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Galbraith |
Harvard mathematician
George Mackey
The five Log24 entries ending at
7:00 PM on March 14, 2006,
the last day of Mackey's life:
Exercise
Review the concepts of integritas, consonantia, and claritas in Aquinas:
"For in respect to beauty three things are essential: first of all,
integrity or completeness, since beings deprived of wholeness are on
this score ugly; and [secondly] a certain required design, or patterned
structure; and finally a certain splendor, inasmuch as things are
called beautiful which have a certain 'blaze of being' about them...."
-- Summa Theologiae Sancti Thomae Aquinatis, I, q. 39, a. 8, as translated by William T. Noon, S.J., in Joyce and Aquinas, Yale University Press, 1957
Review the following three publications cited in a note of April 28, 1985 (21 years ago today):
(1) Cameron, P. J.,
Parallelisms of Complete Designs,
Cambridge University Press, 1976.
(2) Conwell, G. M.,
The 3-space PG(3,2) and its group,
Ann. of Math. 11 (1910) 60-76.
(3) Curtis, R. T.,
A new combinatorial approach to M24,
Math. Proc. Camb. Phil. Soc.
79 (1976) 25-42.
Discuss how the sextet parallelism in (1) illustrates integritas, how the Conwell correspondence in (2) illustrates consonantia, and how the Miracle Octad Generator in (3) illustrates claritas.
Poetry Month, continued
A partial answer:
Yesterday's Pennsylvania Lottery evening number was 432.
Poets and others who seek meaning in random numbers may, if they wish, consult page 432 of The Collected Poems
of Wallace Stevens. They may also, having studied the Log24
entries of Holy Saturday (April 15, 2006), consult page 432 of A Flag For Sunrise.
Those who prefer the dictionary method of interpreting random numbers may consult page 432 of Webster's New World Dictionary,
College Edition of 1960. This page has a special meaning for
those aware that Aslan's How is "home to the deepest magic Narnia
has ever known." (Everything2.com)
Excerpt
by Wallace Stevens
(Collected Poems, p. 216)
Look down now, Cotton Mather, from the blank.
Was heaven where you thought? It must be there.
It must be where you think it is, in the light
On bed-clothes, in an apple on a plate.
It is the honey-comb of the seeing man.
It is the leaf the bird brings back to the boat.
From today's online
Harvard Crimson:
From an Amazon.com review
of McCafferty's latest book:
-- and an entry of April 8
that contains the following
"kind of cross" --
3 PM
Good
Friday
At Decision Time,
Colleges Lay On Charm
-- Today's New York Times
"'Lestat,' the maiden Broadway production of Warner Brothers Theater
Ventures, is the third vampire musical to open in the last few years,
and it seems unlikely to break the solemn curse that has plagued the
genre. Directed by Robert Jess Roth from a book by Linda Woolverton,
the show admittedly has higher aspirations and (marginally) higher
production values than the kitschy 'Dance of the Vampires' (2002) and
the leaden 'Dracula: The Musical' (2004), both major-league flops." -- Ben Brantley
See Log24,
St. Patrick's Day 2004:
"I faced myself that day with
the nonplused apprehension
of someone who has
come across a vampire
and has no crucifix in hand."
-- Joan Didion, "On Self-Respect,"
in Slouching Towards Bethlehem
"For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross."
-- Thomas Pynchon,
Gravity's Rainbow
See also
Plagiarist or Fraud?
The weekly Harvard Independent points out
that Kaavya Viswanathan's recent novel may have been
ghostwritten. Therefore the ghostwriter, rather than the
purported author, may have committed the original plagiarism.
Viswanathan maintains that she herself wrote the novel, and said that "any
phrasing similarities... were completely unintentional and
unconscious." (Harvard Crimson, April 24) (The use of ghostwriters is not generally called plagiarism, although one definition says
plagiarism is "passing off someone else's work as your own." This
would of course make all recent U.S. presidents guilty of the crime.)
Related material:
"There is a pleasantly discursive treatment
of Pontius Pilate's unanswered question
'What is truth?'"
-- H. S. M. Coxeter, 1987, 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
A Serious Position
"'Teitelbaum,' in German,
is 'date palm.'"
-- Generations, Jan. 2003
"In Hasidism, a mystical brand
of Orthodox Judaism, the grand rabbi
is revered as a kinglike link to God...."
-- Today's New York Times obituary
of Rabbi Moses Teitelbaum,
who died on April 24, 2006
(Easter Monday in the
Orthodox Church)
Proofs and Paradoxes
Alfred Teitelbaum
changed his name to Tarski in the early 20s, the same time he changed
religions, but when the Germans invaded his native Poland, the
mathematician was in California, where he remained. His "great
achievement was his audacious assault on the notion of truth," says Martin Davis, focusing on the semantics and syntax of scientific language. Alfred Tarski: Life and Logic, co-written by a former student, Solomon Feferman, offers "remarkably intimate information," such as abusive teaching and "extensive amorous involvements."
From Wikipedia, an unsigned story:
"In 1923
Alfred Teitelbaum and his brother Wacław changed their surnames to
Tarski, a name they invented because it sounded very Polish, was simple
to spell and pronounce, and was unused. (Years later, he met another
Alfred Tarski in northern California.) The Tarski brothers also
converted to Roman Catholicism, the national religion of the Poles.
Alfred did so, even though he was an avowed atheist, because he was
about to finish his Ph.D. and correctly anticipated that it would be
difficult for a Jew to obtain a serious position in the new Polish university system."
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