December 15, 2005
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In honor of Freeman Dyson’s birthday:
“Mahlburg likens his approach to an analogous one for deciding
whether a dance party has an even or odd number of attendees. Instead
of counting all the participants, a quicker method is to see whether
everyone has a partner—in effect making groups that are divisible by 2.In Mahlburg’s work, the partition numbers play the role of the
dance participants, and the crank splits them not into couples but into
groups of a size divisible by the prime number in question. The total
number of partitions is, therefore, also divisible by that prime.Mahlburg’s work ‘has effectively written the final chapter on Ramanujan congruences,’ Ono says.
‘Each step in the story is a work of art,’ Dyson says, ‘and the
story as a whole is a sequence of episodes of rare beauty, a drama
built out of nothing but numbers and imagination.’”– Erica Klarreich in Science News Online, week of June 18, 2005
This would seem to meet the criteria set by Fritz Leiber for “a
story that works.” (See previous entry.) Whether the muse of
dance (played in “Xanadu” by a granddaughter of physicist Max Born–
see recent entries) has a role in the Dyson story is debatable.Born Dec. 11, 1882, Breslau, Germany.
Died Jan. 5, 1970, Göttingen,
West Germany.
Max BornThose who prefer less abstract stories may enjoy a mythic tale by Robert Graves, Watch the North Wind Rise, or a Christian tale by George MacDonald, At the Back of the North Wind.
Related material:
“The valley spirit never dies. It’s named the mystic woman.”
For an image of a particular
incarnation of the mystic woman
(whether as muse, as goddess,
or as the White Witch of Narnia,
I do not know) see Julie Taymor.“Down in the valley,
valley so low,
hang your head over,
hear the wind blow.”“Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in
the same bare placeFor the listener,
who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there
and the nothing that is.”
