Oslo Connection

Today is the birthday of Oystein Ore
(1899-1968), Sterling Professor of Mathematics at Yale for 37 years, who was born and died in Oslo, Norway.  Ore is said to have coined the term “Galois
connection.”  In his honor, an excerpt dealing with such
connections:

Click to enlarge.

(Excerpt was added to Pattern Groups.)

Leventhal recently appeared in the American Masters Bob Dylan documentary on PBS.  According to today’s NYT obituary, “Mr. Leventhal was… widely, if tacitly, acknowledged to have been
the inspiration for Irving Steinbloom, the folk impresario whose
memorial concert sets in motion the plot of the 2003 film comedy ‘A
Mighty Wind.’”

From a Rosh Hashana sermon by Devra Felder Noily:

“Throughout these Holy Days we will chant Unetaneh Tokef, a liturgical poem
more than a thousand years old. In it we find the words:

U-ve shofar gadol yi-ta-ka. V’ kol d’ma-ma da-kah yi-shama. The great shofar
is sounded. And a still small voice is heard….

The prayer quotes from the book of Kings. There, the prophet Elijah has
reached his breaking point, and God reaches out to him. The text tells us:

Then the Eternal passed by. There was a great and mighty wind,
splitting mountains and shattering rocks by the power of God, but God was not in
the wind. After the wind, an earthquake– but God was not in the earthquake. After
the earthquake, fire– but God was not in the fire. And after the fire, a still
small voice.”

New Page for Harvard’s President

From today’s Harvard Crimson:

“University President Lawrence H. Summers said
yesterday that he will marry his longtime partner, Professor of English
Elisa New.”

“I dwell in Possibility -
A fairer House than Prose”

– Emily Dickinson, quoted in
    The Regenerate Lyric:
    Theology and Innovation
    in American Poetry, by
    Elisa New, page 162

Related material:
Log24 entries for Jan. 24 and 25, 2005.

New Page on Geometry

See Pattern Groups, which now has a link to an interesting Nov. 2003 preprint on A₆.

Today is the birthday of Sir Thomas L. Heath, a saint of geometry whose feast day is March 16.

Part I

For a Christian meditation on Captain Kangaroo, see the Log24 entries of Jan. 24, 2004.

Part II

“Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, begins at sunset.”

– Today in History, Associated Press

A Rosh Hashana catechism:

    Question

(See Chorus from the Rock.)

How does one stand

To behold the sublime,

To confront the mockers,

The mickey mockers

And plated pairs?
– Wallace Stevens,
   “The American Sublime”

    Answer

“Spear Daddy!” in yesterday’s entry,
Happy Birthday, Wallace Stevens

Happy Birthday, Wallace Stevens

Readings for today:

At the Wallace Stevens online concordance, search for X and for primitive.

In the e-book edition of Bester’s  The Deceivers,  search for X.

    “We seek
Nothing beyond reality. Within it,

Everything, the spirit’s alchemicana
Included, the spirit that goes roundabout
And through included, not merely the visible,

The solid, but the movable, the moment,
The coming on of feasts and the habits of saints,
The pattern of the heavens and high, night air.”

– Wallace Stevens,
Oct. 2, 1879 – Aug. 2, 1955,
“An Ordinary Evening in New Haven”
IX.1-18, from The Auroras of Autumn,
Knopf, NY (1950)

Related material:

(Added Monday, Oct. 3, 8:45 AM)

“What if Shakespeare had been born in Teaneck, N.J., in 1973?

He
would call himself Spear Daddy. His rap would exhibit a profound,
nuanced understanding of the frailty of the human condition, exploring
the personality in all its bewildering complexity: pretension, pride,
vulnerability, emotional treachery, as well as the enduring triumph of
love.

Spear Daddy would disappear from the charts in about six weeks.”

– Gene Weingarten in the Washington Post,
    Sunday, Oct. 2, 2005

Presenting…