The following IEEE paper is behind a paywall,
but the first page is now available for free
at deepdyve.com —
For further details on the diamond theorem, see
finitegeometry.org/sc/ or the archived version at . . .
The following IEEE paper is behind a paywall,
but the first page is now available for free
at deepdyve.com —
For further details on the diamond theorem, see
finitegeometry.org/sc/ or the archived version at . . .
Abstract: "Protection of digital content from being tapped by intruders is a crucial task in the present generation of Internet world. In this paper, we proposed an implementation of new visual secret sharing scheme for gray level images using diamond theorem correlation. A secret image has broken into 4 × 4 non overlapped blocks and patterns of diamond theorem are applied sequentially to ensure the secure image transmission. Separate diamond patterns are utilized to share the blocks of both odd and even sectors. Finally, the numerical results show that a novel secret shares are generated by using diamond theorem correlations. Histogram representations demonstrate the novelty of the proposed visual secret sharing scheme." — "New visual secret sharing scheme for gray-level images using diamond theorem correlation pattern structure," by V. Harish, N. Rajesh Kumar, and N. R. Raajan.
Published in: 2016 International Conference on Circuit, Power and Computing Technologies (ICCPCT). |
Excerpts —
Related material — Posts tagged Diamond Theorem Correlation.
Continued from All Hallows' Eve, 2014.
Last year's Halloween post displayed the
Dürer print Knight, Death, and the Devil
(illustrated below on the cover of the book
Film and Phenomenology by Allan Casebier).
Cover illustration: Knight, Death, and the Devil,
by Albrecht Dürer
Some mathematics related to a different Dürer print —
Click image for a larger, clearer version.
A new website illustrates its URL.
See DiamondSpace.net.
Related material:
See also remarks on Penrose linked to in Sacerdotal Jargon.
(For a connection of these remarks to
the Penrose diamond, see April 1, 2012.)
“To say more is to say less.”
― Harlan Ellison, as quoted at goodreads.com
Saying less—
The diamond from the Chi-rho page
of the Book of Kells —
The diamond at the center of Euclid's
Proposition I, according to James Joyce
(i.e., the Diamond in the Mandorla) —
“He pointed at the football
on his desk. ‘There it is.’”
– Glory Road
Stephen Rachman on "The Purloined Letter"
"Poe’s tale established the modern paradigm (which, as it happens, Dashiell Hammett and John Huston followed) of the hermetically sealed fiction of cross and double-cross in which spirited antagonists pursue a prized artifact of dubious or uncertain value."
For one such artifact, the diamond rhombus formed by two equilateral triangles, see Osserman in this journal.
Some background on the artifact is given by John T. Irwin's essay "Mysteries We Reread…" reprinted in Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism .
Related material—
Mathematics vulgarizer Robert Osserman died on St. Andrew's Day, 2011.
A Rhetorical Question
"The past decade has been an exciting one in the world of mathematics and a fabulous one (in the literal sense) for mathematicians, who saw themselves transformed from the frogs of fairy tales— regarded with a who-would-want-to-kiss-that aversion, when they were noticed at all— into fascinating royalty, portrayed on stage and screen….
Who bestowed the magic kiss on the mathematical frog?"
A Rhetorical Answer
Above: Amy Adams in "Sunshine Cleaning"
Philosophical Investigations (1953)—
97. Thought is surrounded by a halo.
—Its essence, logic, presents an order,
in fact the a priori order of the world:
that is, the order of possibilities * ,
which must be common to both world and thought.
But this order, it seems, must be
utterly simple . It is prior to all experience,
must run through all experience;
no empirical cloudiness or uncertainty can be allowed to affect it
——It must rather be of the purest crystal.
But this crystal does not appear as an abstraction;
but as something concrete, indeed, as the most concrete,
as it were the hardest thing there is
(Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus No. 5.5563).
— Translation by G.E.M. Anscombe
All propositions of our colloquial language
are actually, just as they are, logically completely in order.
That simple thing which we ought to give here is not
a model of the truth but the complete truth itself.
(Our problems are not abstract but perhaps
the most concrete that there are.)
97. Das Denken ist mit einem Nimbus umgeben.
—Sein Wesen, die Logik, stellt eine Ordnung dar,
und zwar die Ordnung a priori der Welt,
d.i. die Ordnung der Möglichkeiten ,
die Welt und Denken gemeinsam sein muß.
Diese Ordnung aber, scheint es, muß
höchst einfach sein. Sie ist vor aller Erfahrung;
muß sich durch die ganze Erfahrung hindurchziehen;
ihr selbst darf keine erfahrungsmäßige Trübe oder Unsicherheit anhaften.
——Sie muß vielmehr vom reinsten Kristall sein.
Dieser Kristall aber erscheint nicht als eine Abstraktion;
sondern als etwas Konkretes, ja als das Konkreteste,
gleichsam Härteste . (Log. Phil. Abh. No. 5.5563.)
Related language in Łukasiewicz (1937)—
* Updates of 9:29 PM ET July 10, 2011—
A mnemonic from a course titled “Galois Connections and Modal Logics“—
“Traditionally, there are two modalities, namely, possibility and necessity.
The basic modal operators are usually written (square) for necessarily
and (diamond) for possibly. Then, for example,
P can be read as
‘it is possibly the case that P .'”
See also Intensional Semantics , lecture notes by Kai von Fintel and Irene Heim, MIT, Spring 2007 edition—
“The diamond ⋄ symbol for possibility is due to C.I. Lewis, first introduced in Lewis & Langford (1932), but he made no use of a symbol for the dual combination ¬⋄¬. The dual symbol □ was later devised by F.B. Fitch and first appeared in print in 1946 in a paper by his doctoral student Barcan (1946). See footnote 425 of Hughes & Cresswell (1968). Another notation one finds is L for necessity and M for possibility, the latter from the German möglich ‘possible.’” Barcan, Ruth C.: 1946. “A Functional Calculus of First Order Based on Strict Implication.” Journal of Symbolic Logic, 11(1): 1–16. URL http://www.jstor.org/pss/2269159. Hughes, G.E. & Cresswell, M.J.: 1968. An Introduction to Modal Logic. London: Methuen. Lewis, Clarence Irving & Langford, Cooper Harold: 1932. Symbolic Logic. New York: Century. |
Also known, roughly speaking, as confluence or the Church-Rosser property.
From “NYU Lambda Seminar, Week 2” —
[See also the parent page Seminar in Semantics / Philosophy of Language or:
What Philosophers and Linguists Can Learn From Theoretical Computer Science But Didn’t Know To Ask)]
A computational system is said to be confluent, or to have the Church-Rosser or diamond property, if, whenever there are multiple possible evaluation paths, those that terminate always terminate in the same value. In such a system, the choice of which sub-expressions to evaluate first will only matter if some of them but not others might lead down a non-terminating path.
The untyped lambda calculus is confluent. So long as a computation terminates, it always terminates in the same way. It doesn’t matter which order the sub-expressions are evaluated in.
A computational system is said to be strongly normalizing if every permitted evaluation path is guaranteed to terminate. The untyped lambda calculus is not strongly normalizing: ω ω
doesn’t terminate by any evaluation path; and (\x. y) (ω ω)
terminates only by some evaluation paths but not by others.
But the untyped lambda calculus enjoys some compensation for this weakness. It’s Turing complete! It can represent any computation we know how to describe. (That’s the cash value of being Turing complete, not the rigorous definition. There is a rigorous definition. However, we don’t know how to rigorously define “any computation we know how to describe.”) And in fact, it’s been proven that you can’t have both. If a computational system is Turing complete, it cannot be strongly normalizing.
There is no connection, apart from the common reference to an elementary geometric shape, between the use of “diamond” in the above Church-Rosser sense and the use of “diamond” in the mathematics of (Cullinane’s) Diamond Theory.
Any attempt to establish such a connection would, it seems, lead quickly into logically dubious territory.
Nevertheless, in the synchronistic spirit of Carl Jung and Arthur Koestler, here are some links to such a territory —
Link One — “Insane Symmetry” (Click image for further details)—
See also the quilt symmetry in this journal on Christmas Day.
Link Two — Divine Symmetry
(George Steiner on the Name in this journal on Dec. 31 last year (“All about Eve“)) —
“The links are direct between the tautology out of the Burning Bush, that ‘I am’ which accords to language the privilege of phrasing the identity of God, on the one hand, and the presumptions of concordance, of equivalence, of translatability, which, though imperfect, empower our dictionaries, our syntax, our rhetoric, on the other. That ‘I am’ has, as it were, at an overwhelming distance, informed all predication. It has spanned the arc between noun and verb, a leap primary to creation and the exercise of creative consciousness in metaphor. Where that fire in the branches has gone out or has been exposed as an optical illusion, the textuality of the world, the agency of the Logos in logic—be it Mosaic, Heraclitean, or Johannine—becomes ‘a dead letter.'”
– George Steiner, Grammars of Creation
(See also, from Hanukkah this year, A Geometric Merkabah and The Dreidel is Cast.)
Link Three – Spanning the Arc —
Part A — Architect Louis Sullivan on “span” (see also Kindergarten at Stonehenge)
Part B — “Span” in category theory at nLab —
Also from nLab — Completing Spans to Diamonds
“It is often interesting whether a given span in some partial ordered set can be completed into a diamond. The property of a collection of spans to consist of spans which are expandable into diamonds is very useful in the theory of rewriting systems and producing normal forms in algebra. There are classical results e.g. Newman’s diamond lemma, Širšov-Bergman’s diamond lemma (Širšov is also sometimes spelled as Shirshov), and Church-Rosser theorem (and the corresponding Church-Rosser confluence property).”
The concepts in this last paragraph may or may not have influenced the diamond theory of Rudolf Kaehr (apparently dating from 2007).
They certainly have nothing to do with the Diamond Theory of Steven H. Cullinane (dating from 1976).
For more on what the above San Francisco art curator is pleased to call “insane symmetry,” see this journal on Christmas Day.
For related philosophical lucubrations (more in the spirit of Kaehr than of Steiner), see the New York Times “The Stone” essay “Span: A Remembrance,” from December 22—
“To understand ourselves well,” [architect Louis] Sullivan writes, “we must arrive first at a simple basis: then build up from it.”
Around 300 BC, Euclid arrived at this: “A point is that which has no part. A line is breadthless length.”
See also the link from Christmas Day to remarks on Euclid and “architectonic” in Mere Geometry.
… Chomsky vs. Santa
From a New Yorker weblog yesterday—
"Happy Birthday, Noam Chomsky." by Gary Marcus—
"… two titans facing off, with Chomsky, as ever,
defining the contest"
"Chomsky sees himself, correctly, as continuing
a conversation that goes back to Plato, especially
the Meno dialogue, in which a slave boy is
revealed by Socrates to know truths about
geometry that he hadn’t realized he knew."
See Meno Diamond in this journal. For instance, from
the Feast of Saint Nicholas (Dec. 6th) this year—
The Meno Embedding
For related truths about geometry, see the diamond theorem.
For a related contest of language theory vs. geometry,
see pattern theory (Sept. 11, 16, and 17, 2012).
See esp. the Sept. 11 post, on a Royal Society paper from July 2012
claiming that
"With the results presented here, we have taken the first steps
in decoding the uniquely human fascination with visual patterns,
what Gombrich* termed our ‘sense of order.’ "
The sorts of patterns discussed in the 2012 paper —
"First steps"? The mathematics underlying such patterns
was presented 35 years earlier, in Diamond Theory.
* See Gombrich-Douat in this journal.
In honor of the Auckland opening of the opera
“The Cunning Little Vixen” on January 27, 2010 —
“The 2×2 matrix is commonly used in business strategy
as a representational tool to show conflicting concepts and
for decision making. This four-quadrant matrix diagram
is perfect to be used for business or marketing matrices
like BCG, SWOT, Ansoff, risk assessment…
Additionally, it will also be suitable to illustrate 4 ideas or
concepts.” [Link on “illustrate” added.]
See also a Log24 search for “Resplendent.”
A post of May 26, 2005, displays, if not the sword,
a place for it —
“The beautiful in mathematics resides in contradiction.
Incommensurability, logoi alogoi, was the first splendor
in mathematics.” — Simone Weil, Oeuvres Choisies,
éd. Quarto , Gallimard, 1999, p. 100
Logos Alogos by S. H. Cullinane
“To a mathematician, mathematical entities have their own existence,
they habitate spaces created by their intention. They do things,
things happen to them, they relate to one another. We can imagine
on their behalf all sorts of stories, providing they don’t contradict
what we know of them. The drama of the diagonal, of the square…”
— Dennis Guedj, abstract of “The Drama of Mathematics,” a talk
to be given this July at the Mykonos conference on mathematics and
narrative. For the drama of the diagonal of the square, see
Stephen Wolfram yesterday —
“Causal invariance may at first seem like a rather obscure property.
But in the context of our models, we will see in what follows that
it may in fact be the key to a remarkable range of fundamental features
of physics, including relativistic invariance, general covariance, and
local gauge invariance, as well as the possibility of objective reality in
quantum mechanics.”
From . . .
Church Diamond Continued
The above article leads to remarks by Stephen Wolfram published today :
See also “Invariance” as the title of the previous post here.
Note the resemblance to Plato’s Diamond.
Click the Pritchard passage above for an interactive version.
"This interplay of necessity and contingency
produces our anxious— and highly pleasurable—
speculation about the future path of the story."
— Michel Chaouli in "How Interactive Can Fiction Be?"
(Critical Inquiry 31, Spring 2005, page 613.)
See also . . .
Continuing previous Modal Diamond Box posts:
From Ulysses , by James Joyce —
John Eglinton, frowning, said, waxing wroth: —Upon my word it makes my blood boil to hear anyone compare Aristotle with Plato. —Which of the two, Stephen asked, would have banished me from his commonwealth? |
Compare and contrast:
Fans of Plato might enjoy tales of Narnia, but fans of
James Joyce and Edgar Allan Poe might prefer
a tale by Michael Chabon from April 2001 about a
"doleful little corner of western Pennsylvania."
"Husserl is not the greatest philosopher of all times. — Kurt Gödel as quoted by Gian-Carlo Rota Some results from a Google search — Eidetic reduction | philosophy | Britannica.com Eidetic reduction, in phenomenology, a method by which the philosopher moves from the consciousness of individual and concrete objects to the transempirical realm of pure essences and thus achieves an intuition of the eidos (Greek: “shape”) of a thing—i.e., of what it is in its invariable and essential structure, apart … Phenomenology Online » Eidetic Reduction
The eidetic reduction: eidos. Method: Bracket all incidental meaning and ask: what are some of the possible invariate aspects of this experience? The research Eidetic reduction – New World Encyclopedia Sep 19, 2017 – Eidetic reduction is a technique in Husserlian phenomenology, used to identify the essential components of the given phenomenon or experience. |
For example —
The reduction of two-colorings and four-colorings of a square or cubic
array of subsquares or subcubes to lines, sets of lines, cuts, or sets of
cuts between* the subsquares or subcubes.
See the diamond theorem and the eightfold cube.
* Cf. posts tagged Interality and Interstice.
A Scientific American headline today —
Glittering Diamond Dust in Space
Might Solve a 20-Year-Old Mystery
Related art —
"Never underestimate the power of glitter."
Background: "Diamond Dust" + Glitter in this journal.
In 2013, Harvard University Press changed its logo to an abstract "H."
Both logos now accompany a Harvard video first published in 2012,
"The World of Mathematical Reality."
In the video, author Paul Lockhart discusses Varignon's theorem
without naming Varignon (1654-1722) . . .
A related view of "mathematical reality" —
Note the resemblance to Plato's Diamond.
The title refers to the previous two posts.
Related literature —
Plato's Ghost: The Modernist Transformation of Mathematics
(Princeton University Press, 2008) and . . .
Plato's diamond-in-a-matrix:
From a Boston Globe obituary for Andrew Lewis, an Oscar-nominated
screenwriter who reportedly died at 92 on Feb. 28, 2018 —
"A service has been held for Mr. Lewis . . . ."
— Bryan Marquard, Globe staff, April 5, 2018
From this journal on the reported date of his death —
The Globe reports that Lewis's father was Clarence Irving Lewis,
a professor of philosophy at Harvard University.
Fact check: See page 246 of C. I. Lewis: The Last Great Pragmatist ,
by Murray G. Murphey (SUNY Press, 2005).
Figure (a) above is not unrelated to philosophy. See Plato 's Meno dialogue.
See also a different diamond — a symbol devised by C. I. Lewis for use in
modal logic — in the post Wittgenstein's Diamond (July 10, 2011).
"Denn die Welt braucht ewig die Wahrheit,
also braucht sie ewig Heraklit:
obschon er ihrer nicht bedarf.
Was geht ihn sein Ruhm an?
Der Ruhm bei »immer fortfließenden Sterblichen!«,
wie er höhnisch ausruft.
Sein Ruhm geht die Menschen etwas an, nicht ihn,
die Unsterblichkeit der Menschheit braucht ihn,
nicht er die Unsterblichkeit des Menschen Heraklit.
Das, was er schaute, die Lehre vom Gesetz im Werden
und vom Spiel in der Notwendigkeit , muß von jetzt
ab ewig geschaut werden: er hat von diesem größten
Schauspiel den Vorhang aufgezogen."
Logos for Philosophers
(Suggested by Modal Logic) —
A sequel to the post CP is for Consolation Prize (Sept. 3, 2016)
An image from Log24 on this date last year:
A recent comment on a discussion of CP symmetry —
At the Googleplex .
For those whose only interest in higher mathematics
is as a path to the occult …
Plato's Diamond and the Hebrew letter Aleph —
and some related (if only graphically) mathematics —
Click the above image for some related purely mathematical remarks.
Today’s New York Times on a character in a 1978 film —
“Cluelessly upbeat and charmingly idiotic.”
Related material from a post Saturday —
Coda —
See as well this journal on the above date — Sept. 24, 2015.
(The title is from yesterday morning's Graphical Interfaces.)
For example, Plato's diamond as an object to be transformed —
Versions of the transformed object —
See also The 4×4 Relativity Problem in this journal.
From the American Mathematical Society (AMS) webpage today —
From the current AMS Notices —
Related material from a post of Aug. 6, 2014 —
(Here "five point sets" should be "five-point sets.")
From Gotay and Isenberg, “The Symplectization of Science,”
Gazette des Mathématiciens 54, 59-79 (1992):
“… what is the origin of the unusual name ‘symplectic’? ….
Its mathematical usage is due to Hermann Weyl who,
in an effort to avoid a certain semantic confusion, renamed
the then obscure ‘line complex group’ the ‘symplectic group.’
… the adjective ‘symplectic’ means ‘plaited together’ or ‘woven.’
This is wonderfully apt….”
The above symplectic structure* now appears in the figure
illustrating the diamond-theorem correlation in the webpage
Rosenhain and Göpel Tetrads in PG(3,2).
* The phrase as used here is a deliberate
abuse of language . For the real definition of
“symplectic structure,” see (for instance)
“Symplectic Geometry,” by Ana Cannas da Silva
(article written for Handbook of Differential
Geometry , Vol 2.) To establish that the above
figure is indeed symplectic , see the post
Zero System of July 31, 2014.
Or: Philosophy for Jews
From a New Yorker weblog post dated Dec. 6, 2012 —
“Happy Birthday, Noam Chomsky” by Gary Marcus—
“… two titans facing off, with Chomsky, as ever,
defining the contest”
“Chomsky sees himself, correctly, as continuing
a conversation that goes back to Plato, especially
the Meno dialogue, in which a slave boy is
revealed by Socrates to know truths about
geometry that he hadn’t realized he knew.”
Socrates and the slave boy discussed a rather elementary “truth
about geometry” — A diamond inscribed in a square has area 2
(and side the square root of 2) if the square itself has area 4
(and side 2).
Consider that not-particularly-deep structure from the Meno dialogue
in the light of the following…
The following analysis of the Meno diagram from yesterday’s
post “The Embedding” contradicts the Lévi-Strauss dictum on
the impossibility of going beyond a simple binary opposition.
(The Chinese word taiji denotes the fundamental concept in
Chinese philosophy that such a going-beyond is both useful
and possible.)
The matrix at left below represents the feminine yin principle
and the diamond at right represents the masculine yang .
From a post of Sept. 22,
“Binary Opposition Illustrated” —
A symbol of the unity of yin and yang —
Related material:
A much more sophisticated approach to the “deep structure” of the
Meno diagram —
The Cube and the Hexagram
The above illustration, by the late Harvey D. Heinz,
shows a magic cube* and a corresponding magic
hexagram, or Star of David, with the six cube faces
mapped to the six hexagram lines and the twelve
cube edges mapped to the twelve hexagram points.
The eight cube vertices correspond to eight triangles
in the hexagram (six small and two large).
Exercise: Is this noteworthy mapping** of faces to lines,
edges to points, and vertices to triangles an isolated
phenomenon, or can it be viewed in a larger context?
* See the discussion at magic-squares.net of
"perimeter-magic cubes"
** Apparently derived from the Cube + Hexagon figure
discussed here in various earlier posts. See also
"Diamonds and Whirls," a note from 1984.
From this morning's news, a cultural icon —
From November 18, 2015, four icons —
— the three favicons above, and the following:
"… I would drop the keystone into my arch …."
— Charles Sanders Peirce, "On Phenomenology"
" 'But which is the stone that supports the bridge?' Kublai Khan asks."
— Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, as quoted by B. Elan Dresher.
(B. Elan Dresher. Nordlyd 41.2 (2014): 165-181,
special issue on Features edited by Martin Krämer,
Sandra Ronai and Peter Svenonius. University of Tromsø –
The Arctic University of Norway.
http://septentrio.uit.no/index.php/nordlyd)
Peter Svenonius and Martin Krämer, introduction to the
Nordlyd double issue on Features —
"Interacting with these questions about the 'geometric'
relations among features is the algebraic structure
of the features."
For another such interaction, see the previous post.
This post may be viewed as a commentary on a remark in Wikipedia —
"All of these ideas speak to the crux of Plato's Problem…."
See also The Diamond Theorem at Tromsø and Mere Geometry.
An old version of the Wikipedia article "Group theory"
(pictured in the previous post) —
"More poetically …"
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."
The seven seals from the previous post, with some context —
These models of projective points are drawn from the underlying
structure described (in the 4×4 case) as part of the proof of the
Cullinane diamond theorem .
"Hard Science Fiction in the era of short attention spans,
crowd-sourcing, and rapid obsolescence"
— May 26, 2012, Dragon Press Bookstore symposium
Related material: Posts now tagged Black Diamond.
For the late psychopharmacologist Joel Elkes and
the late songwriter P. F. Sloan —
" Inspired by the assassination of President John F. Kennedy
and other events, he wrote 'Eve of Destruction.'
He later said, 'I was arguing with this voice that seemed to
know the future of the world.' "
— Terence McArdle in last night's online Washington Post
See also Tuesday's posts Tab Icons from the Clearing —
— and, later, Meditation on an Icon:
The above image may be viewed
as a midrash on a picture by
the late Dr. Elkes —
"Bostrom has a reinvented man’s sense of lost time.
An only child, he grew up—as Niklas Boström—in
Helsingborg, on the southern coast of Sweden.
Like many exceptionally bright children, he hated
school, and as a teen-ager he developed a listless,
romantic persona. In 1989, he wandered into a library
and stumbled onto an anthology of nineteenth-century
German philosophy, containing works by Nietzsche
and Schopenhauer. He read it in a nearby forest, in
a clearing that he often visited to think and to write
poetry, and experienced a euphoric insight into the
possibilities of learning and achievement. 'It’s hard to
convey in words what that was like,' Bostrom told me…."
— Raffi Khatchadourian
Note that the six anticommuting sets of Dirac matrices listed by Arfken
correspond exactly to the six spreads in the above complex of 15 projective
lines of PG(3,2) fixed under a symplectic polarity (the diamond theorem
correlation ). As I noted in 1986, this correlation underlies the Miracle
Octad Generator of R. T. Curtis, hence also the large Mathieu group.
References:
Arfken, George B., Mathematical Methods for Physicists , Third Edition,
Academic Press, 1985, pages 213-214
Cullinane, Steven H., Notes on Groups and Geometry, 1978-1986
Related material:
The 6-set in my 1986 note above also appears in a 1996 paper on
the sixteen Dirac matrices by David M. Goodmanson —
Background reading:
Ron Shaw on finite geometry, Clifford algebras, and Dirac groups
(undated compilation of publications from roughly 1994-1995)—
The title is a phrase from R. D. Laing's book The Politics of Experience .
(Published in the psychedelic year 1967. The later "contrapuntal interweaving"
below is of a less psychedelic nature.)
An illustration of the "interweaving' part of the title —
The "deep structure" of the diamond theorem:
.
The word "symplectic" from the end of last Sunday's (Oct. 11) sermon
describes the "interwoven" nature of the above illustration.
An illustration of the "contrapuntal" part of the title (click to enlarge):
Some context for yesterday's post on a symplectic polarity —
This 1986 note may or may not have inspired some remarks
of Wolf Barth in his foreword to the 1990 reissue of Hudson's
1905 Kummer's Quartic Surface .
See also the diamond-theorem correlation.
"And not all the king's men nor his horses
Will resurrect his corpus."
See as well Andy Weir's "The Egg" and Working Backward.
Illustrations from a post of Feb. 17, 2011:
Plato’s paradigm in the Meno —
Changed paradigm in the diamond theorem (2×2 case) —
The words: "symplectic polarity"—
The images:
The Natural Symplectic Polarity in PG(3,2)
Symmetry Invariance in a Diamond Ring
The Diamond-Theorem Correlation
Steven Pressfield on April 25, 2012:
What exactly is High Concept?
Let’s start with its opposite, low concept.
Low concept stories are personal,
idiosyncratic, ambiguous, often European.
“Well, it’s a sensitive fable about a Swedish
sardine fisherman whose wife and daughter
find themselves conflicted over … ”
ZZZZZZZZ.
Fans of Oslo artist Josefine Lyche know she has
valiantly struggled to find a high-concept approach
to the diamond theorem. Any such approach must,
unfortunately, reckon with the following low
(i.e., not easily summarized) concept —
The Diamond Theorem Correlation:
From left to right …
http://www.log24.com/log/pix14B/140824-Diamond-Theorem-Correlation-1202w.jpg
http://www.log24.com/log/pix14B/140731-Diamond-Theorem-Correlation-747w.jpg
http://www.log24.com/log/pix14B/140824-Picturing_the_Smallest-1986.gif
http://www.log24.com/log/pix14B/140806-ProjPoints.gif
For some backstory, see ProjPoints.gif and "Symplectic Polarity" in this journal.
An image related to the recent posts Sense and Sensibility:
A quote from yesterday's post The Eight:
A possible source for the above phrase about phenomena "carved at their joints":
See also the carving at the joints of Plato's diamond from the Meno :
Related material: Phaedrus on Kant as a diamond cutter
in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance .
"To every man upon this earth,
Death cometh soon or late.
And how can man die better
Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his fathers,
and the temples of his gods…?"
— Macaulay, quoted in the April 2013 film "Oblivion"
"Leave a space." — Tom Stoppard, "Jumpers"
Related material: The August 16, 2014, sudden death in Scotland
of an architect of the above Cardross seminary, and a Log24 post,
Plato's Logos, from the date of the above photo: June 26, 2010.
See also…
Here “eidolon” should instead be “eidos .”
An example of eidos — Plato's diamond (from the Meno ) —
In the Miracle Octad Generator (MOG):
The above details from a one-page note of April 26, 1986, refer to the
Miracle Octad Generator of R. T. Curtis, as it was published in 1976:
From R. T. Curtis (1976). A new combinatorial approach to M24,
Mathematical Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical Society ,
79, pp 25-42. doi:10.1017/S0305004100052075.
The 1986 note assumed that the reader would be able to supply, from the
MOG itself, the missing top row of each heavy brick.
Note that the interchange of the two squares in the top row of each
heavy brick induces the diamond-theorem correlation.
Note also that the 20 pictured 3-subsets of a 6-set in the 1986 note
occur as paired complements in two pictures, each showing 10 of the
3-subsets.
This pair of pictures corresponds to the 20 Rosenhain tetrads among
the 35 lines of PG(3,2), while the picture showing the 2-subsets
corresponds to the 15 Göpel tetrads among the 35 lines.
See Rosenhain and Göpel tetrads in PG(3,2). Some further background:
Some background for the part of the 2002 paper by Dolgachev and Keum
quoted here on January 17, 2014 —
Related material in this journal (click image for posts) —
(Continued from August 9, 2014.)
Syntactic:
Symplectic:
"Visual forms— lines, colors, proportions, etc.— are just as capable of
articulation , i.e. of complex combination, as words. But the laws that govern
this sort of articulation are altogether different from the laws of syntax that
govern language. The most radical difference is that visual forms are not
discursive . They do not present their constituents successively, but
simultaneously, so the relations determining a visual structure are grasped
in one act of vision."
– Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key
For examples, see The Diamond-Theorem Correlation
in Rosenhain and Göpel Tetrads in PG(3,2).
This is a symplectic correlation,* constructed using the following
visual structure:
.
* Defined in (for instance) Paul B. Yale, Geometry and Symmetry ,
Holden-Day, 1968, sections 6.9 and 6.10.
From Gotay and Isenberg, "The Symplectization of Science,"
Gazette des Mathématiciens 54, 59-79 (1992):
"… what is the origin of the unusual name 'symplectic'? ….
Its mathematical usage is due to Hermann Weyl who,
in an effort to avoid a certain semantic confusion, renamed
the then obscure 'line complex group' the 'symplectic group.'
… the adjective 'symplectic' means 'plaited together' or 'woven.'
This is wonderfully apt…."
The above symplectic structure** now appears in the figure
illustrating the diamond-theorem correlation in the webpage
Rosenhain and Göpel Tetrads in PG(3,2).
Some related passages from the literature:
* The title is a deliberate abuse of language .
For the real definition of "symplectic structure," see (for instance)
"Symplectic Geometry," by Ana Cannas da Silva (article written for
Handbook of Differential Geometry, vol 2.) To establish that the
above figure is indeed symplectic , see the post Zero System of
July 31, 2014.
** See Steven H. Cullinane, Inscapes III, 1986
The title phrase (not to be confused with the film 'The Zero Theorem')
means, according to the Encyclopedia of Mathematics,
a null system , and
"A null system is also called null polarity,
a symplectic polarity or a symplectic correlation….
it is a polarity such that every point lies in its own
polar hyperplane."
See Reinhold Baer, "Null Systems in Projective Space,"
Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, Vol. 51
(1945), pp. 903-906.
An example in PG(3,2), the projective 3-space over the
two-element Galois field GF(2):
See also the 10 AM ET post of Sunday, June 8, 2014, on this topic.
“The relevance of a geometric theorem is determined by what the theorem
tells us about space, and not by the eventual difficulty of the proof.”
— Gian-Carlo Rota discussing the theorem of Desargues
What space tells us about the theorem :
In the simplest case of a projective space (as opposed to a plane ),
there are 15 points and 35 lines: 15 Göpel lines and 20 Rosenhain lines.*
The theorem of Desargues in this simplest case is essentially a symmetry
within the set of 20 Rosenhain lines. The symmetry, a reflection
about the main diagonal in the square model of this space, interchanges
10 horizontally oriented (row-based) lines with 10 corresponding
vertically oriented (column-based) lines.
Vide Classical Geometry in Light of Galois Geometry.
* Update of June 9: For a more traditional nomenclature, see (for instance)
R. Shaw, 1995. The “simplest case” link above was added to point out that
the two types of lines named are derived from a natural symplectic polarity
in the space. The square model of the space, apparently first described in
notes written in October and December, 1978, makes this polarity clearly visible:
Raiders of the Lost (Continued)
"Socrates: They say that the soul of man is immortal…."
From August 16, 2012—
In the geometry of Plato illustrated below,
"the figure of eight [square] feet" is not , at this point
in the dialogue, the diamond in Jowett's picture.
An 1892 figure by Jowett illustrating Plato's Meno—
A more correct version, from hermes-press.com —
Socrates: He only guesses that because the square is double, the line is double.Meno: True.
Socrates: Observe him while he recalls the steps in regular order. (To the Boy.) Tell me, boy, do you assert that a double space comes from a double line? Remember that I am not speaking of an oblong, but of a figure equal every way, and twice the size of this-that is to say of eight feet; and I want to know whether you still say that a double square comes from double line? [Boy] Yes. Socrates: But does not this line (AB) become doubled if we add another such line here (BJ is added)? [Boy] Certainly.
Socrates: And four such lines [AJ, JK, KL, LA] will make a space containing eight feet? [Boy] Yes. Socrates: Let us draw such a figure: (adding DL, LK, and JK). Would you not say that this is the figure of eight feet? [Boy] Yes. Socrates: And are there not these four squares in the figure, each of which is equal to the figure of four feet? (Socrates draws in CM and CN) [Boy] True. Socrates: And is not that four times four? [Boy] Certainly. Socrates: And four times is not double? [Boy] No, indeed. Socrates: But how much? [Boy] Four times as much. Socrates: Therefore the double line, boy, has given a space, not twice, but four times as much. [Boy] True. Socrates: Four times four are sixteen— are they not? [Boy] Yes. |
As noted in the 2012 post, the diagram of greater interest is
Jowett's incorrect version rather than the more correct version
shown above. This is because the 1892 version inadvertently
illustrates a tesseract:
A 4×4 square version, by Coxeter in 1950, of a tesseract—
This square version we may call the Galois tesseract.
One way of interpreting the symbol
at the end of yesterday's post is via
the phrase "necessary possibility."
See that phrase in (for instance) a post
of July 24, 2013, The Broken Tablet .
The Tablet post may be viewed in light
of a Tom Wolfe passage quoted here on
the preceding day, July 23, 2013—
On that day (July 23) another weblog had
a post titled
Wallace Stevens: Night's Hymn of the Rock.
Some related narrative —
I prefer the following narrative —
Part I: Stevens's verse from "The Rock" (1954) —
"That in which space itself is contained"
Part II: Mystery Box III: Inside, Outside (2014)
A review of this date in 2005 —
Modal Theology
“We symbolize logical necessity
with the box ()
and logical possibility
with the diamond ().”
— Keith Allen Korcz
And what do we
symbolize by ?
Microsoft in 2009 on its new search engine name—
"We like Bing because it sounds off in our heads
when we think about that moment of discovery
and decision making— when you resolve those
important tasks."
A search on Bing today —
A colorful tale —
"… Galois was a mathematical outsider…."
— Tony Mann, "head of the department of mathematical sciences,
University of Greenwich, and president, British Society for the
History of Mathematics," in a May 6, 2010, review of Duel at Dawn
in Times Higher Education.
Related art:
(Click for a larger image.)
For a less outside version of the central image
above, see Kunstkritikk on Oct. 15, 2013.
The Philosopher's Gaze , by David Michael Levin, The post-metaphysical question—question for a post-metaphysical phenomenology—is therefore: Can the perceptual field, the ground of perception, be released from our historical compulsion to represent it in a way that accommodates our will to power and its need to totalize and reify the presencing of being? In other words: Can the ground be experienced as ground? Can its hermeneutical way of presencing, i.e., as a dynamic interplay of concealment and unconcealment, be given appropriate respect in the receptivity of a perception that lets itself be appropriated by the ground and accordingly lets the phenomenon of the ground be what and how it is? Can the coming-to-pass of the ontological difference that is constitutive of all the local figure-ground differences taking place in our perceptual field be made visible hermeneutically, and thus without violence to its withdrawal into concealment? But the question concerning the constellation of figure and ground cannot be separated from the question concerning the structure of subject and object. Hence the possibility of a movement beyond metaphysics must also think the historical possibility of breaking out of this structure into the spacing of the ontological difference: différance , the primordial, sensuous, ekstatic écart . As Heidegger states it in his Parmenides lectures, it is a question of "the way historical man belongs within the bestowal of being (Zufügung des Seins ), i.e., the way this order entitles him to acknowledge being and to be the only being among all beings to see the open" (PE* 150, PG** 223. Italics added). We might also say that it is a question of our response-ability, our capacity as beings gifted with vision, to measure up to the responsibility for perceptual responsiveness laid down for us in the "primordial de-cision" (Entscheid ) of the ontological difference (ibid.). To recognize the operation of the ontological difference taking place in the figure-ground difference of the perceptual Gestalt is to recognize the ontological difference as the primordial Riß , the primordial Ur-teil underlying all our perceptual syntheses and judgments—and recognize, moreover, that this rift, this division, decision, and scission, an ekstatic écart underlying and gathering all our so-called acts of perception, is also the only "norm" (ἀρχή ) by which our condition, our essential deciding and becoming as the ones who are gifted with sight, can ultimately be judged. * PE: Parmenides of Heidegger in English— Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992 ** PG: Parmenides of Heidegger in German— Gesamtausgabe , vol. 54— Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1992 |
Examples of "the primordial Riß " as ἀρχή —
For an explanation in terms of mathematics rather than philosophy,
see the diamond theorem. For more on the Riß as ἀρχή , see
Function Decomposition Over a Finite Field.
The Galois tesseract appeared in an early form in the journal
Computer Graphics and Art , Vol. 2, No. 1, February 1977—
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—
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.
(Simplicity continued)
"Understanding a metaphor is like understanding a geometrical
truth. Features of various geometrical figures or of various contexts
are pulled into revealing alignment with one another by the
demonstration or the metaphor.
What is 'revealed' is not that the alignment is possible; rather,
that the alignment is possible reveals the presence of already-
existing shapes or correspondences that lay unnoticed. To 'see' a
proof or 'get' a metaphor is to experience the significance of the
correspondence for what the thing, concept, or figure is ."
— Jan Zwicky, Wisdom & Metaphor , page 36 (left)
Zwicky illustrates this with Plato's diamond figure
from the Meno on the facing page— her page 36 (right).
A more sophisticated geometrical figure—
Galois-geometry key to
Desargues' theorem:
D | E | F | |
S' | P | Q | R |
S | P' | Q' | R' |
O | P1 | Q1 | R1 |
For an explanation, see
Classical Geometry in Light of Galois Geometry.
Profile picture of "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
Keywords (to help place my artwork in the (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 .
Continued from the previous post (June 27),
about the death of the founder of the
Future of Humanity Institute (FHI) at Oxford…
From Oxford Today , June 26, 2013—
(See also a June 11 Independent story on the same topic.)
Update of 6:42 PM ET June 29:
Any similarity between the FHI logo and Plato's diamond
is of course purely coincidental—
The body of James Martin, 79, founder of the Oxford Martin School,
was reportedly found floating in the sea near his private island
off Bermuda on Monday, June 24, 2013.
In his memory— A Log24 post from last December.
The hypercube model of the 4-space over the 2-element Galois field 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).
The thirty-five 4×4 structures within the MOG:
Curtis himself first described these 35 square MOG patterns
combinatorially, (as his title indicated) rather than
algebraically or geometrically:
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):
Story, Structure, and the Galois Tesseract
Recent Log24 posts have referred to the
"Penrose diamond" and Minkowski space.
The Penrose diamond has nothing whatever
to do with my 1976 monograph "Diamond Theory,"
except for the diamond shape and the connection
of the Penrose diamond to the Klein quadric—
The Klein quadric occurs in the five-dimensional projective space
over a field. If the field is the two-element Galois field GF(2), the
quadric helps explain certain remarkable symmetry properties
of the R. T. Curtis Miracle Octad Generator (MOG), hence of
the large Mathieu group M24. These properties are also
relevant to the 1976 "Diamond Theory" monograph.
For some background on the quadric, see (for instance)…
See also The Klein Correspondence,
Penrose Space-Time, and a Finite Model.
Related material:
"… one might crudely distinguish between philosophical – J. M. E. Hyland. "Proof Theory in the Abstract." (pdf) |
Those who prefer story to structure may consult
The title refers not to the 1996 Sokal hoax (which has
Boundaries , plural, in the title), but to the boundary
discussed in Monday's Penrose diamond post—
"Science is a differential equation.
Religion is a boundary condition."
— Alan Turing in the epigraph to the
first chapter of a book by Terence Tao
From the Tao book, page 170—
"Typically the transformed solution extends to the
boundary of the Penrose diamond and beyond…."
Transgressing the boundary between science
and religion is the topic of a 1991 paper available
at JSTOR for $29.
For the Pope on Ash Wednesday:
"Think you might have access
to this content via your library?" —JSTOR
See also Durkheim at Harvard.
For Tony Kushner fans:
For logic fans:
In the box-diamond notation, the axiom Searle quotes is
"The euclidean property guarantees the truth of this." — Wikipedia
Linking to Euclid
Clicking on "euclidean" above yields another Wikipedia article…
"In mathematics, Euclidean relations are a class of binary relations that satisfy a weakened form of transitivity that formalizes Euclid's 'Common Notion 1' in The Elements : things which equal the same thing also equal one another."
Verification: See, for instance, slides on modal logic at Carnegie Mellon University and modal logic at plato.stanford.edu.
… Before Derrida's writings on Plato and on inscription
A remark by the late William Harris:
"Scholarship has many dark ages, and they do not all fall
in the safe confines of remote antiquity."
For more about Harris, see the previous post.
Discussing an approach to solving a geometrical problem
from section 86e of the Meno , Harris wrote that
"… this is a very important element of method and purpose,
one which must be taken with great seriousness and respect.
In fact it is as good an example of the master describing for us
his method as Plato ever gives us. Tricked by the appearance
of brevity and unwilling to follow through Plato's thought on
the road to Euclid, we have garbled or passed over a unique
piece of philosophical information."
Harris, though not a geometer, was an admirable man.
His remark on the Meno method is itself worthy of respect.
In memory of Harris, Plato, and pre-Derrida scholarship, here
are some pages from 1961 on the problem Harris discussed.
A pair of figures from the 1961 pages indicates how one view of the
section 86e problem (at right below) resembles the better-known
demonstration earlier in the Meno of how to construct
a square of area 2 —
"…a fundamental cognitive ability known as 'fluid' intelligence: the capacity to solve novel problems, to learn, to reason, to see connections and to get to the bottom of
…matrices are considered the gold standard of fluid-intelligence tests. Anyone who has taken an intelligence test has seen matrices like those used in the Raven’s: three rows, with three graphic items in each row, made up of squares, circles, dots or the like. Do the squares get larger as they move from left to right? Do the circles inside the squares fill in, changing from white to gray to black, as they go downward? One of the nine items is missing from the matrix, and the challenge is to find the underlying patterns— up, down and across— from six possible choices. Initially the solutions are readily apparent to most people, but they get progressively harder to discern. By the end of the test, most test takers are baffled."
— Dan Hurley, "Can You Make Yourself Smarter?," NY Times , April 18, 2012
See also "Raven Steals the Light" in this journal.
Related material:
Plan 9 from MIT and, perhaps exemplifying crystallized rather than fluid intelligence, Black Diamond.
Part I
Embedding the Stone (March 23, 2012) —
The Meno Embedding
Part II
Conclusion of "The Storyteller," a story
by Cynthia Zarin about author Madeleine L'Engle—
— The New Yorker , April 12, 2004 —
Note the black diamond at the story's end.
… I saw a shadow
I rose to a knee, |
Simpson reportedly died on Holy Cross Day.
That day in this journal—
(Continued from August 13. See also Coxeter Graveyard.)
Here the tombstone says
"GEOMETRY… 600 BC — 1900 AD… R.I.P."
In the geometry of Plato illustrated below,
"the figure of eight [square] feet" is not , at this point
in the dialogue, the diamond in Jowett's picture.
An 1892 figure by Jowett illustrating Plato's Meno—
Jowett's picture is nonetheless of interest for
its resemblance to a figure drawn some decades later
by the Toronto geometer H. S. M. Coxeter.
A similar 1950 figure by Coxeter illustrating a tesseract—
For a less scholarly, but equally confusing, view of the number 8,
see The Eight , a novel by Katherine Neville.
Hard Science Fiction weekend at Dragon Press Bookstore
Saturday May 26:
11am-noon Playing with the net up:
Hard Science Fiction in the era of
short attention spans, crowd-sourcing,
and rapid obsolescence
( Greg Benford, James Cambias, Kathryn Cramer)
….
3pm-4:30 Technological optimism and pessimism;
utopia and dystopia; happy endings & sad endings:
what do these oppositions have to do with one another?
Are they all the same thing? How are they different
from one another? Group discussion.
My own interests in this area include…
(Click image for some context)
The above was adapted from a 1996 cover—
Vintage Books, July 1996. Cover: Evan Gaffney.
For the significance of the flames,
see PyrE in the book. For the significance
of the cube in the altered cover, see
The 2×2×2 Cube and The Diamond Archetype.
A physics quote relayed at Peter Woit's weblog today—
"The relation between 4D N=4 SYM and the 6D (2, 0) theory
is just like that between Darth Vader and the Emperor.
You see Darth Vader and you think 'Isn’t he just great?
How can anyone be greater than that? No way.'
Then you meet the Emperor."
Some related material from this weblog—
(See Big Apple and Columbia Film Theory)
The Meno Embedding:
Some related material from the Web—
See also uses of the word triality in mathematics. For instance…
A discussion of triality by Edward Witten—
Triality is in some sense the last of the exceptional isomorphisms,
and the role of triality for n = 6 thus makes it plausible that n = 6
is the maximum dimension for superconformal symmetry,
though I will not give a proof here.
— "Conformal Field Theory in Four and Six Dimensions"
and a discussion by Peter J. Cameron—
There are exactly two non-isomorphic ways
to partition the 4-subsets of a 9-set
into nine copies of AG(3,2).
Both admit 2-transitive groups.
— "The Klein Quadric and Triality"
Exercise: Is Witten's triality related to Cameron's?
(For some historical background, see the triality link from above
and Cameron's Klein Correspondence and Triality.)
Cameron applies his triality to the pure geometry of a 9-set.
For a 9-set viewed in the context of physics, see A Beginning—
From MIT Commencement Day, 2011— A symbol related to Apollo, to nine, and to "nothing"— A minimalist favicon— This miniature 3×3 square— |
Happy April 1.
"Imbedding the God character in a holy book's very detailed narrative
and building an entire culture around this narrative
seems by itself to confer a kind of existence on Him."
— John Allen Paulos in the philosophy column "The Stone,"
New York Times online, Oct. 24, 2010
A related post from Log24 later that year—
Sunday, November 28, 2010The EmbeddingThe New York Times Magazine this morning on a seminar on film theory at Columbia University— "When the seminar reconvened after the break, Schamus said, 'Let’s dive into the Meno,' a dialogue in which Plato and Socrates consider virtue. 'The heart of it is the mathematical proof.' He rose from his seat and went to the whiteboard, where he drew figures and scribbled numbers as he worked through the geometry. 'You can only get the proof visually,' he concluded, stepping back and gazing at it. Plato may be skeptical about the category of the visual, he said, but 'you are confronted with a visual proof that gets you back to the idea embedded in visuality.'" The Meno Embedding See also Plato's Code and |
"Next come the crown of thorns and Jesus' agonized crawl across the stage,
bearing the weight of his own crucifix. And at last, after making
yet another entrance, Mr. Nolan strikes the pose immortalized
in centuries of art, clad in a demure loincloth, arms held out to his sides,
one leg artfully bent in front of the other, head hanging down
in tortured exhaustion. Gently spotlighted, he rises from the stage
as if by magic, while a giant cross, pulsing with hot gold lights,
descends from above to meet him. Mr. Lloyd Webber's churning guitar rock
hits a climactic note, and the audience erupts in excited applause."
— Charles Isherwood, review of "Jesus Christ Superstar" in today's New York Times
Other remarks on embedding —
Part I
Review of a new book on linguistics, embedding, and a South American tribe—
"Imagine a linguist from Mars lands on Earth to survey the planet's languages…."
— Chronicle of Higher Education , March 20, 2012
Part II
The Embedding , by Ian Watson (Review of a 1973 novel from Shakespeare's birthday, 2006)
Suggested by an Oct. 18 piece in the Book Bench section
of the online New Yorker magazine—
Related material suggested by the "Shouts and Murmurs" piece
in The New Yorker , issue dated Oct. 24, 2011—
"a series of e-mails from a preschool teacher planning to celebrate
the Day of the Dead instead of Halloween…"
A search for Coxeter + Graveyard in this journal yields…
Here the tombstone says "GEOMETRY… 600 BC — 1900 AD… R.I.P."
A related search for Plato + Tombstone yields an image from July 6, 2007…
Here Plato's poems to Aster suggested
the "Star and Diamond" tombstone.
The eight-rayed star is an ancient symbol of Venus
and the diamond is from Plato's Meno .
The star and diamond are combined in a figure from
12 AM on September 6th, 2011—
The Diamond Star
See Configurations and Squares.
That webpage explains how Coxeter
united the diamond and the star.
Those who prefer narrative to mathematics may consult
a definition of the Spanish word lucero from March 28, 2003.
For Norway's Niels Henrik Abel (1802-1829)
on his birthday, August Fifth
(6 PM Aug. 4, Eastern Time, is 12 AM Aug. 5 in Oslo.)
Plato's Diamond
The above version by Peter Pesic is from Chapter I of his book Abel's Proof , titled "The Scandal of the Irrational." Plato's diamond also occurs in a much later mathematical story that might be called "The Scandal of the Noncontinuous." The story—
Paradigms"These passages suggest that the Form is a character or set of characters common to a number of things, i.e. the feature in reality which corresponds to a general word. But Plato also uses language which suggests not only that the forms exist separately (χωριστά ) from all the particulars, but also that each form is a peculiarly accurate or good particular of its own kind, i.e. the standard particular of the kind in question or the model (παράδειγμα ) [i.e. paradigm ] to which other particulars approximate…. … Both in the Republic and in the Sophist there is a strong suggestion that correct thinking is following out the connexions between Forms. The model is mathematical thinking, e.g. the proof given in the Meno that the square on the diagonal is double the original square in area." – William and Martha Kneale, The Development of Logic , Oxford University Press paperback, 1985 Plato's paradigm in the Meno— Changed paradigm in the diamond theorem (2×2 case) — Aspects of the paradigm change— Monochrome figures to Areas to Continuous transformations to Euclidean geometry to Euclidean quantities to The 24 patterns resulting from the paradigm change— Each pattern has some ordinary or color-interchange symmetry. This is the 2×2 case of a more general result. The patterns become more interesting in the 4×4 case. For their relationship to finite geometry and finite fields, see the diamond theorem. |
Related material: Plato's Diamond by Oslo artist Josefine Lyche.
“Plato’s Ghost evokes Yeats’s lament that any claim to worldly perfection inevitably is proven wrong by the philosopher’s ghost….”
— Princeton University Press on Plato’s Ghost: The Modernist Transformation of Mathematics (by Jeremy Gray, September 2008)
"Remember me to her."
— Closing words of the Algis Budrys novel Rogue Moon .
Background— Some posts in this journal related to Abel or to random thoughts from his birthday.
From tonight's online New York Times —
John McCracken, Sculptor of Geometric Forms, Dies at 76
McCracken died in Manhattan on Friday, April 8.
From Christopher Knight in tonight's online LA Times —
… the works embody perceptual and philosophical conundrums. The colored planks stand on the floor like sculptures….
McCracken was bedeviled by Stanley Kubrick's famously obscure science-fiction epic, "2001: A Space Odyssey," with its iconic image of an ancient monolith floating in outer space. The 1968 blockbuster was released two years after the artist made his first plank.
"At the time, some people thought I had designed the monolith or that it had been derived from my work," he told art critic Frances Colpitt of the coincidence in a 1998 interview.
Two photos of McCracken's 1967 Black Plank seem relevant—
November 28, 2010 (Click to enlarge) —
December 28, 2010 (Click to enlarge) —
Material that an artist might view as related, if only synchronistically—
Two posts in this journal on the dates the photos were taken—
The Embedding on November 28 and Dry Bones on December 28.
The photos are of an exhibition titled "There is nothing to see here" at the
National Gallery of Art, October 30, 2010-April 24, 2011 —
For related nihilism from the National Gallery, see "Pictures of Nothing" in this journal.
Some less nihilistic illustrations—
A photo by one of the artists whose work is displayed above beside McCracken's—
"Accentuate the Positive."
— Clint Eastwood
"These passages suggest that the Form is a character or set of characters
common to a number of things, i.e. the feature in reality which corresponds
to a general word. But Plato also uses language which suggests not only
that the forms exist separately (χωριστά ) from all the particulars, but also
that each form is a peculiarly accurate or good particular of its own kind,
i.e. the standard particular of the kind in question or the model (παράδειγμα )
[i.e. paradigm ] to which other particulars approximate….
… Both in the Republic and in the Sophist there is a strong suggestion
that correct thinking is following out the connexions between Forms.
The model is mathematical thinking, e.g. the proof given in the Meno
that the square on the diagonal is double the original square in area."
— William and Martha Kneale, The Development of Logic,
Oxford University Press paperback, 1985
Plato's paradigm in the Meno —
Changed paradigm in the diamond theorem (2×2 case) —
Aspects of the paradigm change* —
Monochrome figures to
colored figures
Areas to
transformations
Continuous transformations to
non-continuous transformations
Euclidean geometry to
finite geometry
Euclidean quantities to
finite fields
Some pedagogues may find handling all of these
conceptual changes simultaneously somewhat difficult.
* "Paradigm shift " is a phrase that, as John Baez has rightly pointed out,
should be used with caution. The related phrase here was suggested by Plato's
term παράδειγμα above, along with the commentators' specific reference to
the Meno figure that serves as a model. (For "model" in a different sense,
see Burkard Polster.) But note that Baez's own beloved category theory
has been called a paradigm shift.
The New York Times Magazine this morning on a seminar on film theory at Columbia University—
"When the seminar reconvened after the break, Schamus said, 'Let’s dive into the Meno,' a dialogue in which Plato and Socrates consider virtue. 'The heart of it is the mathematical proof.' He rose from his seat and went to the whiteboard, where he drew figures and scribbled numbers as he worked through the geometry. 'You can only get the proof visually,' he concluded, stepping back and gazing at it. Plato may be skeptical about the category of the visual, he said, but 'you are confronted with a visual proof that gets you back to the idea embedded in visuality.'"
The Meno Embedding
See also Plato's Code and
Plato Thanks the Academy.
Continued from May 18, 2010.
Previous logo for the New York Times feature "The Stone"—
Today's new logo, appearing retroactively—
Comparison—
From the October 3 "The Stone," Hegel on Wall Street—
The “Phenomenology” is a philosophical portrait gallery that presents depictions, one after another, of different, fundamental ways in which individuals and societies have understood themselves. Each self-understanding has two parts: an account of how a particular kind of self understands itself and, then, an account of the world that the self considers its natural counterpart. Hegel narrates how each formation of self and world collapses because of a mismatch between self-conception and how that self conceives of the larger world. Hegel thinks we can see how history has been driven by misshapen forms of life in which the self-understanding of agents and the worldly practices they participate in fail to correspond. With great drama, he claims that his narrative is a “highway of despair.”
— J.M. Bernstein of the New School for Social Research
A two-part self-understanding that is not from Hegel—
1. An account of how a particular kind of self understands itself:
… world’s wildfire, leave but ash: | |
In a flash, at a trumpet crash, | |
I am all at once what Christ is, ' since he was what I am, and | |
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, ' patch, matchwood, immortal diamond, | |
Is immortal diamond. |
2. An account of the world that the self considers its natural counterpart:
CLOUD-PUFFBALL, torn tufts, tossed pillows ' flaunt forth, then chevy on an air- | |
built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs ' they throng; they glitter in marches. | |
Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, ' wherever an elm arches, | |
Shivelights and shadowtackle in long ' lashes lace, lance, and pair. | |
Delightfully the bright wind boisterous ' ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare | |
Of yestertempest’s creases; in pool and rut peel parches | |
Squandering ooze to squeezed ' dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches | |
Squadroned masks and manmarks ' treadmire toil there | |
Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd, ' nature’s bonfire burns on. |
The above is the result of a (fruitless) image search today for a current version of Giovanni Sambin's "Basic Picture: A Structure for Topology."
That search was suggested by the title of today's New York Times op-ed essay "Found in Translation" and an occurrence of that phrase in this journal on January 5, 2007.
Further information on one of the images above—
A search in this journal on the publication date of Giaquinto's Visual Thinking in Mathematics yields the following—
In defense of Plato’s realism (vs. sophists’ nominalism– see recent entries.) Plato cited geometry, notably in the Meno , in defense of his realism. |
For the Meno 's diamond figure in Giaquinto, see a review—
— Review by Jeremy Avigad (preprint)
Finite geometry supplies a rather different context for Plato's "basic picture."
In that context, the Klein four-group often cited by art theorist Rosalind Krauss appears as a group of translations in the mathematical sense. (See Kernel of Eternity and Sacerdotal Jargon at Harvard.)
The Times op-ed essay today notes that linguistic translation "… is not merely a job assigned to a translator expert in a foreign language, but a long, complex and even profound series of transformations that involve the writer and reader as well."
The list of four-group transformations in the mathematical sense is neither long nor complex, but is apparently profound enough to enjoy the close attention of thinkers like Krauss.
John Allen Paulos yesterday at Twitter—
"Plato's code cracked? http://bit.ly/ad6k1S
Fascinating if not a hoax or hype."
The story that Paulos linked to is about a British
academic who claims to have found some
symbolism hidden in Plato's writings by
splitting each into 12 parts and correlating
the 12 parts with semitones of a musical scale.
I prefer a different approach to Plato that is
related to the following hoax and hype—
HOAX:
From Dan Brown's novel Angels & Demons (2000)—
HYPE:
This four-elements diamond summarizes the classical
four elements and four qualities neatly, but some scholars
might call the figure "hype" since it deals with an academically
disreputable subject, alchemy, and since its origin is unclear.
For the four elements' role in some literature more respectable
than Dan Brown's, see Poetry's Bones.
Although an author like Brown might spin the remarks
below into a narrative— The Plato Code — they are
neither hoax nor hype.
NOT HOAX:
NOT HYPE:
For related non-hoax, non-hype remarks, see
The Rational Enterprise: Logos in Plato's Theaetetus,
by Rosemary Desjardins.
Those who prefer hoax and hype in their philosophy may consult
the writings of, say, Barbara Johnson, Rosalind Krauss, and—
in yesterday's NY Times's "The Stone" column— Nancy Bauer.
— The New York Times
“The present study is closely connected with a lecture* given by Prof. Ernst Cassirer at the Warburg Library whose subject was ‘The Idea of the Beautiful in Plato’s Dialogues’…. My investigation traces the historical destiny of the same concept….”
* See Cassirer’s Eidos und Eidolon : Das Problem des Schönen und der Kunst in Platons Dialogen, in Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg II, 1922/23 (pp. 1–27). Berlin and Leipzig, B.G. Teubner, 1924.
— Erwin Panofsky, Idea: A Concept in Art Theory, foreword to the first German edition, Hamburg, March 1924
On a figure from Plato’s Meno—
The above figures illustrate Husserl’s phrase “eidetic variation”—
a phrase based on Plato’s use of eidos, a word
closely related to the word “idea” in Panofsky’s title.
For remarks by Cassirer on the theory of groups, a part of
mathematics underlying the above diamond variations, see
his “The Concept of Group and the Theory of Perception.”
Sketch of some further remarks—
The Waterfield question in the sketch above
is from his edition of Plato’s Theaetetus
(Penguin Classics, 1987).
The “design theory” referred to in the sketch
is that of graphic design, which includes the design
of commercial logos. The Greek word logos
has more to do with mathematics and theology.
“If there is one thread of warning that runs
through this dialogue, from beginning to end,
it is that verbal formulations as such are
shot through with ambiguity.”
— Rosemary Desjardins, The Rational Enterprise:
Logos in Plato’s Theaetetus, SUNY Press, 1990
Related material—
According to the Mathematical Association of America this morning, one purpose of the upcoming June/July issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society is
"…to stress the inspirational role of combinatorics…."
Here is another contribution along those lines—
Eidetic Variation
from page 244 of
From Combinatorics to Philosophy: The Legacy of G.-C. Rota,
hardcover, published by Springer on August 4, 2009
(Edited by Ernesto Damiani, Ottavio D'Antona, Vincenzo Marra, and Fabrizio Palombi)
"Rota's Philosophical Insights," by Massimo Mugnai—
"… In other words, 'objectivism' is the attitude [that tries] to render a particular aspect absolute and dominant over the others; it is a kind of narrow-mindedness attempting to reduce to only one the multiple layers which constitute what we call 'reality.' According to Rota, this narrow-mindedness limits in an essential way even of [sic ] the most basic facts of our cognitive activity, as, for example, the understanding of a simple declarative sentence: 'So objectivism is the error we [make when we] persist in believing that we can understand what a declarative sentence means without a possible thematization of this declarative sentence in one of [an] endless variety of possible contexts' (Rota, 1991*, p. 155). Rota here implicitly refers to what, amongst phenomenologists is known as eidetic variation, i.e. the change of perspective, imposed by experience or performed voluntarily, from which to look at things, facts or sentences of the world. A typical example, proposed by Heidegger, in Sein und Zeit (1927) and repeated many times by Rota, is that of the hammer."
* Rota, G.-C. (1991), The End of Objectivity: The Legacy of Phenomenology. Lectures at MIT, Cambridge, MA, MIT Mathematics Department
The example of the hammer appears also on yesterday's online New York Times front page—
Related material:
From The Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy—
Eidetic variation — an alternative expression for eidetic reduction
Husserl's term for an intuitive act toward an essence or universal, in contrast to an empirical intuition or perception. He also called this act an essential intuition, eidetic intuition, or eidetic variation. In Greek, eideo means “to see” and what is seen is an eidos (Platonic Form), that is, the common characteristic of a number of entities or regularities in experience. For Plato, eidos means what is seen by the eye of the soul and is identical with essence. Husserl also called this act “ideation,” for ideo is synonymous with eideo and also means “to see” in Greek. Correspondingly, idea is identical to eidos.
An example of eidos— Plato's diamond (from the Meno )—
For examples of variation of this eidos, see the diamond theorem.
See also Blockheads (8/22/08).
Related poetic remarks— The Trials of Device.
From James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:
he hearth and began to stroke his chin. –When may we expect to have something from you on the esthetic question? he asked. –From me! said Stephen in astonishment. I stumble on an idea once a fortnight if I am lucky. –These questions are very profound, Mr Dedalus, said the dean. It is like looking down from the cliffs of Moher into the depths. Many go down into the depths and never come up. Only the trained diver can go down into those depths and explore them and come to the surface again. –If you mean speculation, sir, said Stephen, I also am sure that there is no such thing as free thinking inasmuch as all thinking must be bound by its own laws. –Ha! –For my purpose I can work on at present by the light of one or two ideas of Aristotle and Aquinas. –I see. I quite see your point. |
Besides being Mondrian's birthday, today is also the dies natalis (in the birth-into-heaven sense) of St. Thomas Aquinas and, for those who believe worthy pre-Christians also enter heaven, possibly of Aristotle.
Pope Benedict XVI explained the dies natalis concept on Dec. 26, 2006:
"For believers the day of death, and even more the day of martyrdom, is not the end of all; rather, it is the 'transit' towards immortal life. It is the day of definitive birth, in Latin, dies natalis."
Pictorial version
of Hexagram 20,
Contemplation (View)
In honor of
Aristotle and Aquinas,
here is a new web site,
illuminati-diamond.com,
with versions of the diamond shape
made famous by Mondrian —
![]()
Robert Stone,
"'That old Jew gave me this here.' Egan looked at the diamond. 'I ain't giving this to you, understand? The old man gave it to me for my boy. It's worth a whole lot of money– you can tell that just by looking– but it means something, I think. It's got a meaning, like.'
'Let's see,' Egan said, 'what would it mean?' He took hold of Pablo's hand cupping the stone and held his own hand under it. '"The jewel is in the lotus," perhaps that's what it means. The eternal in the temporal. The Boddhisattva declining nirvana out of compassion. Contemplating the ignorance of you and me, eh? That's a metaphor of our Buddhist friends.' Pablo's eyes glazed over. 'Holy shit,' he said. 'Santa Maria.' He stared at the diamond in his palm with passion." For further details, click on the diamond. |
Today's online Times on
the Saturday, Dec. 27,
death of an artist:
Mr. Wasserman wrote more than 75 scripts for television, the stage and the movies, including screenplays for 'The Vikings' (1958), a seafaring epic with Tony Curtis and Kirk Douglas, and 'A Walk With Love and Death' (1969), a John Huston film set in 14th-century Europe….
He feuded with… John Huston, who gave the lead female role in 'Walk' to his teenage daughter, Anjelica, against Mr. Wasserman's wishes. And he never attended ceremonies to receive the awards he won."
Accepting for Mr. Wasserman:
Mr. Graham's widow,
Anjelica Huston —
"Well…"
Frame Tales
From June 30 —
("Will this be on the test?")
Frame Tale One:
Summer Reading
Subtitle: |
Frame Tale Two:
Barry Sharples
on his version of the
Kaleidoscope Puzzle —
Background:
"A possible origin of this puzzle is found in a dialogue
between Socrates and Meno written by the Greek philosopher,
Plato, where a square is drawn inside a square such that
the blue square is twice the area of the yellow square.
Colouring the triangles produces a starting pattern
which is a one-diamond figure made up of four tiles
and there are 24 different possible arrangements."
"The king asked, in compensation for his toils during this strangest
of all the nights he had ever known, that the twenty-four riddle tales
told him by the specter, together with the story of the night itself,
should be made known over the whole earth
and remain eternally famous among men."
Frame Tale Three:
"The quad gospellers may own the targum
but any of the Zingari shoolerim may pick a peck
of kindlings yet from the sack of auld hensyne."
Serious Numbers
A Yom Kippur
Meditation
"When times are mysterious
Serious numbers
Will always be heard."
— Paul Simon,
"When Numbers Get Serious"
"There is a pleasantly discursive treatment of Pontius Pilate's unanswered question 'What is truth?'"
— H. S. M. Coxeter, introduction to Richard J. Trudeau's remarks on the "story theory" of truth as opposed to the "diamond theory" of truth in The Non-Euclidean Revolution
Trudeau's 1987 book uses the phrase "diamond theory" to denote the philosophical theory, common since Plato and Euclid, that there exist truths (which Trudeau calls "diamonds") that are certain and eternal– for instance, the truth in Euclidean geometry that the sum of a triangle's angles is 180 degrees. As the excerpt below shows, Trudeau prefers what he calls the "story theory" of truth–
"There are no diamonds. People make up stories about what they experience. Stories that catch on are called 'true.'"
(By the way, the phrase "diamond theory" was used earlier, in 1976, as the title of a monograph on geometry of which Coxeter was aware.)
What does this have to do with numbers?
Pilate's skeptical tone suggests he may have shared a certain confusion about geometric truth with thinkers like Trudeau and the slave boy in Plato's Meno. Truth in a different part of mathematics– elementary arithmetic– is perhaps more easily understood, although even there, the existence of what might be called "non-Euclidean number theory"– i.e., arithmetic over finite fields, in which 1+1 can equal zero– might prove baffling to thinkers like Trudeau.
Trudeau's book exhibits, though it does not discuss, a less confusing use of numbers– to mark the location of pages. For some philosophical background on this version of numerical truth that may be of interest to devotees of the Semitic religions on this evening's High Holiday, see Zen and Language Games.
For uses of numbers that are more confusing, see– for instance– the new website The Daily Beast and the old website Story Theory and the Number of the Beast.
The following poem of Emily Dickinson is quoted here in memory of John Watson Foster Dulles, a scholar of Brazilian history who died at 95 on June 23. He was the eldest son of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, a nephew of Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles, brother of Roman Catholic Cardinal Avery Dulles, and a grandson of Presbyterian minister Allen Macy Dulles, author of The True Church.
I asked no other thing, No other was denied. I offered Being for it; The mighty merchant smiled. Brazil? He twirled a button, Without a glance my way: "But, madam, is there nothing else That we can show to-day?" |
"He twirled a button…."
The above figure
of Plato (see 3/22)
was suggested by
Lacan's diamond
(losange or poinçon)
as a symbol —
according to Frida Saal —
of Derrida's différance —
which is, in turn,
"that which enables and
results from Being itself"
— according to
Professor John Lye
Thomas Wolfe
(Harvard M.A., 1922)
versus
Rosalind Krauss
(Harvard M.A., 1964,
Ph.D., 1969)
on
"No culture has a pact with eternity."
— George Steiner, interview in
The Guardian of
"At that instant he saw,
in one blaze of light, an image
of unutterable conviction….
the core of life, the essential
pattern whence all other things
proceed, the kernel of eternity."
— Thomas Wolfe, Of Time
and the River, quoted in
Log24 on June 9, 2005
From today's online Harvard Crimson:
"… under the leadership of Faust,
Harvard students should look forward
to an ever-growing opportunity for
international experience
and artistic endeavor."
Pauli as Mephistopheles
in a 1932 parody of
Goethe's Faust at Niels Bohr's
institute in Copenhagen
From a recent book
on Wolfgang Pauli,
The Innermost Kernel:
A belated happy birthday
to the late
Felix Christian Klein
(born on April 25) —
Another Harvard figure quoted here on Dec. 5, 2002:
"The theory of poetry, that is to say, the total of the theories of poetry, often seems to become in time a mystical theology or, more simply, a mystique. The reason for this must by now be clear. The reason is the same reason why the pictures in a museum of modern art often seem to become in time a mystical aesthetic, a prodigious search of appearance, as if to find a way of saying and of establishing that all things, whether below or above appearance, are one and that it is only through reality, in which they are reflected or, it may be, joined together, that we can reach them. Under such stress, reality changes from substance to subtlety, a subtlety in which it was natural for Cézanne to say: 'I see planes bestriding each other and sometimes straight lines seem to me to fall' or 'Planes in color…. The colored area where shimmer the souls of the planes, in the blaze of the kindled prism, the meeting of planes in the sunlight.' The conversion of our Lumpenwelt went far beyond this. It was from the point of view of another subtlety that Klee could write: 'But he is one chosen that today comes near to the secret places where original law fosters all evolution. And what artist would not establish himself there where the organic center of all movement in time and space– which he calls the mind or heart of creation– determines every function.' Conceding that this sounds a bit like sacerdotal jargon, that is not too much to allow to those that have helped to create a new reality, a modern reality, since what has been created is nothing less."
— Wallace Stevens, Harvard College Class of 1901, "The Relations between Poetry and Painting" in The Necessary Angel (Knopf, 1951)
From a review of Rosalind Krauss's The Optical Unconscious (MIT Press hardcover, 1993):
Krauss is concerned to present Modernism less in terms of its history than its structure, which she seeks to represent by means of a kind of diagram: "It is more interesting to think of modernism as a graph or table than a history." The "table" is a square with diagonally connected corners, of the kind most likely to be familiar to readers as the Square of Opposition, found in elementary logic texts since the mid-19th century. The square, as Krauss sees it, defines a kind of idealized space "within which to work out unbearable contradictions produced within the real field of history." This she calls, using the inevitable gallicism, "the site of Jameson's Political Unconscious" and then, in art, the optical unconscious, which consists of what Utopian Modernism had to kick downstairs, to repress, to "evacuate… from its field."
— Arthur C. Danto in ArtForum, Summer 1993
Rosalind Kraus in The Optical Unconscious (MIT Press paperback, 1994):
For a presentation of the Klein Group, see Marc Barbut, "On the Meaning of the Word 'Structure' in Mathematics," in Introduction to Structuralism, ed. Michael Lane (New York: Basic Books, 1970). Claude Lévi-Strauss uses the Klein group in his analysis of the relation between Kwakiutl and Salish masks in The Way of the Masks, trans. Sylvia Modelski (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982), p. 125; and in relation to the Oedipus myth in "The Structural Analysis of Myth," Structural Anthropology, trans. Claire Jackobson [sic] and Brooke Grundfest Schoepf (New York: Basic Books, 1963). In a transformation of the Klein Group, A. J. Greimas has developed the semiotic square, which he describes as giving "a slightly different formulation to the same structure," in "The Interaction of Semiotic Constraints," On Meaning (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 50. Jameson uses the semiotic square in The Political Unconscious (see pp. 167, 254, 256, 277) [Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981)], as does Louis Marin in "Disneyland: A Degenerate Utopia," Glyph, no. 1 (1977), p. 64.
Wikipedia on the Klein group (denoted V, for Vierergruppe):
In this representation, V is a normal subgroup of the alternating group A4 (and also the symmetric group S4) on 4 letters. In fact, it is the kernel of a surjective map from S4 to S3. According to Galois theory, the existence of the Klein four-group (and in particular, this representation of it) explains the existence of the formula for calculating the roots of quartic equations in terms of radicals.
For material related to Klee's phrase mentioned above by Stevens, "the organic center of all movement in time and space," see the following Google search:
“I believe Husserl to be the greatest philosopher of all times….
Intellectual honesty is the striking quality of Husserl’s writings. He wrote what he honestly believed to be true, neither more nor less. However, honesty is not clarity; as a matter of fact, honesty and clarity are at opposite ends. Husserl proudly refused to stoop to the demands of showmanship that are indispensable in effective communication.”
Related material:
The Diamond Theorem
George Tabori
“BERLIN (AP) — Hungarian-born playwright and director George Tabori, a legend in Germany’s postwar theater world whose avant-garde works confronted anti-Semitism, died Monday [July 23, 2007]. He was 93.
Tabori, who as recently as three years ago dreamed of returning to stage to play the title role in Shakespeare’s ‘King Lear,’ died in his apartment near the theater, the Berliner Ensemble said Tuesday, noting that friends and family had accompanied him through his final days. No cause of death was given.
Born into a Jewish family in Budapest on May 24, 1914, Tabori fled in 1936 to London, where he started working for the British Broadcasting Corp., and became a British citizen. His father, and other members of his family, were killed at Auschwitz.
Tabori moved to Hollywood in the 1950s, where he worked as a scriptwriter, most notably co-writing the script for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1953 film, ‘I Confess.’
He moved to Germany in the 1970s and launched a theater career that spanned from acting to directing to writing. He used sharp wit and humor in his plays to examine the relationship between Germany and the Jews, as well as attack anti-Semitism.
Among his best-known works are ‘Mein Kampf,’ set in the Viennese hostel where Adolf Hitler lived from 1910-1913, and the ‘Goldberg Variations,’ both dark farces that poke fun at the Nazis.”
From Year of Jewish Culture:
“The year 2006 marks the 100th anniversary of the establishment of the Jewish Museum in Prague.”
From the related page Programme (October-December):
“Divadlo v Dlouhé
George Tabori: GOLDBERGOVSKÉ VARIACE / THE GOLDBERG VARIATIONS, 19 October, 7 p.m. A comedy on creation and martyrdom.”
From Log24 on the date of ![]() The above is from Variable Resolution 4–k Meshes: Concepts and Applications (pdf), by Luiz Velho and Jonas Gomes. See also Symmetry Framed |
Theme (Plato, Meno)
![]() Click on “variations” above |
Theme
(Plato, Meno)
“A diamond jubilance
beyond the fire,
That gives its power
to the wild-ringed eye”
— Wallace Stevens,
“The Owl in the Sarcophagus”
In Defense of
Plato’s Realism
(vs. sophists’ nominalism–
see recent entries.)
Plato cited geometry,
notably in the Meno,
in defense of his realism.
Consideration of the
Meno’s diamond figure
leads to the following:
Click on image for details.
As noted in an entry,
Plato, Pegasus, and
the Evening Star,
linked to
at the end of today’s
previous entry,
the “universals”
of Platonic realism
are exemplified by
the hexagrams of
the I Ching,
which in turn are
based on the seven
trigrams above and
on the eighth trigram,
of all yin lines,
not shown above:
K’un
The Receptive
_____________________________________________
Update of Nov. 30, 2013:
From a little-known website in Kuala Lumpur:
(Click to enlarge.)
The remarks on Platonic realism are from Wikipedia.
The eightfold cube is apparently from this post.
The diamond is used in modal logic to symbolize possibility. |
The 3×3 grid may also be used
to illustrate “possibility.” It leads,
as noted at finitegeometry.org, to
the famed “24-cell,” which may be
pictured either as the diamond
figure from Plato’s Meno —
— or as a figure
with 24 vertices:
Click for details.
The “diamond” version of the
24-cell seems unrelated to the
second version that shows all
vertices and edges, yet the
second version is implicit,
or hidden, in the first.
Hence “possibility.”
Neither version of the 24-cell
seems related in any obvious
way to the 3×3 grid, yet both
versions are implicit,
or hidden, in the grid.
Hence “possibility.”
(continued from
January 9, 2003)
George Balanchine
|
"What on earth is
a concrete universal?"
— Robert M. Pirsig
Review:
From Wikipedia's
"Upper Ontology"
and
Epiphany 2007:
"There is no neutral ground
that can serve as
a means of translating between
specialized (lower) ontologies."
There is, however,
"the field of reason"–
the 3×3 grid:
Click on grid
for details.
As Rosalind Krauss
has noted, some artists
regard the grid as
"a staircase to
the Universal."
Other artists regard
Epiphany itself as an
approach to
the Universal:
— Richard Kearney, 2005,
in The New Arcadia Review
Kearney (right) with
Martin Scorsese (left)
and Gregory Peck
in 1997.
— Richard Kearney, interview (pdf) in The Leuven Philosophy Newsletter, Vol. 14, 2005-2006
For more on "the possible," see Kearney's The God Who May Be, Diamonds Are Forever, and the conclusion of Mathematics and Narrative:
"We symbolize
logical necessity with the box ![]() and logical possibility with the diamond ![]()
"The possibilia that exist,
— Michael Sudduth, |
"For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross."
— Thomas Pynchon
Click on picture for details.
Today is the feast
of St. Thomas Becket.
In his honor, a meditation
on tools and causation:
— Review by H. Allen Orr in
The New York Review of Books,
Vol. 54, No. 1, January 11, 2007
"An odd extension"–
Wolpert's title is, of course,
from Lewis Carroll.
Related material:
"It's a poor sort of memory
that only works backwards."
— Through the Looking-Glass
An event at the Kennedy Center
broadcast on
December 26, 2006
(St. Steven's Day):
(Log24, Aug. 22, 2005):
"At times, bullshit can
only be countered
with superior bullshit."
— Norman Mailer
"The concept of possible worlds dates back to at least Leibniz who in his Théodicée tries to justify the apparent imperfections of the world by claiming that it is optimal among all possible worlds. Voltaire satirized this view in his picaresque novel Candide….
Borges' seminal short story El jardín de senderos que se bifurcan ("The Garden of Forking Paths") is an early example of many worlds in fiction."
"Il faut cultiver notre jardin."
— Voltaire
"We symbolize
logical necessity
with the box )
and logical possibility
with the diamond )."
"The possibilia that exist,
and out of which
the Universe arose,
are located in
a necessary being…."
— Michael Sudduth,
Notes on
God, Chance, and Necessity
by Keith Ward,
Regius Professor of Divinity,
Christ Church College, Oxford
(the home of Lewis Carroll)
For further details,
click on the
Christ Church diamond.
A Poem for Pinter
Oct. 13, 2005 The Guardian on Harold Pinter, winner of this year's Nobel Prize for Literature: "Earlier this year, he announced his decision to retire from playwriting in favour of poetry," Michael Muskal in today's Los Angeles Times: "Pinter, 75, is known for his sparse and thin style as well as his etched characters whose crystal patter cuts through the mood like diamond drill bits." Robert Stone, A Flag for Sunrise (See Jan. 25): "'That old Jew gave me this here.' Egan looked at the diamond…. 'It's worth a whole lot of money– you can tell that just by looking– but it means something, I think. It's got a meaning, like.'
'Let's see,' Egan said, 'what would it mean?' He took hold of Pablo's hand cupping the stone and held his own hand under it. '"The jewel is in the lotus," perhaps that's what it means. The eternal in the temporal….'"
"Modal logic was originally developed to investigate logic under the modes of necessary and possible truth. The words 'necessary' and 'possible' are called modal connectives, or modalities. A modality is a word that when applied to a statement indicates when, where, how, or under what circumstances the statement may be true. In terms of notation, it is common to use a box [] for the modality 'necessary' and a diamond <> for the modality 'possible.'"
Commentary:
"Waka" also means Japanese poem or Maori canoe. (For instance, this Japanese poem and this Maori canoe.)
For a meditation on "bang splat," see Sept. 25-29. For the meaning of "tick tick," see Emily Dickinson on "degreeless noon." "Hash," of course, signifies "checkmate." (See previous three entries.) |
For language more suited to
the year's most holy day, see
this year's Yom Kippur entry,
from October 2.
That was also the day of the
Amish school killings in
Pennsylvania and the day that
mathematician Paul Halmos died.
For more on the former, see
Death in Two Seconds.
For more on the latter, see
The Halmos Tombstone.
Serious
"I don't think the 'diamond theorem' is anything serious, so I started with blitzing that."
— Charles Matthews at Wikipedia, Oct. 2, 2006
"The 'seriousness' of a mathematical theorem lies, not in its practical consequences, which are usually negligible, but in the significance of the mathematical ideas which it connects. We may say, roughly, that a mathematical idea is 'significant' if it can be connected, in a natural and illuminating way, with a large complex of other mathematical ideas."
— G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology
Matthews yesterday deleted references to the diamond theorem and related material in the following Wikipedia articles:
Affine group
Reflection group
Symmetry in mathematics
Incidence structure
Invariant (mathematics)
Symmetry
Finite geometry
Group action
History of geometry
This would appear to be a fairly large complex of mathematical ideas.
See also the following "large complex" cited, following the above words of Hardy, in Diamond Theory:
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, design theory, duads, duality, error correcting codes, exceptional groups, 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 schoolgirl problem, Latin squares, Leech lattice, linear groups, linear spaces, linear transformations, Mathieu groups, matrix theory, Meno, Miracle Octad Generator, MOG, multiply transitive groups, octads, the octahedral group, orthogonal arrays, outer automorphisms, parallelisms, partial geometries, permutation groups, PG(3,2), polarities, Polya-Burnside theorem, projective geometry, projective planes, projective spaces, projectivities, Reed-Muller codes, the relativity problem, Singer cycle, skew lines, sporadic simple groups, Steiner systems, symmetric, symmetry, symplectic, synthemes, synthematic, tesseract, transvections, Walsh functions, Witt designs.
Not Crazy Enough?
Some children of the sixties may feel that today's previous two entries, on Syd Barrett, the Crazy Diamond, are not crazy enough. Let them consult the times of those entries– 2:11 and 8:15– and interpret those times, crazily, as dates: 2/11 and 8/15.
This brings us to Stephen King territory– apparently the natural habitat of Syd Barrett.
See Log24 on a 2/11, Along Came a Dreamcatcher, and Log24 on an 8/15, The Line.
From 8/15, a remark of Plato:
"There appears to be a sort of war of Giants and Gods going on…"
(Compare with the remarks by Abraham Cowley for Tom Stoppard's recent birthday.)
From 2/11, two links: Halloween Meditations and We Are the Key.
From Dreamcatcher (the film and the book):
For Syd Barrett as Duddits,
see Terry Kirby on Syd Barrett
(edited– as in Stephen King
and the New Testament—
for narrative effect):
"He appeared as the Floyd performed the song 'Shine On You Crazy Diamond.' It contains the words: 'Remember when you were young, you shone like the sun. Shine on you crazy diamond. Now there's a look in your eyes, like black holes in the sky.'
But this was the 'crazy diamond' himself: Syd Barrett, the subject of the song….
When Roger Waters saw his old friend, he broke down….
Rick Wright, the keyboards player, later told an interviewer:
… 'Roger [Waters] was in tears, I think I was; we were both in tears. It was very shocking… seven years of no contact and then to walk in while we're actually doing that particular track. I don't know – coincidence, karma, fate, who knows? But it was very, very, very powerful.'"
Remarks suitable for Duddits's opponent, Mister Gray, may be found in the 1994 Ph.D. thesis of Noel Gray.
"I refer here to Plato's utilisation in the Meno of graphic austerity as the tool to bring to the surface, literally and figuratively, the inherent presence of geometry in the mind of the slave."
Shine on, gentle Duddits.
It's like tryin' to
tell a stranger 'bout
Rock 'n' Roll
— Terry Kirby, Syd Barrett: The Crazy Diamond, in The Independent of July 12
Keynote
"Each scene is punctuated with a rock track from such acts as the Velvet Underground, the Doors, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan and Pink Floyd. Songs by Floyd's lost founder, Syd Barrett, are the keynote for Stoppard's theme that rock music sounded the death knell for repression but also heralded a freedom filled with its own perils."
— Ray Bennett, today's review of a new play, "Rock 'n' Roll," by Tom Stoppard
Dance of the Numbers,
for Tom Stoppard
on his birthday,
July 3, 2006,
and
Knock, Knock, Knockin',
from yesterday.
Pink Floyd co-founder
Syd Barrett dies
"Pink Floyd's 1975 track 'Shine On You Crazy Diamond,' from the album 'Wish You Were Here,' is widely believed to be a tribute to Barrett."– Reuters
An obituary in this morning's New York Times suggests a flashback. The Times says that Paul Nelson, 69, a music critic once famously ripped off by the young Bobby Zimmerman, was found dead in his Manhattan apartment last Wednesday. Here is a Log24 entry for that date. (The obituary, by Jon Pareles, notes that Nelson "prized hard-boiled detective novels and film noir.")
Wednesday, July 5, 2006 7:35 PM
Dance of the Numbers
"… in the mode of
"For Bach, as Sellars explains, |
The Case
An entry suggested by today's New York Times story by Tom Zeller Jr., A Million Little Skeptics:
From The Hustler, by Walter Tevis:
The only light in the room was from the lamp over the couch where she was reading.
He looked at her face. She was very drunk. Her eyes were swollen, pink at the corners. "What's the book?" he said, trying to make his voice conversational. But it sounded loud in the room, and hard.
She blinked up at him, smiled sleepily, and said nothing.
"What's the book?" His voice had an edge now.
"Oh," she said. "It's Kierkegaard. Soren Kierkegaard." She pushed her legs out straight on the couch, stretching her feet. Her skirt fell back a few inches from her knees. He looked away.
"What's that?" he said.
"Well, I don't exactly know, myself." Her voice was soft and thick.
He turned his face away from her again, not knowing what he was angry with. "What does that mean, you don't know, yourself?"
She blinked at him. "It means, Eddie, that I don't exactly know what the book is about. Somebody told me to read it, once, and that's what I'm doing. Reading it."
He looked at her, tried to grin at her– the old, meaningless, automatic grin, the grin that made everybody like him– but he could not. "That's great," he said, and it came out with more irritation than he had intended.
She closed the book, tucked it beside her on the couch. "I guess this isn't your night, Eddie. Why don't we have a drink?"
"No." He did not like that, did not want her being nice to him, forgiving. Nor did he want a drink.
Her smile, her drunk, amused smile, did not change. "Then let's talk about something else," she said. "What about that case you have? What's in it?" Her voice was not prying, only friendly. "Pencils?"
"That's it," he said. "Pencils."
She raised her eyebrows slightly. Her voice seemed thick. "What's in it, Eddie?"
"Figure it out yourself." He tossed the case on the couch.
Related material:
Soren Kierkegaard on necessity and possibility
in The Sickness Unto Death, Chapter 3,
the Baseball Almanac,
and this morning's entry, "Natural Hustler."
For the feast of
St. Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald
From Fitzgerald’s The Diamond as Big as the Ritz:
“Now,” said John eagerly, “turn out your pocket and let’s see what jewels you brought along. If you made a good selection we three ought to live comfortably all the rest of our lives.”
Obediently Kismine put her hand in her pocket and tossed two handfuls of glittering stones before him.
“Not so bad,” cried John, enthusiastically. “They aren’t very big, but– Hello!” His expression changed as he held one of them up to the declining sun. “Why, these aren’t diamonds! There’s something the matter!”
“By golly!” exclaimed Kismine, with a startled look. “What an idiot I am!”
“Why, these are rhinestones!” cried John.
From The Hawkline Monster, by Richard Brautigan:
“What are we going to do now?” Susan Hawkline said, surveying the lake that had once been their house.
Cameron counted the diamonds in his hand. There were thirty-five diamonds and they were all that was left of the Hawkline Monster.
“We’ll think of something,” Cameron said.
“A disciple of Ezra Pound, he adapts to the short story the ideogrammatic method of The Cantos, where a grammar of images, emblems, and symbols replaces that of logical sequence. This grammar allows for the grafting of particulars into a congeries of implied relation without subordination. In contrast to postmodernists, Davenport does not omit causal connection and linear narrative continuity for the sake of an aleatory play of signification but in order to intimate by combinational logic kinships and correspondences among eras, ideas and forces.”
— When Novelists Become Cubists:
The Prose Ideograms of Guy Davenport,
by Andre Furlani
“T.S. Eliot’s experiments in ideogrammatic method are equally germane to Davenport, who shares with the poet an avant-garde aesthetic and a conservative temperament. Davenport’s text reverberates with echoes of Four Quartets.”
“At the still point,
there the dance is.”
— T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets,
quoted in the epigraph to
the chapter on automorphism groups
in Parallelisms of Complete Designs,
by Peter J. Cameron,
published when Cameron was at
Merton College, Oxford.
“As Gatsby closed the door of
‘the Merton College Library’
I could have sworn I heard
the owl-eyed man
break into ghostly laughter.”
From Jung’s Map of the Soul, by Murray Stein:
“… Jung thinks of the self as undergoing continual transformation during the course of a lifetime…. At the end of his late work Aion, Jung presents a diagram to illustrate the dynamic movements of the self….”
“The formula presents a symbol of the self, for the self is not just a stable quantity or constant form, but is also a dynamic process. In the same way, the ancients saw the imago Dei in man not as a mere imprint, as a sort of lifeless, stereotyped impression, but as an active force…. The four transformations represent a process of restoration or rejuvenation taking place, as it were, inside the self….”
“The formula reproduces exactly the essential features of the symbolic process of transformation. It shows the rotation of the mandala, the antithetical play of complementary (or compensatory) processes, then the apocatastasis, i.e., the restoration of an original state of wholeness, which the alchemists expressed through the symbol of the uroboros, and finally the formula repeats the ancient alchemical tetrameria, which is implicit in the fourfold structure of unity.
What the formula can only hint at, however, is the higher plane that is reached through the process of transformation and integration. The ‘sublimation’ or progress or qualitative change consists in an unfolding of totality into four parts four times, which means nothing less than its becoming conscious. When psychic contents are split up into four aspects, it means that they have been subjected to discrimination by the four orienting functions of consciousness. Only the production of these four aspects makes a total description possible. The process depicted by our formula changes the originally unconscious totality into a conscious one.”
— Jung, Collected Works,
Vol. 9, Part 2, Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self (1951)
Related material:
“Although ‘wholeness’ seems at first sight to be nothing but an abstract idea (like anima and animus), it is nevertheless empirical in so far as it is anticipated by the psyche in the form of spontaneous or autonomous symbols. These are the quaternity or mandala symbols, which occur not only in the dreams of modern people who have never heard of them, but are widely disseminated in the historical recods of many peoples and many epochs. Their significance as symbols of unity and totality is amply confirmed by history as well as by empirical psychology. What at first looks like an abstract idea stands in reality for something that exists and can be experienced, that demonstrates its a priori presence spontaneously. Wholeness is thus an objective factor that confronts the subject independently of him… Unity and totality stand at the highest point on the scale of objective values because their symbols can no longer be distinguished from the imago Dei. Hence all statements about the God-image apply also to the empirical symbols of totality.”
— Jung, Aion, as quoted in
Carl Jung and Thomas Merton
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