

See also 

* See yesterday's Steiner's Systems.

Saturday, February 18, 2012

Logo

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 8:48 am

Pentagram design agency on the new Windows 8 logo

"… the logo re-imagines the familiar four-color symbol
as a modern geometric shape"—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix12/120218-Windows8Logo.jpg

Sam Moreau, Principal Director of User Experience for Windows,
yesterday—

On Redesigning the Windows Logo

"To see what is in front of one's nose
needs a constant struggle."
George Orwell

That is the feeling we had when Paula Scher
(from the renowned Pentagram design agency)
showed us her sketches for the new Windows logo.

Related material:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix12/120218-SmallSpaces-256w.gif

Saturday, January 14, 2012

Damnation Morning*

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 5:24 am

(Continued)

The following is adapted from a 2011 post

IMAGE- Galois vs. Rubik

* The title, that of a Fritz Leiber story, is suggested by
   the above picture of the symmetry axes of the square.
   Click "Continued" above for further details. See also
   last Wednesday's Cuber.

Monday, August 29, 2011

Many = Six.

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 7:20 pm

A comment today on yesterday's New York Times  philosophy column "The Stone"
notes that "Augustine… incorporated Greek ideas of perfection into Christianity."

Yesterday's post here  for the Feast of St. Augustine discussed the 2×2×2 cube.

Today's Augustine comment in the Times  reflects (through a glass darkly)
a Log24 post  from Augustine's Day, 2006, that discusses the larger 4×4×4 cube.

For related material, those who prefer narrative to philosophy may consult
Charles Williams's 1931 novel Many Dimensions . Those who prefer mathematics
to either may consult an interpretation in which Many = Six.

Galois space of six dimensions represented in Euclidean spaces of three and of two dimensions

Click image for some background.

Sunday, August 28, 2011

The Cosmic Part

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , — m759 @ 6:29 pm

Yesterday’s midday post, borrowing a phrase from the theology of Marvel Comics,
offered Rubik’s mechanical contrivance as a rather absurd “Cosmic Cube.”

A simpler candidate for the “Cube” part of that phrase:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10/100214-Cube2x2x2.gif

The Eightfold Cube

As noted elsewhere, a simple reflection group* of order 168 acts naturally on this structure.

“Because of their truly fundamental role in mathematics,
even the simplest diagrams concerning finite reflection groups
(or finite mirror systems, or root systems—
the languages are equivalent) have interpretations
of cosmological proportions.”

Alexandre V. Borovik in “Coxeter Theory: The Cognitive Aspects

Borovik has a such a diagram—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11B/110828-BorovikM.jpg

The planes in Borovik’s figure are those separating the parts of the eightfold cube above.

In Coxeter theory, these are Euclidean hyperplanes. In the eightfold cube, they represent three of seven projective points that are permuted by the above group of order 168.

In light of Borovik’s remarks, the eightfold cube might serve to illustrate the “Cosmic” part of the Marvel Comics phrase.

For some related theological remarks, see Cube Trinity in this journal.

Happy St. Augustine’s Day.

* I.e., one generated by reflections : group actions that fix a hyperplane pointwise. In the eightfold cube, viewed as a vector space of 3 dimensions over the 2-element Galois field, these hyperplanes are certain sets of four subcubes.

Sunday, June 26, 2011

Paradigms Lost

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 7:20 am

Continued from March 10, 2011 — A post that says

"If Galois geometry is thought of as a paradigm shift
from Euclidean geometry, both… the Kuhn cover
and the nine-point affine plane may be viewed…
as illustrating the shift."

Yesterday's posts The Fano Entity and Theology for Antichristmas,
together with this morning's New York Times  obituaries (below)—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11A/110626-NYTobits.jpg

—suggest a Sunday School review from last year's
    Devil's Night (October 30-31, 2010)

Sunday, October 31, 2010

ART WARS

m759 @ 2:00 AM

                                …    There is a Cave
Within the Mount of God, fast by his Throne,
Where light and darkness in perpetual round
Lodge and dislodge by turns, which makes through Heav'n
Grateful vicissitude, like Day and Night….

Paradise Lost , by John Milton

http://www.log24.com/log/pix09A/091024-RayFigure.jpg

Click on figure for details.

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101031-Pacino.jpg

Al Pacino in Devil's Advocate
as attorney John Milton

See also Ash Wednesday Surprise and Geometry for Jews.

Friday, June 24, 2011

For Stephen King Fans

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 6:48 am

The Gleaming

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11A/110624-Cubes-and-NYT.jpg

The column at left is from Galois Geometry.

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Groups Acting

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

The LA Times  on last weekend's film "Thor"—

"… the film… attempts to bridge director Kenneth Branagh's high-minded Shakespearean intentions with Marvel Entertainment's bottom-line-oriented need to crank out entertainment product."

Those averse to Nordic religion may contemplate a different approach to entertainment (such as Taymor's recent approach to Spider-Man).

A high-minded— if not Shakespearean— non-Nordic approach to groups acting—

"What was wrong? I had taken almost four semesters of algebra in college. I had read every page of Herstein, tried every exercise. Somehow, a message had been lost on me. Groups act . The elements of a group do not have to just sit there, abstract and implacable; they can do  things, they can 'produce changes.' In particular, groups arise naturally as the symmetries of a set with structure. And if a group is given abstractly, such as the fundamental group of a simplical complex or a presentation in terms of generators and relators, then it might be a good idea to find something for the group to act on, such as the universal covering space or a graph."

— Thomas W. Tucker, review of Lyndon's Groups and Geometry  in The American Mathematical Monthly , Vol. 94, No. 4 (April 1987), pp. 392-394

"Groups act "… For some examples, see

Related entertainment—

High-minded— Many Dimensions

Not so high-minded— The Cosmic Cube

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11A/110509-SpideySuperStories39Sm.jpg

One way of blending high and low—

The high-minded Charles Williams tells a story
in his novel Many Dimensions about a cosmically
significant cube inscribed with the Tetragrammaton—
the name, in Hebrew, of God.

The following figure can be interpreted as
the Hebrew letter Aleph inscribed in a 3×3 square—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11A/110510-GaloisAleph.GIF

The above illustration is from undated software by Ed Pegg Jr.

For mathematical background, see a 1985 note, "Visualizing GL(2,p)."

For entertainment purposes, that note can be generalized from square to cube
(as Pegg does with his "GL(3,3)" software button).

For the Nordic-averse, some background on the Hebrew connection—

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Block That Metaphor–

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 4:00 am

A Note on Galois Geometry

 Simple groups as the
"building blocks of group theory"

(Click image to enlarge.)

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11A/110427-BlocksOfGroupTheory-Sm.jpg

 Points,  lines,  etc., as the
"building blocks of geometry"

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11A/110427-BlocksOfGeometry-Sm.jpg

Related material —

(Click images for some background.)

Building blocks and
a simple group—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11A/110427-genrefl3.jpg

 

Building blocks and
geometry—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix11A/110427-CubesPlane1.gif

Sunday, April 17, 2011

Annals of Search

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 6:29 pm

The following has rather mysteriously appeared in a search at Google Scholar for "Steven H. Cullinane."

[HTML] Romancing the Non-Euclidean Hyperspace
AB Story – Annals of Pure and Applied Logic, 2002 – m759.net

This turns out to be a link to a search within this weblog. I do not know why Google Scholar attributes the resulting web page to a journal article by "AB Story" or why it drew the title from a post within the search and applied it to the entire list of posts found. I am, however, happy with the result— a Palm Sunday surprise with an eclectic mixture of styles that might please the late Robert de Marrais.

I hope the late George Temple would also be pleased. He appears in "Romancing" as a resident of Quarr Abbey, a Benedictine monastery.

The remarks by Martin Hyland quoted in connection with Temple's work are of particular interest in light of the Pope's Christmas remark on mathematics quoted here yesterday.

Monday, December 13, 2010

Mathematics and Narrative continued…

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 7:20 am

Apollo's 13: A Group Theory Narrative —

I. At Wikipedia —

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101213-GroupTheory.jpg

II. Here —

See Cube Spaces and Cubist Geometries.

The 13 symmetry axes of the (Euclidean) cube–
exactly one axis for each pair of opposite
subcubes in the 27-part (Galois) 3×3×3 cube–

The 13 symmetry axes of the cube

A note from 1985 describing group actions on a 3×3 plane array—

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10A/100621-VisualizingDetail.gif

Undated software by Ed Pegg Jr. displays
group actions on a 3×3×3 cube that extend the
3×3 group actions from 1985 described above—

Ed Pegg Jr.'s program at Wolfram demonstrating concepts of a 1985<br />
note by Cullinane

Pegg gives no reference to the 1985 work on group actions.

Thursday, December 2, 2010

Caesarian

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 8:00 am

The Dreidel Is Cast

The Nietzschean phrase "ruling and Caesarian spirits" occurred in yesterday morning's post "Novel Ending."

That post was followed yesterday morning by a post marking, instead, a beginning— that of Hanukkah 2010. That Jewish holiday, whose name means "dedication," commemorates the (re)dedication of the Temple in Jerusalem in 165 BC.

The holiday is celebrated with, among other things, the Jewish version of a die—  the dreidel . Note the similarity of the dreidel  to an illustration of The Stone*  on the cover of the 2001 Eerdmans edition of  Charles Williams's 1931 novel Many Dimensions

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101202-DreidelAndStone.jpg

For mathematics related to the dreidel , see Ivars Peterson's column on this date fourteen years ago.
For mathematics related (if only poetically) to The Stone , see "Solomon's Cube" in this journal.

Here is the opening of Many Dimensions

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101202-WilliamsChOne.jpg

For a fanciful linkage of the dreidel 's concept of chance to The Stone 's concept of invariant law, note that the New York Lottery yesterday evening (the beginning of Hanukkah) was 840. See also the number 840 in the final post (July 20, 2002) of the "Solomon's Cube" search.

Some further holiday meditations on a beginning—

Today, on the first full day of Hanukkah, we may or may not choose to mark another beginning— that of George Frederick James Temple, who was born in London on this date in 1901. Temple, a mathematician, was President of the London Mathematical Society in 1951-1953. From his MacTutor biography

"In 1981 (at the age of 80) he published a book on the history of mathematics. This book 100 years of mathematics (1981) took him ten years to write and deals with, in his own words:-

those branches of mathematics in which I had been personally involved.

He declared that it was his last mathematics book, and entered the Benedictine Order as a monk. He was ordained in 1983 and entered Quarr Abbey on the Isle of Wight. However he could not stop doing mathematics and when he died he left a manuscript on the foundations of mathematics. He claims:-

The purpose of this investigation is to carry out the primary part of Hilbert's programme, i.e. to establish the consistency of set theory, abstract arithmetic and propositional logic and the method used is to construct a new and fundamental theory from which these theories can be deduced."

For a brief review of Temple's last work, see the note by Martin Hyland in "Fundamental Mathematical Theories," by George Temple, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, A, Vol. 354, No. 1714 (Aug. 15, 1996), pp. 1941-1967.

The following remarks by Hyland are of more general interest—

"… one might crudely distinguish between philosophical and mathematical motivation. In the first case one tries to convince with a telling conceptual story; in the second one relies more on the elegance of some emergent mathematical structure. If there is a tradition in logic it favours the former, but I have a sneaking affection for the latter. Of course the distinction is not so clear cut. Elegant mathematics will of itself tell a tale, and one with the merit of simplicity. This may carry philosophical weight. But that cannot be guaranteed: in the end one cannot escape the need to form a judgement of significance."

— J. M. E. Hyland. "Proof Theory in the Abstract." (pdf)
Annals of Pure and Applied Logic 114, 2002, 43-78.

Here Hyland appears to be discussing semantic ("philosophical," or conceptual) and syntactic ("mathematical," or structural) approaches to proof theory. Some other remarks along these lines, from the late Gian-Carlo Rota

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10B/101202-RotaChXII-sm.jpg

    (Click to enlarge.)

See also "Galois Connections" at alpheccar.org and "The Galois Connection Between Syntax and Semantics" at logicmatters.net.

* Williams's novel says the letters of The Stone  are those of the Tetragrammaton— i.e., Yod, He, Vau, He  (cf. p. 26 of the 2001 Eerdmans edition). But the letters on the 2001 edition's cover Stone  include the three-pronged letter Shin , also found on the dreidel .  What esoteric religious meaning is implied by this, I do not know.

Saturday, August 7, 2010

The Matrix Reloaded

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 12:00 am

   For aficionados of mathematics and narrative

Illustration from
"The Galois Quaternion— A Story"

The Galois Quaternion

This resembles an attempt by Coxeter in 1950 to represent
a Galois geometry in the Euclidean plane—
Coxeter's 1950 representation in the Euclidean plane of the 9-point affine plane over GF(3)

The quaternion illustration above shows a more natural way to picture this geometry—
not with dots representing points in the Euclidean  plane, but rather with unit squares
representing points in a finite Galois  affine plane. The use of unit squares to
represent points in Galois space allows, in at least some cases, the actions
of finite groups to be represented more naturally than in Euclidean space.

See Galois Geometry, Geometry Simplified, and
Finite Geometry of the Square and Cube.

Sunday, June 27, 2010

Sunday at the Apollo

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 9:00 pm
 

27

 

The 13 symmetry axes of the (Euclidean) cube–
exactly one axis for each pair of opposite
  subcubes in the 27-part (Galois) 3×3×3 cube–

The 13 symmetry axes of the cube

Wednesday, June 16, 2010

Geometry of Language

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 10:31 am

(Continued from April 23, 2009, and February 13, 2010.)

Paul Valéry as quoted in yesterday’s post:

“The S[elf] is invariant, origin, locus or field, it’s a functional property of consciousness” (Cahiers, 15:170 [2: 315])

The geometric example discussed here yesterday as a Self symbol may seem too small to be really impressive. Here is a larger example from the Chinese, rather than European, tradition. It may be regarded as a way of representing the Galois field GF(64). (“Field” is a rather ambiguous term; here it does not, of course, mean what it did in the Valéry quotation.)

From Geometry of the I Ching

Image-- The 64 hexagrams of the I Ching

The above 64 hexagrams may also be regarded as
the finite affine space AG(6,2)— a larger version
of the finite affine space AG(4,2) in yesterday’s post.
That smaller space has a group of 322,560 symmetries.
The larger hexagram  space has a group of
1,290,157,424,640 affine symmetries.

From a paper on GL(6,2), the symmetry group
of the corresponding projective  space PG(5,2),*
which has 1/64 as many symmetries—

(Click to enlarge.)

Image-- Classes of the Group GL(6,)

For some narrative in the European  tradition
related to this geometry, see Solomon’s Cube.

* Update of July 29, 2011: The “PG(5,2)” above is a correction from an earlier error.

Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Mathematics and Narrative, continued

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 8:28 pm

Romancing the
Non-Euclidean Hyperspace

Backstory
Mere Geometry, Types of Ambiguity,
Dream Time, and Diamond Theory, 1937

The cast of 1937's 'King Solomon's Mines' goes back to the future

For the 1937 grid, see Diamond Theory, 1937.

The grid is, as Mere Geometry points out, a non-Euclidean hyperspace.

For the diamonds of 2010, see Galois Geometry and Solomon’s Cube.

Monday, April 26, 2010

Types of Ambiguity

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , — m759 @ 10:31 am

From Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel
The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
(1974)—

Chapter One

“There was a wall. It did not look important. It was built of uncut rocks roughly mortared. An adult could look right over it, and even a child could climb it. Where it crossed the roadway, instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry, a line, an idea of boundary. But the idea was real. It was important. For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall.

Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.”

Note—

“We note that the phrase ‘instead of having a gate it degenerated into mere geometry’ is mere fatuousness. If there is an idea here, degenerate, mere, and geometry  in concert do not fix it. They bat at it like a kitten at a piece of loose thread.”

— Samuel R. Delany, The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction  (Dragon Press, 1977), page 110 of revised edition, Wesleyan University Press, 2009

(For the phrase mere geometry  elsewhere, see a note of April 22. The apparently flat figures in that note’s illustration “Galois Affine Geometry” may be regarded as degenerate  views of cubes.)

Later in the Le Guin novel—

“… The Terrans had been intellectual imperialists, jealous wall builders. Even Ainsetain, the originator of the theory, had felt compelled to give warning that his physics embraced no mode but the physical and should not be taken as implying the metaphysical, the philosophical, or the ethical. Which, of course, was superficially true; and yet he had used number, the bridge between the rational and the perceived, between psyche and matter, ‘Number the Indisputable,’ as the ancient founders of the Noble Science had called it. To employ mathematics in this sense was to employ the mode that preceded and led to all other modes. Ainsetain had known that; with endearing caution he had admitted that he believed his physics did, indeed, describe reality.

Strangeness and familiarity: in every movement of the Terran’s thought Shevek caught this combination, was constantly intrigued. And sympathetic: for Ainsetain, too, had been after a unifying field theory. Having explained the force of gravity as a function of the geometry of spacetime, he had sought to extend the synthesis to include electromagnetic forces. He had not succeeded. Even during his lifetime, and for many decades after his death, the physicists of his own world had turned away from his effort and its failure, pursuing the magnificent incoherences of quantum theory with its high technological yields, at last concentrating on the technological mode so exclusively as to arrive at a dead end, a catastrophic failure of imagination. Yet their original intuition had been sound: at the point where they had been, progress had lain in the indeterminacy which old Ainsetain had refused to accept. And his refusal had been equally correct– in the long run. Only he had lacked the tools to prove it– the Saeba variables and the theories of infinite velocity and complex cause. His unified field existed, in Cetian physics, but it existed on terms which he might not have been willing to accept; for the velocity of light as a limiting factor had been essential to his great theories. Both his Theories of Relativity were as beautiful, as valid, and as useful as ever after these centuries, and yet both depended upon a hypothesis that could not be proved true and that could be and had been proved, in certain circumstances, false.

But was not a theory of which all the elements were provably true a simple tautology? In the region of the unprovable, or even the disprovable, lay the only chance for breaking out of the circle and going ahead.

In which case, did the unprovability of the hypothesis of real coexistence– the problem which Shevek had been pounding his head against desperately for these last three days. and indeed these last ten years– really matter?

He had been groping and grabbing after certainty, as if it were something he could possess. He had been demanding a security, a guarantee, which is not granted, and which, if granted, would become a prison. By simply assuming the validity of real coexistence he was left free to use the lovely geometries of relativity; and then it would be possible to go ahead. The next step was perfectly clear. The coexistence of succession could be handled by a Saeban transformation series; thus approached, successivity and presence offered no antithesis at all. The fundamental unity of the Sequency and Simultaneity points of view became plain; the concept of interval served to connect the static and the dynamic aspect of the universe. How could he have stared at reality for ten years and not seen it? There would be no trouble at all in going on. Indeed he had already gone on. He was there. He saw all that was to come in this first, seemingly casual glimpse of the method, given him by his understanding of a failure in the distant past. The wall was down. The vision was both clear and whole. What he saw was simple, simpler than anything else. It was simplicity: and contained in it all complexity, all promise. It was revelation. It was the way clear, the way home, the light.”

Related material—

Time Fold, Halloween 2005, and May and Zan.

See also The Devil and Wallace Stevens

“In a letter to Harriet Monroe, written December 23, 1926, Stevens refers to the Sapphic fragment that invokes the genius of evening: ‘Evening star that bringest back all that lightsome Dawn hath scattered afar, thou bringest the sheep, thou bringest the goat, thou bringest the child home to the mother.’ Christmas, writes Stevens, ‘is like Sappho’s evening: it brings us all home to the fold’ (Letters of Wallace Stevens, 248).”

— “The Archangel of Evening,” Chapter 5 of Wallace Stevens: The Intensest Rendezvous, by Barbara M. Fisher, The University Press of Virginia, 1990

Saturday, March 13, 2010

Space Cowboy

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

From yesterday's Seattle Times

According to police, employees of a Second Avenue mission said the suspect, clad in black and covered in duct tape, had come into the mission "and threatened to blow the place up." He then told staffers "that he was a vampire and wanted to eat people."

The man… also called himself "a space cowboy"….

This suggests two film titles…

Plan 9 from Outer Space

Rebecca Goldstein and a Cullinane quaternion

and Apollo's 13

The 13 symmetry axes of the (Euclidean) cube–
exactly one axis for each pair of opposite
  subcubes in the (Galois) 3×3×3 cube–

The 13 symmetry axes of the cube

Saturday, February 27, 2010

Cubist Geometries

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

"The cube has…13 axes of symmetry:
  6 C2 (axes joining midpoints of opposite edges),
4 C3 (space diagonals), and
3C4 (axes joining opposite face centroids)."
–Wolfram MathWorld article on the cube

These 13 symmetry axes can be used to illustrate the interplay between Euclidean and Galois geometry in a cubic model of the 13-point Galois plane.

The geometer's 3×3×3 cube–
27 separate subcubes unconnected
by any Rubik-like mechanism–

The 3x3x3 geometer's cube, with coordinates

The 13 symmetry axes of the (Euclidean) cube–
exactly one axis for each pair of opposite
  subcubes in the (Galois) 3×3×3 cube–

The 13 symmetry axes of the cube

A closely related structure–
the finite projective plane
with 13 points and 13 lines–

Oxley's 2004 drawing of the 13-point projective plane

A later version of the 13-point plane
by Ed Pegg Jr.–

Ed Pegg Jr.'s 2007 drawing of the 13-point projective plane

A group action on the 3×3×3 cube
as illustrated by a Wolfram program
by Ed Pegg Jr. (undated, but closely
related to a March 26, 1985 note
by Steven H. Cullinane)–

Ed Pegg Jr.'s program at Wolfram demonstrating concepts of a 1985 note by Cullinane

The above images tell a story of sorts.
The moral of the story–

Galois projective geometries can be viewed
in the context of the larger affine geometries
from which they are derived.

The standard definition of points in a Galois projective plane is that they are lines through the (arbitrarily chosen) origin in a corresponding affine 3-space converted to a vector 3-space.

If we choose the origin as the center cube in coordinatizing the 3×3×3 cube (See Weyl's relativity problem ), then the cube's 13 axes of symmetry can, if the other 26 cubes have properly (Weyl's "objectively") chosen coordinates, illustrate nicely the 13 projective points derived from the 27 affine points in the cube model.

The 13 lines of the resulting Galois projective plane may be derived from Euclidean planes  through the cube's center point that are perpendicular to the cube's 13 Euclidean symmetry axes.

The above standard definition of points in a Galois projective plane may of course also be used in a simpler structure– the eightfold cube.

(The eightfold cube also allows a less standard way to picture projective points that is related to the symmetries of "diamond" patterns formed by group actions on graphic designs.)

See also Ed Pegg Jr. on finite geometry on May 30, 2006
at the Mathematical Association of America.

Sunday, January 24, 2010

Today’s Sermon

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

More Than Matter

Wheel in Webster’s Revised Unabridged Dictionary, 1913

(f) Poetry

The burden or refrain of a song.

⇒ “This meaning has a low degree of authority, but is supposed from the context in the few cases where the word is found.” Nares.

You must sing a-down a-down, An you call him a-down-a. O, how the wheel becomes it! Shak.

“In one or other of G. F. H. Shadbold’s two published notebooks, Beyond Narcissus and Reticences of Thersites, a short entry appears as to the likelihood of Ophelia’s enigmatic cry: ‘Oh, how the wheel becomes it!’ referring to the chorus or burden ‘a-down, a-down’ in the ballad quoted by her a moment before, the aptness she sees in the refrain.”

— First words of Anthony Powell’s novel “O, How the Wheel Becomes It!” (See Library Thing.)

Anthony Powell's 'O, How the Wheel Becomes It!' along with Laertes' comment 'This nothing's more than matter.'

Related material:

Photo uploaded on January 14, 2009
with caption “This nothing’s more than matter”

and the following nothings from this journal
on the same date– Jan. 14, 2009

The Fritz Leiber 'Spider' symbol in a square

A Singer 7-cycle in the Galois field with eight elements

The Eightfold (2x2x2) Cube

The Jewel in Venn's Lotus (photo by Gerry Gantt)

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Tuesday September 8, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , — m759 @ 12:25 pm

Froebel's   
Magic Box  
 

Box containing Froebel's Third Gift-- The Eightfold Cube
 
 Continued from Dec. 7, 2008,
and from yesterday.

 

Non-Euclidean
Blocks

 

Passages from a classic story:

… he took from his pocket a gadget he had found in the box, and began to unfold it. The result resembled a tesseract, strung with beads….

Tesseract
 Tesseract

 

"Your mind has been conditioned to Euclid," Holloway said. "So this– thing– bores us, and seems pointless. But a child knows nothing of Euclid. A different sort of geometry from ours wouldn't impress him as being illogical. He believes what he sees."

"Are you trying to tell me that this gadget's got a fourth dimensional extension?" Paradine demanded.
 
"Not visually, anyway," Holloway denied. "All I say is that our minds, conditioned to Euclid, can see nothing in this but an illogical tangle of wires. But a child– especially a baby– might see more. Not at first. It'd be a puzzle, of course. Only a child wouldn't be handicapped by too many preconceived ideas."

"Hardening of the thought-arteries," Jane interjected.

Paradine was not convinced. "Then a baby could work calculus better than Einstein? No, I don't mean that. I can see your point, more or less clearly. Only–"

"Well, look. Let's suppose there are two kinds of geometry– we'll limit it, for the sake of the example. Our kind, Euclidean, and another, which we'll call x. X hasn't much relationship to Euclid. It's based on different theorems. Two and two needn't equal four in it; they could equal y, or they might not even equal. A baby's mind is not yet conditioned, except by certain questionable factors of heredity and environment. Start the infant on Euclid–"

"Poor kid," Jane said.

Holloway shot her a quick glance. "The basis of Euclid. Alphabet blocks. Math, geometry, algebra– they come much later. We're familiar with that development. On the other hand, start the baby with the basic principles of our x logic–"

"Blocks? What kind?"

Holloway looked at the abacus. "It wouldn't make much sense to us. But we've been conditioned to Euclid."

— "Mimsy Were the Borogoves," Lewis Padgett, 1943


Padgett (pseudonym of a husband-and-wife writing team) says that alphabet blocks are the intuitive "basis of Euclid." Au contraire; they are the basis of Gutenberg.

For the intuitive basis of one type of non-Euclidean* geometry– finite geometry over the two-element Galois field– see the work of…


Friedrich Froebel
 (1782-1852), who
 invented kindergarten.

His "third gift" —

Froebel's Third Gift-- The Eightfold Cube
© 2005 The Institute for Figuring
 
Photo by Norman Brosterman
fom the Inventing Kindergarten
exhibit at The Institute for Figuring

Go figure.

* i.e., other than Euclidean

Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Tuesday February 24, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , , — m759 @ 1:00 pm
 
Hollywood Nihilism
Meets
Pantheistic Solipsism

Tina Fey to Steve Martin
at the Oscars:
"Oh, Steve, no one wants
 to hear about our religion
… that we made up."

Tina Fey and Steve Martin at the 2009 Oscars

From Wallace Stevens: A World of Transforming Shapes, by Alan D. Perlis, Bucknell University Press, 1976, p. 117:

… in 'The Pediment of Appearance,' a slight narrative poem in Transport to Summer

 A group of young men enter some woods 'Hunting for the great ornament, The pediment of appearance.' Though moving through the natural world, the young men seek the artificial, or pure form, believing that in discovering this pediment, this distillation of the real, they will also discover the 'savage transparence,' the rude source of human life. In Stevens's world, such a search is futile, since it is only through observing nature that one reaches beyond it to pure form. As if to demonstrate the degree to which the young men's search is misaligned, Stevens says of them that 'they go crying/The world is myself, life is myself,' believing that what surrounds them is immaterial. Such a proclamation is a cardinal violation of Stevens's principles of the imagination.


Superficially the young men's philosophy seems to resemble what Wikipedia calls "pantheistic solipsism"– noting, however, that "This article has multiple issues."

As, indeed, does pantheistic solipsism– a philosophy (properly called "eschatological pantheistic multiple-ego solipsism") devised, with tongue in cheek, by science-fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein.

Despite their preoccupation with solipsism, Heinlein and Stevens point, each in his own poetic way, to a highly non-solipsistic topic from pure mathematics that is, unlike the religion of Martin and Fey, not made up– namely, the properties of space.

Heinlein:

"Sharpie, we have condensed six dimensions into four, then we either work by analogy into six, or we have to use math that apparently nobody but Jake and my cousin Ed understands. Unless you can think of some way to project six dimensions into three– you seem to be smart at such projections."
    I closed my eyes and thought hard. "Zebbie, I don't think it can be done. Maybe Escher could have done it."

Stevens:

A discussion of Stevens's late poem "The Rock" (1954) in Wallace Stevens: A World of Transforming Shapes, by Alan D. Perlis, Bucknell University Press, 1976, p. 120:

For Stevens, the poem "makes meanings of the rock." In the mind, "its barrenness becomes a thousand things/And so exists no more." In fact, in a peculiar irony that only a poet with Stevens's particular notion of the imagination's function could develop, the rock becomes the mind itself, shattered into such diamond-faceted brilliance that it encompasses all possibilities for human thought:

The rock is the gray particular of man's life,
The stone from which he rises, up—and—ho,
The step to the bleaker depths of his descents ...

The rock is the stern particular of the air,
The mirror of the planets, one by one,
But through man's eye, their silent rhapsodist,

Turquoise the rock, at odious evening bright
With redness that sticks fast to evil dreams;
The difficult rightness of half-risen day.

The rock is the habitation of the whole,
Its strength and measure, that which is near,
     point A
In a perspective that begins again

At B: the origin of the mango's rind.

                    (Collected Poems, 528)

Stevens's rock is associated with empty space, a concept that suggests "nothingness" to one literary critic:

B. J. Leggett, "Stevens's Late Poetry" in The Cambridge Companion to Wallace Stevens— On the poem "The Rock":

"… the barren rock of the title is Stevens's symbol for the nothingness that underlies all existence, 'That in which space itself is contained'….  Its subject is its speaker's sense of nothingness and his need to be cured of it."

This interpretation might appeal to Joan Didion, who, as author of the classic novel Play It As It Lays, is perhaps the world's leading expert on Hollywood nihilism.

More positively…

Space is, of course, also a topic
in pure mathematics…
For instance, the 6-dimensional
affine space
(or the corresponding
5-dimensional projective space)

The 4x4x4 cube

over the two-element Galois field
can be viewed as an illustration of
Stevens's metaphor in "The Rock."

Heinlein should perhaps have had in mind the Klein correspondence when he discussed "some way to project six dimensions into three." While such a projection is of course trivial for anyone who has taken an undergraduate course in linear algebra, the following remarks by Philippe Cara present a much more meaningful mapping, using the Klein correspondence, of structures in six (affine) dimensions to structures in three.

Cara:

Philippe Cara on the Klein correspondence
Here the 6-dimensional affine
space contains the 63 points
of PG(5, 2), plus the origin, and
the 3-dimensional affine
space contains as its 8 points
Conwell's eight "heptads," as in
Generating the Octad Generator.

Thursday, February 5, 2009

Thursday February 5, 2009

Through the
Looking Glass:

A Sort of Eternity

From the new president’s inaugural address:

“… in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things.”

The words of Scripture:

9 For we know in part, and we prophesy in part.
10 But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is in part shall be done away.
11 When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
12 For now we see through a glass, darkly, but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. 

First Corinthians 13

“through a glass”

[di’ esoptrou].
By means of
a mirror [esoptron]
.

Childish things:

Froebel's third gift, the eightfold cube
© 2005 The Institute for Figuring
Photo by Norman Brosterman
fom the Inventing Kindergarten
exhibit at The Institute for Figuring
(co-founded by Margaret Wertheim)
 

Not-so-childish:

Three planes through
the center of a cube
that split it into
eight subcubes:
Cube subdivided into 8 subcubes by planes through the center
Through a glass, darkly:

A group of 8 transformations is
generated by affine reflections
in the above three planes.
Shown below is a pattern on
the faces of the 2x2x2 cube
that is symmetric under one of
these 8 transformations–
a 180-degree rotation:

Design Cube 2x2x2 for demonstrating Galois geometry

(Click on image
for further details.)

But then face to face:

A larger group of 1344,
rather than 8, transformations
of the 2x2x2 cube
is generated by a different
sort of affine reflections– not
in the infinite Euclidean 3-space
over the field of real numbers,
but rather in the finite Galois
3-space over the 2-element field.

Galois age fifteen, drawn by a classmate.

Galois age fifteen,
drawn by a classmate.

These transformations
in the Galois space with
finitely many points
produce a set of 168 patterns
like the one above.
For each such pattern,
at least one nontrivial
transformation in the group of 8
described above is a symmetry
in the Euclidean space with
infinitely many points.

For some generalizations,
see Galois Geometry.

Related material:

The central aim of Western religion– 

"Each of us has something to offer the Creator...
the bridging of
 masculine and feminine,
 life and death.
It's redemption.... nothing else matters."
-- Martha Cooley in The Archivist (1998)

The central aim of Western philosophy–

 Dualities of Pythagoras
 as reconstructed by Aristotle:
  Limited Unlimited
  Odd Even
  Male Female
  Light Dark
  Straight Curved
  ... and so on ....

“Of these dualities, the first is the most important; all the others may be seen as different aspects of this fundamental dichotomy. To establish a rational and consistent relationship between the limited [man, etc.] and the unlimited [the cosmos, etc.] is… the central aim of all Western philosophy.”

— Jamie James in The Music of the Spheres (1993)

“In the garden of Adding
live Even and Odd…
And the song of love’s recision
is the music of the spheres.”

— The Midrash Jazz Quartet in City of God, by E. L. Doctorow (2000)

A quotation today at art critic Carol Kino’s website, slightly expanded:

“Art inherited from the old religion
the power of consecrating things
and endowing them with
a sort of eternity;
museums are our temples,
and the objects displayed in them
are beyond history.”

— Octavio Paz,”Seeing and Using: Art and Craftsmanship,” in Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1987), 52

From Brian O’Doherty’s 1976 Artforum essays– not on museums, but rather on gallery space:

Inside the White Cube

“We have now reached
a point where we see
not the art but the space first….
An image comes to mind
of a white, ideal space
that, more than any single picture,
may be the archetypal image
of 20th-century art.”

http://www.log24.com/log/pix09/090205-cube2x2x2.gif

“Space: what you
damn well have to see.”

— James Joyce, Ulysses  

Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Wednesday January 14, 2009

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 2:45 am

Eight is a Gate

'The Eight,' by Katherine Neville

Customer reviews of Neville's 'The Eight'

From the most highly
rated negative review:

“I never did figure out
what ‘The Eight’ was.”

Various approaches
to this concept
(click images for details):

The Fritz Leiber 'Spider' symbol in a square

A Singer 7-cycle in the Galois field with eight elements

The Eightfold (2x2x2) Cube

The Jewel in Venn's Lotus (photo by Gerry Gantt)

Tom O'Horgan in his loft. O'Horgan died Sunday, Jan. 11, 2009.

Bach, Canon 14, BWV 1087

Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Wednesday October 22, 2008

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 9:26 am
Euclid vs. Galois

On May 4, 2005, I wrote a note about how to visualize the 7-point Fano plane within a cube.

Last month, John Baez
showed slides that touched on the same topic. This note is to clear up possible confusion between our two approaches.

From Baez’s Rankin Lectures at the University of Glasgow:

(Click to enlarge)

John Baez, drawing of seven vertices of a cube corresponding to Fano-plane points

Note that Baez’s statement (pdf) “Lines in the Fano plane correspond to planes through the origin [the vertex labeled ‘1’] in this cube” is, if taken (wrongly) as a statement about a cube in Euclidean 3-space, false.

The statement is, however, true of the eightfold cube, whose eight subcubes correspond to points of the linear 3-space over the two-element field, if “planes through the origin” is interpreted as planes within that linear 3-space, as in Galois geometry, rather than within the Euclidean cube that Baez’s slides seem to picture.

This Galois-geometry interpretation is, as an article of his from 2001 shows, actually what Baez was driving at. His remarks, however, both in 2001 and 2008, on the plane-cube relationship are both somewhat trivial– since “planes through the origin” is a standard definition of lines in projective geometry– and also unrelated– apart from the possibility of confusion– to my own efforts in this area. For further details, see The Eightfold Cube.

Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress