"My God, it's full of numbers!"

See Monolith in this journal.

Continued from March 7, 2011

" One for my baby, and one more… "

See also this morning's previous posts "Unique Figure" and "One of a Kind."

See as well a search for intelligent life at Santa Cruz —

Related art —

In the online April 1, 2019,  New Yorker —

Burying the Lede

"You lose some, you winsome."

"My God, it's
full of numbers!"

In memory of Jimmy Breslin, who reportedly died today at 88 —

From "Dimensions," (Log24, Feb. 15, 2015) —

"Hello  darkness,  my  old  friend.
I’ve  come  to  talk  with  you  again."

(Continued.)  Click each image for its source.

Peter Schjeldahl in the current (Dec. 14) New Yorker :

The phrase “outsider art” was coined in 1972 by a
British art historian, Roger Cardinal, to translate
the sense of “art brut ,” which Dubuffet had
considered rendering as art “raw,” “uncouth,” “crude,”
or “in the rough.” But the term misses the full thrust
of Dubuffet’s elevation of “people uncontaminated
by artistic culture,” as he called them. He aspired not
to make outsiders respectable but to destroy the
complacency of insiders. He disqualified even tribal
and folk artists, and spirited amateurs like Henri
Rousseau, for being captive to one tradition or another.
Art brut  must be sui generis, from the hands and minds
of “unique, hypersensitive men, maniacs, visionaries,
builders of strange myths.”

The literary  art of Fritz Leiber and Stephen King seems to
fit this definition.

Somewhat less brut — the literary art of Plato.

A non-literary illustration:

  Time as "a moving
   image of eternity.”
       — Plato   

The two symbols on the monolith

may, if one likes, be interpreted 
as standing for Damnation Morning 
and for the Windmill of Time.

* "Award-winning fashion icon."
— Harvard Graduate School of Design

See as well All Souls' Day and November 16.

(Continued)

Two items for cultural anthropologists,
each from April 28, 2015 —

For further details, click on
      the black monolith.

"Hello  darkness,  my  old  friend.
I’ve  come  to  talk  with  you  again."

From Log24  on Feb. 26, 2008 —

Part I–
Ironic Symbols

From St. Andrew’s Day, 2009:

Also on that date:

Supreme Court rejects Ford’s
appeal in rollover case

The New York Times this morning:

Roll over to learn more

Click image to enlarge.

Part II–

Also from
St. Andrew’s Day, 2009:

Found on Google today:

Related material:

This morning’s New York Times reports the deaths of Nuremberg interrogator Richard W. Sonnenfeldt and of avant-garde novelist and Beckett scholar Raymond Federman.

Symbols from this journal on the dates of their deaths:

For connotations of the symbol appropriate to the name Sonnenfeldt, see the link to A Sunrise for Sunrise in the entry of Saturday, Oct. 10.

A quotation that appeared here on Wednesday, Oct. 7, seems relevant to Federman:

But I am a worker, a tombstone mason, anxious to pleace averyburies and jully glad when Christmas comes his once ayear. You are a poorjoist, unctuous to polise nopebobbies….

— James Joyce, Finnegans Wake

Transit Authority

In memory of
Stanley Kubrick
(overlooked in
yesterday's memorial)

"'Wherever you come near
the human race, there's layers
and layers of nonsense,'
says the Stage Manager in
Thornton Wilder's 'Our Town.'"

— Today's sermon
    from Frank Rich

For more layers, see
James A. Michener's
The Source.

“Prof. Paul Halmos died of pneumonia early in the morning of October 2, 2006. He was 90 years old. He is survived by his wife, Virginia Halmos. An obituary may be found at the website of the Mathematical Association of America….”

— Halmos’s home page
at Santa Clara University

For a memorial of sorts, see
Lovely, Dark and Deep. 

Update of 8 PM Oct. 4 —

From Google Book Search:
 

This is the source of the
“Halmos tombstone” symbol,
which has been described in a
different form at Wikipedia:

“The tombstone, or halmos–
symbol ∎ (Unicode U+220E)–
is used in mathematics to denote
the end of a proof.” 

This Unicode character is rendered
as an empty square in Explorer
and as a black square in Firefox.

Related material:

The Unity of Mathematics
and
Monolith

From James A. Michener‘s The Source:

“Trouble started in a quarter that neither Uriel nor Zadok could have foreseen.  For many generations the wiser men of Zadok’s clan had worshipped El-Shaddai with the understanding that whereas Canaanites and Egyptians could see their gods directly, El-Shaddai was invisible and inhabited no specific place.  Unequivocally the Hebrew patriarchs had preached this concept and the sager men of the clans accepted it, but to the average Hebrew who was not a philosopher the theory of a god who lived nowhere, who did not even exist in corporeal form, was not easy to comprehend.  Such people were willing to agree with Zadok that their god did not live on this mountain– the one directly ahead– but they suspected that he did live on some mountain nearby, and when they said this they pictured an elderly man with a white beard who lived in a proper tent and whom they might one day see and touch.  If questioned, they would have said that they expected El-Shaddai to look much like their father Zadok, but with a longer beard, a stronger voice, and more penetrating eyes.

Now, as these simpler-minded Hebrews settled down outside the walls of Makor, they began to see Canaanite processions leave the main gate and climb the mountain to the north, seeking the high place where Baal lived, and they witnessed the joy which men experienced when visiting their god, and the Hebrews began in subtle ways and easy steps to evolve the idea that Baal, who obviously lived in a mountain, and El-Shaddai, who was reported to do so, must have much in common.  Furtively at first, and then openly, they began to climb the footpath to the place of Baal, where they found a monolith rising from the highest point of rock.  Here was a tangible thing they could comprehend, and after much searching along the face of the mountain, a group of Hebrew men found a straight rock of size equal to the one accorded Baal, and with much effort they dragged it one starless night to the mountain top, where they installed it not far from the home of Baal….”

Rabbi Chitrik died on
Valentine’s Day, 2006,
having had a heart attack
on Feb. 8, 2006–

Grammy Night.

The above monolith is perhaps more
closely related to El-Shaddai than to
Madonna, Grammy Night, and Baal.
It reflects my own interests
(Mathematics and Narrative)
and those of Martin Buber
(Jews on Fiction):
 

“Among Buber’s early philosophical influences were Kant’s Prolegomena, which he read at the age of fourteen, and Nietzsche’s Zarathustra.  Whereas Kant had a calming influence on the young mind troubled by the aporia of infinite versus finite time, Nietzsche’s doctrine of ‘the eternal recurrence of the same’ constituted a powerful negative seduction.  By the time Buber graduated from Gymnasium he felt he had overcome this seduction, but Nietzsche’s prophetic tone and aphoristic style are evident in Buber’s subsequent writings.”

— Plato.stanford.edu

Martin Buber

Rabbi Chitrik

Into the Dark

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant
….
And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
Nobody’s funeral, for there is no one to bury.
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of
    darkness on darkness….

— T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets

“I’m well past eighty now and fairly certain I won’t see ninety but I’d like more of a choice than Hell or Paradise when I leave. Now that we know the Bible was created by a vote of Emperor Constantine’s clergy, wouldn’t we all be better off if other options were offered? Or is the fear of what happens after death the glue that holds Religion together? I hope not because I believe better of God.

As a Deist, I have no fear or doubts of the way that life ends. I can bravely face the reality of ceasing to exist because the God of my heart comforts me by promising to provide a dark, starless night of nothingness when my visit is over.”

— Paul Winchell (pdf) (See previous entry.)

Paul Winchell was born at the winter solstice — the longest night — December 21, 1922.

For another view of the longest night, see the five Log24 entries ending on the day after the longest night of 2003.   Summary of those entries:

“My God, it’s full of stars!”

William H. Pickering,

Dec. 24, 1910 – March 15, 2004

In memory of
John Gregory Dunne,
who died on
Dec. 30, 2003:

For further details, click
on the black monolith.

See, too, last year's entries
for Dec. 30 and 31:

"… he might add under his breath,
like the professor in The Last Battle
who has passed on to the next life,
'It's all in Plato, all in Plato:
bless me, what do they teach them
at these schools!' "

ART WARS for

Trotsky’s Birthday

Part I:
Symbols

From my entry of July 26, 2003, in memory
of Marathon Man director John Schlesinger:

For the meaning of the above symbols, see
Kubrick’s 1x4x9 monolith in 2001,
the Halmos tombstone in Measure Theory,
and the Fritz Leiber Changewar stories.

No se puede vivir sin amar.

Part II:
Sunday in the Park with Death

  To Leon from Diego —
Details of a mural,
A Dream of a Sunday Afternoon
in Alameda Park,
Fresco, 1947-48,
Alameda Hotel, Mexico City:

Three’s a Crowd:

Symbol:

ART WARS Sept. 1, 2003:

Sir Terry Frost Dies

A noted English abstract painter died at 87 on Monday, September 1.  From a memorial essay on Sir Terry Frost, born in 1915, in The Daily Telegraph: 

“He was educated at Leamington Spa Central School where he edited the art magazine, but left at 15 to work….” His first jobs included, the Telegraph says, painting “the red, white and blue targets on to fighter planes.”

The “target” the Telegraph refers to
is known as the Royal Air Force Roundel.

It may indeed have functioned as a target, but it was originally intended only as a distinctive identifying mark.

Some of Frost’s later work may be viewed at the British Government Art Collection.  For some of Frost’s work more closely related to his early “target” theme, see the Badcock’s Gallery site.

An example:

For related religious
and cinematic material, see

Pilate, Truth, and Friday the Thirteenth,

a meditation for Good Friday of 2001,

A Matter of Life and Death,

a meditation for Friday the Thirteenth
of September, 2002,

and

The Unity of Mathematics,

from the day Frost died, which concludes
with links related to the religious symbol of

2001:

Monolithic Form
and
ART WARS.

Monolith

“Music can name the unnameable
and communicate the unknowable.”

— Quotation attributed to Leonard Bernstein

“Finally we get to Kubrick’s ultimate trick….  His secret is in plain sight…. The film is the monolith. In a secret that seems to never have been seen by anyone: the monolith in the film has the same exact dimensions as the movie screen on which 2001 was projected.”

—  Alchemical Kubrick 2001, by Jay Weidner 

My entry of Saturday, August 30,
included the following illustration:

My entry of Monday, September 1,
concluded with the black monolith.

“There is little doubt that the black monolith
in 2001 is the Philosopher’s Stone.”

—  Alchemical Kubrick 2001, by Jay Weidner 

 The philosopher Donald Davidson
died on Saturday, August 30.

The New York Times says that as an undergraduate, Davidson “persuaded Harvard to let him put on ‘The Birds’ by Aristophanes and played the lead, Peisthetairos, which meant memorizing 700 lines of Greek. His friend and classmate Leonard Bernstein, with whom he played four-handed piano, wrote an original score for the production.”

Perhaps they are still making music together.

The Unity of Mathematics,

or “Shema, Israel”

A conference to honor the 90th birthday (Sept. 2) of Israel Gelfand is currently underway in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The following note from 2001 gives one view of the conference’s title topic, “The Unity of Mathematics.”

Related Reading

For four different proofs of Euler’s result, see the inexpensive paperback classic by Konrad Knopp, Theory and Application of Infinite Series (Dover Publications).

Related Websites

Evaluating Zeta(2), by Robin Chapman (PDF article) Fourteen proofs!

Zeta Functions for Undergraduates

The Riemann Zeta Function

Reciprocity Laws
Reciprocity Laws II

The Langlands Program

Recent Progress on the Langlands Conjectures

For more on
the theme of unity,
see

Monolithic Form
and
ART WARS.