From the May 18 Harvard Crimson:

"Paul B. Davis ’07-’08, who contributed to a collection of student
essays written in 2005 on the purpose and structure of a Harvard
education, said that 'the devil is in the details'...."

Related material:

"In philosophy, reductionism is a theory that asserts that the nature of complex things is reduced to the nature of sums of simpler or more fundamental things." --Wikipedia

"In the 1920's... the discovery of quantum mechanics went a very long
way toward reducing chemistry to the solution of well-defined
mathematical problems. Indeed, only the extreme difficulty of many of
these problems prevents the present day theoretical chemist from being
able to predict the outcome of every laboratory experiment by making
suitable calculations. More recently the molecular biologists have made
startling progress in reducing the study of life back to the study of
chemistry. The living cell is a miniature but extremely active and
elaborate chemical factory and many, if not most, biologists today are
confident that there is no mysterious 'vital principle,' but that life
is just very complicated chemistry. With biology reduced to chemistry
and chemistry to mathematics, the measurable aspects of the world
become quite pervasive." --Harvard mathematician George Mackey, "What Do Mathematicians Do?"

Opposed to reductionism are "emergence" and "strong emergence"--

"Although strong emergence is logically possible, it is uncomfortably like magic." --Mark A. Bedau

Or comfortably.

"[The applet] Syntheme illustrates ways of partitioning the 12
vertices of an icosahedron into 3 sets of 4, so that each set forms the corners
of a rectangle in the Golden Ratio. Each such rectangle is known as a duad.
The short sides of a duad are opposite edges of the icosahedron, and there are 30 edges,
so there are 15 duads.

Each partition of the vertices into duads is known as a syntheme.
There are 15 synthemes; 5 consist of duads that are mutually perpendicular, while
the other 10 consist of duads that share a common line of intersection."

-- Greg Egan, Syntheme

The above note shows
duads and synthemes related
to the diamond theorem.

See also John Baez's essay
"Some Thoughts on the Number 6."
That essay was written 15 years
ago today-- which happens
to be the birthday of
Sir Laurence Olivier, who,
were he alive today, would
be 100 years old.

"Is it safe?"

A more recent royal reference:

"'Yau
wants to be the king of geometry,' Michael Anderson, a geometer at
Stony Brook, said. 'He believes that everything should issue from him,
that he should have oversight. He doesn't like people encroaching on
his territory.'" --Sylvia Nasar and David Gruber in The New Yorker, issue dated Aug. 28, 2006

Wikipedia, Cultural references to the Royal Road:

"Euclid is said to have replied to King Ptolemy's request for an easier way of learning mathematics that 'there is no royal road to geometry.' Charles S. Peirce,
in his 'How to Make Our Ideas Clear' (1878), says 'There is no royal
road to logic, and really valuable ideas can only be had at the price
of close attention.'"

Related material:
Log24 entries of 11/18/05

"I have another far more solid and central ground for submitting to it as a
faith, instead of merely picking up hints from it as a scheme. And that is
this: that the Christian Church in its practical relation to my soul is a
living teacher, not a dead one. It not only certainly taught me yesterday, but
will almost certainly teach me to-morrow. Once I saw suddenly the meaning of
the shape of the cross; some day I may see suddenly the meaning of the shape of
the mitre. One free morning I saw why windows were pointed; some fine morning I
may see why priests were shaven. Plato has told you a truth; but Plato is dead.
Shakespeare has startled you with an image; but Shakespeare will not startle
you with any more. But imagine what it would be to live with such men still
living, to know that Plato might break out with an original lecture to-morrow,
or that at any moment Shakespeare might shatter everything with a single song.
The man who lives in contact with what he believes to be a living Church is a
man always expecting to meet Plato and Shakespeare to-morrow at breakfast. He
is always expecting to see some truth that he has never seen before."

-- G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy, Ch. IX

From Plato, Pegasus, and the Evening Star (11/11/99):

"O God, I could be
bounded in a nutshell
and count myself
a king of infinite space,
were it not that
I have bad dreams."
-- Hamlet

From today's newspaper:

Notes:

For an illustration of
the phrase "solid and central,"
see the previous entry.

For further context, see the
five Log24 entries ending
on September 6, 2006.

For background on the word
"hollow," see the etymology of
 "hole in the wall" as well as
"The God-Shaped Hole" and
"Is Nothing Sacred?"

For further ado, see
Macbeth, V.v
("signifying nothing")
and The New Yorker,
issue dated tomorrow.

"In a sense, too, Wallace Stevens has spent a lifetime writing a single poem. What gives his best
work its astonishing power and vitality is the way in which a fixed point of view, maturing
naturally, eventually takes in more than a constantly shifting point of view could get at.

The point of view is romantic, 'almost the color of comedy'; but 'the strength at the center is
serious.'  Behind Wallace Stevens stand Wordsworth and Coleridge as well as Rimbaud and
Mallarmé, and, surprisingly enough, La Fontaine and Pope. This poetic lineage is important only
in so far as it proves that a master can claim the world as ancestor. Knowing where he stands,
the poet can move as a free man in the company of free men."

Today's Harvard Crimson:

"Paul B. Davis ’07-’08, who contributed to a collection of student
essays written in 2005 on the purpose and structure of a Harvard
education, said that 'the devil is in the details'...."

From the weblog of Peter Woit:

"The New Yorker keeps its physics theme going this week with cover art that includes a blackboard full of basic equations from quantum mechanics."

May 21, 2007

New Yorker cover

 
Detail

The detail suggests
the following
religious images from
Twelfth Night 2003:

Devil's Claws, or Hourglass Var. 3

Yankee Puzzle, or Hourglass Var. 5

 

"Mercilessly tasteful"
 
-- Andrew Mueller,
review of Suzanne Vega's
"Songs in Red and Gray"