July 23, 2006

  • Dance of the Numbers, continued:

    Partitions

    Freeman Dyson on the role of the "crank" in the theory of partitions:

    "'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, quoted in
       "In Honor of Freeman Dyson's Birthday:
        Dance of the Numbers"
        (Log24, Dec. 15, 2005)

    Paraphrase of Freeman Dyson's remarks in The New York Review of Books, issue dated May 28, 1998:

    "Theology is about words; science is about things."

    "What is 256 about?"

    -- Reply to Freeman Dyson,

        (May 15, 1998)

    A partial answer to that rhetorical question: 256 is the cardinality of the power set of an 8-set.

    For the role played by 8-sets and by 23 (today's date) in partitions of a different sort, see Geometry of the 4x4 Square.