For further details, see
Finite Geometry of
the Square and Cube
and The Eightfold Cube.
n. itinerant seller or giver of books,
especially religious literature.
Now you has jazz.
-- Cole Porter, lyric for "High Society,"
set in Newport, Rhode Island, 1956
The "greatest generation" theme from Art Wars-- April 7, 2003 continues in two obituaries from this morning's New York Times:
The first obituary says that Goldberg
"saw abstract painting... as 'still the primary visual challenge of our time. It might get harder
and harder to make an abstract image that's believable, but I think
that just makes the challenge greater.'" The Times says that Goldberg was a veteran of Merrill's Marauders in World War II (as well as of the last century's art wars).
The second obituary notes that Astor's books include A Blood-Dimmed Tide (a phrase from Yeats)-- an account of the Battle of the Bulge-- and a biography of Dr. Josef Mengele.
Both men died on Sunday, December 30, 2007. From Log24 on that date, an abstract image and a cinematic portrait of Dr. Mengele:
|
Fahne, |
Dr. Mengele, |
Yesterday's entry
The Revelation Game
and an entry of April 7, 2003:
April is Math Awareness Month.
This year's theme is "mathematics and art."
(The art, by Ingmar Bergman, was
in honor of the April 7 birthday of
Francis Ford Coppola, director of
"Apocalypse Now.")
The Revelation Game
New Year's reading for
the tigers of Princeton
Two reviews from the February 2008 Notices of the American Mathematical Society:
From a review of
A Certain Ambiguity
(A Mathematical Novel)
by Gaurav Suri and Hartosh Singh Bal
Princeton University Press
Hardcover, US$27.95, 281 pages --
"From the Habermas-Lyotard debate (see [1] for an introduction) to the Sokal hoax ([4]), to recent atheist manifestos on the bestseller lists (e.g., [2]) the question of foundations for intellectual thought and especially for intellectual debate has never been more critical or urgent."
[1] M. Bérubé, What's Liberal about the Liberal Arts? Classroom Politics and "Bias" in Higher Education, W. W. Norton, 2006.
[2] S. Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation, Knopf, 2006.
[4] A. Sokal and P. Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals' Abuse of Science, Picador, 1999.
Also in the February Notices-- a review of a book, Superior Beings: If They Exist, How Would We Know?, in which the author
".. uses elementary ideas from game theory to create situations between a Person (P) and God (Supreme Being, SB) and discusses how each reacts to the other in these model scenarios....
In the 'Revelation Game,' for example,
the Person (P) has two options:
1) P can believe in SB’s existence
2) P can not believe in SB’s existence
The Supreme Being also has two options:
1) SB can reveal Himself
2) SB can not reveal Himself....
... [and] goals allow us to rank all the outcomes for each player from best... to worst.... The question we must answer is: what is the Nash equilibrium in this case?"
The answer is what one might expect from the American Mathematical Society:
"... the dominant strategy for both is when SB does not reveal Himself and P does not believe in His existence."
Other strategies are, of course, possible. See last year's entries.
See also
the life of John Nash,
for whom the above
equilibrium is named.
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