February 27, 2009

• Mathematics and Narrative:

  Time and Chance
  continued

  Today's Pennsylvania lottery numbers suggest the following meditations...

  Midday:  Lot 497, Bloomsbury Auctions May 15, 2008-- Raum und Zeit (Space and Time), by Minkowski, 1909. Background: Minkowski Space and "100 Years of Space-Time."*

  Evening: 5/07, 2008, in this journal-- "Forms of the Rock."

  Related material:
  
  A current competition at Harvard Graduate School of Design, "The Space of Representation," has a deadline of 8 PM tonight, February 27, 2009.

  The announcement of the competition quotes the Marxist Henri Lefebvre on "the social production of space."

  A related quotation by Lefebvre (cf. 2/22 2009):
  

  "... an epoch-making event so generally ignored that we have to be reminded of it at every moment. The fact is that around 1910 a certain space was shattered... the space... of classical perspective and geometry...."

  -- Page 25 of The Production of Space (Blackwell Publishing, 1991)

  This suggests, for those who prefer Harvard's past glories to its current state, a different Raum from the Zeit 1910.

  In January 1910 Annals of Mathematics, then edited at Harvard, published George M. Conwell's "The 3-space PG(3, 2) and Its Group." This paper, while perhaps neither epoch-making nor shattering, has a certain beauty. For some background, see this journal on February 24, 2009.†

      * Ending on Stephen King's birthday, 2008
       † Mardi Gras
  

  • 7:35 pm
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