Month: March 2009

  • Fish Story, continued:

    Straight

    From this journal's Sunday sermon:

    "Flowers's thoughts stray to Brown,
     with affectionate pity, as he
    drinks port and eats walnuts
    for the first time in
    Senior Combination Room."

    -- G. H. Hardy recounting the plot
    of A Fellow of Trinity

    A Glossary of Cambridge:

    Combination Room
    Attached to the High Table end of the largely unheated medieval college halls, this was a warm place for Fellows to gather before and after meals. Now known as the Senior Combination Room to distinguish it from the Junior and Middle combination rooms.
    From Stanley Fish's weblog
     in The New York Times
     (Sunday, March 1, 2009, 10 PM):

    George Herbert's "Redemption" --
    "'I resolved to be bold,/And make a suit unto him, to afford/A new small-rented lease and cancel th'old.'

    But first he has to find him.... Either he's just left or he hasn't been seen, but then, unexpectedly and in the most unlikely circumstances, he turns up:

    'At length I heard a ragged noise and mirth/Of thieves and murderers: there I him espied.'

    Before he or his reader can ask 'what on earth are you doing here?,' the final line provides an answer with a compact swiftness that is literally breathtaking:

     'Who straight, "Your suit is granted," said, and died.'"

    For Senior Combination Room as
    a den of thieves and murderers,
    see That Hideous Strength.

    Related material:

    "The Painted Word"

    G. H. Hardy died at 70
     on December 1, 1947.
    That date is now observed as
    "Day Without Art."

    Day Without Art logo: X'd-out frame

    Click on image
    for further details.

  • ART WARS:

    Today in History - March 2

    By The Associated Press

    Today is Monday, March 2, the 61st day of 2009. There are 304 days left in the year.

    Today's Highlight in History:

    On March 2, 1939, Roman Catholic Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli was elected Pope on his 63rd birthday; he took the name Pius XII.
    Angels and Demons, Illuminati Diamond, pages 359-360

    Log24 on June 9, 2008--

    From Gravity's Rainbow (Penguin Classics, 1995), page 563:

    "He brings out the mandala he found.
    'What's it mean?'
    [....]
    Slothrop gives him the mandala. He hopes it will work like the mantra that Enzian told him once, mba-kayere (I am passed over), mba-kayere... a spell [...]. A mezuzah. Safe passage through a bad night...."

    In lieu of Slothrop's mandala, here is another...

    Christ and the four elements, 1495
    Christ and the Four Elements

    This 1495 image is found in
    The Janus Faces of Genius:
    The Role of Alchemy
    in Newton's Thought,
    by B. J. T. Dobbs,
    Cambridge University Press,
    2002, p. 85

    Related mandalas:

    Diamond arrangement of the four elements

    and

    Logo by Steven H. Cullinane for website on finite geometry

    For further details,
    click on any of the
    three mandalas above.

    Angels and Demons cross within a diamond (page 306), and Finite Geometry logo

    Happy birthday to
    Tom Wolfe, author of
    The Painted Word.

  • Today's Sermon:

    Solomon's Cube
    continued

    "There is a book... called A Fellow of Trinity, one of series dealing with what is supposed to be Cambridge college life.... There are two heroes, a primary hero called Flowers, who is almost wholly good, and a secondary hero, a much weaker vessel, called Brown. Flowers and Brown find many dangers in university life, but the worst is a gambling saloon in Chesterton run by the Misses Bellenden, two fascinating but extremely wicked young ladies. Flowers survives all these troubles, is Second Wrangler and Senior Classic, and succeeds automatically to a Fellowship (as I suppose he would have done then). Brown succumbs, ruins his parents, takes to drink, is saved from delirium tremens during a thunderstorm only by the prayers of the Junior Dean, has much difficulty in obtaining even an Ordinary Degree, and ultimately becomes a missionary. The friendship is not shattered by these unhappy events, and Flowers's thoughts stray to Brown, with affectionate pity, as he drinks port and eats walnuts for the first time in Senior Combination Room."

    -- G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology

    "The Solomon Key is the working title of an unreleased novel in progress by American author Dan Brown. The Solomon Key will be the third book involving the character of the Harvard professor Robert Langdon, of which the first two were Angels & Demons (2000) and The Da Vinci Code (2003)." --Wikipedia

    "One has O+(6) ≅ S8, the symmetric group of order 8! ...."

     -- "Siegel Modular Forms and Finite Symplectic Groups," by Francesco Dalla Piazza and Bert van Geemen, May 5, 2008, preprint.

    "The complete projective group of collineations and dualities of the [projective] 3-space is shown to be of order [in modern notation] 8! .... To every transformation of the 3-space there corresponds a transformation of the [projective] 5-space. In the 5-space, there are determined 8 sets of 7 points each, 'heptads' ...."

    -- George M. Conwell, "The 3-space PG(3, 2) and Its Group," The Annals of Mathematics, Second Series, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Jan., 1910), pp. 60-76

    "It must be remarked that these 8 heptads are the key to an elegant proof...."

    -- Philippe Cara, "RWPRI Geometries for the Alternating Group A8," in Finite Geometries: Proceedings of the Fourth Isle of Thorns Conference (July 16-21, 2000), Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001, ed. Aart Blokhuis, James W. P. Hirschfeld, Dieter Jungnickel, and Joseph A. Thas, pp. 61-97