Those who have followed the links here recently may appreciate a short story told by yesterday's lottery numbers in Pennsylvania: mid-day 096, evening 513.

The "96" may be regarded as a reference to the age at death of geometer H.S.M. Coxeter (see yesterday morning's links). The "513" may be regarded as a reference to the time of yesterday afternoon's entry, 5:01, plus the twelve minutes discussed in that entry by presidential aide Richard Darman, who died yesterday.

These references may seem less fanciful in the light of other recent Log24 material: a verse quoted here on Jan. 18--

-- and a link on Jan. 19 to the following:

Time and the River

Harvard Class of 1964
Twenty-fifth Anniversary Report:

"At this writing (November, '88), President-elect Bush has just announced his intention to name me to his Cabinet and to nominate me as Director of the Office of Management and Budget. Given the state of play in Washington, I suppose I may find myself in premature retirement by the time this report is published.

That is not an entirely unattractive prospect. Kath (Kathleen Emmet, '64) and I live in an idyllic setting, overlooking the Little Falls of the Potomac, just twelve minutes upstream from the Capitol. She writes-- she's now completing a book on American writers in Paris after World War II. Our children (Willy and Jonathan) do what healthy growing twelve- and seven-year-olds do. The river works its way peacefully over the falls and riffles around a woodsy island through the Chain Bridge narrows, and then on into the familar wide mud-basin of Washington-- a wholly different world.

When I was an undergraduate, I asked all the adolescent questions. I still do: Why does the river flow the way it does? Why does one move downstream and back? The allure of such simple questions is as great for me today as when we talked of them so seriously and so long at the University Restaurant or the Casablanca, or on the steps of Widener. The only difference seems to be that I'm now a bit more willing to settle for answers that seem simpler, less profound, sometimes even trite. But only a bit."

-- Richard Darman, who died today at 64

Edward Rothstein has a piece on Bobby Fischer in today's New
York Times.  The Rothstein opening:

"There may be only three human activities in which miraculous
accomplishment is possible before adulthood: mathematics, music and
chess."

This echoes the opening of a classic George Steiner essay (The New
Yorker, Sept. 7, 1968):

"There are three intellectual pursuits, and, so far as I am aware, only
three, in which human beings have performed major feats before the age
of puberty. They are music, mathematics, and chess."

-- "A Death of Kings," reprinted in George
Steiner: A Reader, Oxford University Press, 1984,
pp. 171-178.

Despite its promising (if unoriginal) opening, the New York Times piece is mainly an attack on Fischer's anti-Jewish stance.  Rothstein actually has little of interest to say about what he calls the "glass-bead games" of music, mathematics, and chess. For a better-written piece on chess and madness, see Charles Krauthammer's 2005 essay in TIME. The feuilletons of Rothstein and Krauthammer do not, of course, come close to the genuinely bead-game-like writing of Steiner.

"Mazur introduced the topic of prime numbers with a story from Don Quixote
in which Quixote asked a poet to write a poem with 17 lines. Because 17
is prime, the poet couldn't find a length for the poem's stanzas and
was thus stymied."