Log24

Wednesday, December 3, 2014

Pyramid Dance

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

Oslo artist Josefine Lyche has a new Instagram post,
this time on pyramids (the monumental kind).

My response —

Wikipedia's definition of a tetrahedron as a
"triangle-based pyramid"

and remarks from a Log24 post of August 14, 2013 :

Norway dance (as interpreted by an American)

IMAGE- 'The geometry of the dance' is that of a tetrahedron, according to Peter Pesic

I prefer a different, Norwegian, interpretation of "the dance of four."

Related material:
The clash between square and tetrahedral versions of PG(3,2).

See also some of Burkard Polster's triangle-based pyramids
and a 1983 triangle-based pyramid in a paper that Polster cites —

(Click image below to enlarge.)

Some other illustrations that are particularly relevant
for Lyche, an enthusiast of magic :

From On Art and Magic (May 5, 2011) —

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

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

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.

 

(Updated at about 7 PM ET on Dec. 3.)

Wednesday, August 14, 2013

ART WARS

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

(Continued from 24 hours ago and from May 9, 2012)

Quoted 24 hours ago in this journal—

Remark by Aldous Huxley on an artist's work:

"All the turmoil, all the emotions of the scenes
have been digested by the mind into a
grave intellectual whole."

Quoted in a video uploaded on May 9, 2012:

Norway Toilet Scene
IMAGE- Privy scene from 'Headhunters'

Norway dance (as interpreted by an American)

IMAGE- 'The geometry of the dance' is that of a tetrahedron, according to Peter Pesic

I prefer a different, Norwegian, interpretation of "the dance of four."

Related material: The clash between square and tetrahedral versions of PG(3,2).

Thursday, May 5, 2011

On Art and Magic

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

Two Blocks Short of a Design:

A sequel to this morning’s post on Douglas Hofstadter

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

Photo of Hofstadter by Mike McGrath taken May 13, 2006

Related material — See Lyche’s  “Theme and Variations” in this journal
and Hofstadter’s “Variations on a Theme as the Essence of Imagination
Scientific American  October 1982

A quotation from a 1985 book by Hofstadter—

“… we need to entice people with the beauties of clarity, simplicity, precision,
elegance, balance, symmetry, and so on.

Those artistic qualities… are the things that I have tried to explore and even
to celebrate in Metamagical Themas .  (It is not for nothing that the word
‘magic’ appears inside the title!)”

The artistic qualities Hofstadter lists are best sought in mathematics, not in magic.

An example from Wikipedia —

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

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.

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Imago, Imago, Imago

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: , , , , — m759 @ 11:07 am

Recommended— an online book—

Flight from Eden: The Origins of Modern Literary Criticism and Theory,
by Steven Cassedy, U. of California Press, 1990.

See in particular

Valéry and the Discourse On His Method.

Pages 156-157—

Valéry saw the mind as essentially a relational system whose operation he attempted to describe in the language of group mathematics. “Every act of understanding is based on a group,” he says (C, 1:331). “My specialty—reducing everything to the study of a system closed on itself and finite” (C, 19: 645). The transformation model came into play, too. At each moment of mental life the mind is like a group, or relational system, but since mental life is continuous over time, one “group” undergoes a “transformation” and becomes a different group in the next moment. If the mind is constantly being transformed, how do we account for the continuity of the self? Simple; by invoking the notion of the invariant. And so we find passages like this one: “The S[elf] is invariant, origin, locus or field, it’s a functional property of consciousness” (C, 15:170 [2: 315]). Just as in transformational geometry, something remains fixed in all the projective transformations of the mind’s momentary systems, and that something is the Self (le Moi, or just M, as Valéry notates it so that it will look like an algebraic variable). Transformation theory is all over the place. “Mathematical science . . . reduced to algebra, that is, to the analysis of the transformations of a purely differential being made up of homogeneous elements, is the most faithful document of the properties of grouping, disjunction, and variation in the mind” (O, 1:36). “Psychology is a theory of transformations, we just need to isolate the invariants and the groups” (C, 1:915). “Man is a system that transforms itself” (C, 2:896).

Notes:

  Paul Valéry, Oeuvres (Paris: Pléiade, 1957-60)

C   Valéry, Cahiers, 29 vols. (Paris: Centre National de le Recherche Scientifique, 1957-61)

Compare Jung’s image in Aion  of the Self as a four-diamond figure:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10A/100615-JungImago.gif

and Cullinane’s purely geometric four-diamond figure:

http://www.log24.com/log/pix10A/100615-FourD.gif

For a natural group of 322,560 transformations acting on the latter figure, see the diamond theorem.

What remains fixed (globally, not pointwise) under these transformations is the system  of points and hyperplanes from the diamond theorem. This system was depicted by artist Josefine Lyche in her installation “Theme and Variations” in Oslo in 2009.  Lyche titled this part of her installation “The Smallest Perfect Universe,” a phrase used earlier by Burkard Polster to describe the projective 3-space PG(3,2) that contains these points (at right below) and hyperplanes (at left below).

Image-- Josefine Lyche's combination of Polster's phrase with<br /> Cullinane's images in her gallery show, Oslo, 2009-- 'The Smallest<br /> Perfect Universe -- Points and Hyperplanes'

Although the system of points (at right above) and hyperplanes (at left above) exemplifies Valéry’s notion of invariant, it seems unlikely to be the sort of thing he had in mind as an image of the Self.

Friday, May 21, 2010

The Oslo Version

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

From an art exhibition in Oslo last year–

Image-- Josefine Lyche's combination of Polster's phrase with Cullinane's images in her gallery show, Oslo, 2009-- 'The Smallest Perfect Universe -- Points and Hyperplanes'

The artist's description above is not in correct left-to-right order.
Actually the hyperplanes above are at left, the points at right.

Compare to "Picturing the Smallest Projective 3-Space,"
a note of mine from April 26, 1986—

Image-- Points and hyperplanes in the finite 3-space PG(3,2), April 1986, by Cullinane

Click for the original full version.

Compare also to Burkard Polster's original use of
the phrase "the smallest perfect universe."

Polster's tetrahedral model of points and hyperplanes
is quite different from my own square version above.

See also Cullinane on Polster.

Here are links to the gallery press release
and the artist's own photos.

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