Dance for Clarinet and Drums:

The Crimson Passion
continues...

Professors: Post Your Syllabi   Professors should post their course syllabi before move-in, not after class has started The Harvard Crimson Published On Friday, September 14, 2007  12:54 AM By THE CRIMSON STAFF "Classes start in three days, and that means it’s time to... examine course syllabi-- that is if you can find them...." More >>

Classics 101:
The Holy Spook
 

Prof. Coleman Silk introducing
 freshmen to academic values

The Course Begins:

Larry Summers, former president
of Harvard, was recently invited,
then disinvited, to speak at a
politically correct UC campus.

A Guest Lecturer Speaks:

"This is so pathetic. I used to write long disquisitions on the ethical dimensions of behavior like this, but years of it can make a girl get very tired. And that's because this stuff is tiresome, and boring, and wrong, and pathetic, and so very indicative of the derailed character of academic life. It's more important to keep punishing Summers for a comment he made years ago-- and apologized for many times over, and essentially lost the presidency of Harvard over-- than it is just to move on and let free exchange happen on campuses. I doubt Summers would have devoted his time before the Regents to theorizing gender (not that I would personally care much if he did-- I was not so mortally wounded by his observations as others were), and he is a brilliant man with much of value to bring to a visit with the Regents. But what does that matter when the opportunity to mob a politically incorrect academic presents itself?" --Erin O'Connor on Sept. 15, 2007

Illustration of the Theme:

Clarinetist Ken Peplowski
plays "Cry Me a River"
as Nicole Kidman focuses
the students' attention.

A sample Holy Spook,
Kurt Vonnegut, was introduced
by Peplowski on the birthday
this year of Pope Benedict XVI.

"Deeply vulgar"
-- Academic characterization
of Harvard president Summers

"Do they still call it
 the licorice stick?"
-- Kurt Vonnegut

Related Material:

Midnight Drums for Larry

Thursday, September 13, 2007  3:57 AM

Credit Where Credit Is Due:

Scorsese Is
Kennedy Center
Honoree

"Scorsese, 64, a native New Yorker, thought of being a priest and went to the seminary after high school. But he changed his mind and built a catalogue of great films, many of which are considered the best of their time." -- Washington Post, Sept. 12, 2007

His Life.



My Card.



Columbus Day, 2005

Click on image to enlarge.

Thursday, September 13, 2007  2:02 AM

Battlefield Geometry continued:

Burt Hasen, a New York painter who drew inspiration from his experience working with maps as a military technician during World War II, died on Friday [September 7, 2007] in Manhattan. He was 85 and lived in Lower Manhattan....

During the war he served in the Air Force in the Pacific, where his duties involved close study of aerial maps, an activity that lastingly influenced his work. His densely worked canvases often had an overhead perspective....Toward the end of his life, many of his seemingly abstract paintings were based directly, and in detail, on maps....

In 2006 Mr. Hasen, his wife and the other tenants of a five-story building at 7 Dutch Street near the South Street Seaport made news when they organized against their landlord’s attempt to evict them from the rent-regulated lofts they had occupied for more than 30 years. They subsequently had their leases renewed.

"For every kind of vampire,
there is a kind of cross."
-- Gravity's Rainbow

Wednesday, September 12, 2007  5:01 PM

ART WARS continued:

Vector Logic

Geometry for Jews
(March 2003)
discussed the
following figure:

Some properties of
this figure were also
discussed last March
in my note
The Geometry of Logic.

I learned yesterday from Jonathan Westphal, a professor of philosophy at Idaho State University, that he and a colleague, Jim Hardy, have devised another geometric approach to logic: a system of arrow diagrams that illustrate classical propositional logic. The diagrams resemble those used to illustrate Euclidean vector spaces, and Westphal and Hardy call their approach "a vector system," although it does not involve what a mathematician would regard as a vector space.

 

 

See "Logic as a Vector System,"

Journal of Logic and Computation

15(5) (October, 2005), pp. 751-765.

Related material:

 

(1) Quilt Geometry,

(2) the quilt pattern

below (click for

the source) --

 

Tents of Armageddon--

 

and

(3) yesterday's entry

Battlefield Geometry.

 

"Christ! what are

patterns for?"

-- Amy Lowell

 

Happy Rosh Hashanah.

Tuesday, September 11, 2007  12:07 AM

Jomini Meets Rommel:

Related material:

Log24 entries of
June 11 and 12, 2005:



"In the desert you can
remember your name
'Cause there ain't no one
for to give you no pain."

Monday, September 10, 2007  11:07 AM

Beauty Bare: A Poem

The Story Theory
of Truth --

"I'm a gun for hire,
I'm a saint, I'm a liar,
because there are no facts,
there is no truth,
just data to be manipulated."

-- The Garden of Allah  

Data
  


The data in more poetic form:

To 23,
For 16.

Commentary:

23: See
The Prime Cut Gospel.
16: See
Happy Birthday, Benedict XVI.

Related material:

The remarks yesterday
of Harvard president
Drew G. Faust
to incoming freshmen.

Faust "encouraged
the incoming class
to explore Harvard’s
many opportunities.

'Think of it as
a treasure room
of hidden objects
Harry discovers
at Hogwarts,'
Faust said."

-- Today's Crimson   

For a less Faustian approach,
see the Harvard-educated
philosopher Charles Hartshorne
at The Harvard Square Library
and the words of another
Harvard-educated Hartshorne:

"Whenever one
 approaches a subject from
two different directions,
there is bound to be
an interesting theorem
expressing their relation."
-- Robin Hartshorne

Saturday, September 8, 2007  7:11 PM

Saturday Evening:

May 25, 2007:



"Let's give 'em somethin' to talk about,
A little mystery to figure out"

-- Scarlett Johansson singing on
Saturday Night Live, April 21, 2007

Related material:

Today's previous entry
and the following:

Saturday, September 8, 2007  2:02 PM

Requiem for a Storyteller:

The Intensest Rendezvous

"There is one story and one story only
That will prove worth your telling....

Dwell on her graciousness, dwell on her smiling,
Do not forget what flowers
The great boar trampled down in ivy time.
Her brow was creamy as the crested wave,
Her sea-blue eyes were wild
But nothing promised that is not performed. "

-- Robert Graves,
    To Juan at the Winter Solstice

The Devil and Wallace Stevens:

"In a letter to Harriet Monroe, written December 23, 1926, Stevens refers to the Sapphic fragment that invokes the genius of evening: 'Evening star that bringest back all that lightsome Dawn hath scattered afar, thou bringest the sheep, thou bringest the goat, thou bringest the child home to the mother.' Christmas, writes Stevens, 'is like Sappho's evening: it brings us all home to the fold.' (Letters of Wallace Stevens, 248)"

-- "The Archangel of Evening," Chapter 5 of Wallace Stevens: The Intensest Rendezvous, by Barbara M. Fisher, The University Press of Virginia, 1990, pages 72-73

"Evening. Evening of this day. Evening of the century. Evening of my own life....

At Christmastime my parents held open house on Sunday evenings, and a dozen or more people gathered around the piano, and the apartment was full of music, and theology was sung into my heart."

-- Madeleine L'Engle, Bright Evening Star: Mystery of the Incarnation

From the date of
 L'Engle's death:



Some enchanted evening...     

Friday, September 7, 2007  2:02 PM

Philosophy Wars continued:

Her death, of natural causes, was announced today by her publisher, Farrar, Straus and Giroux."

More >>

Related material:

Log24 entries of
August 31--

"That is how we travel."



-- A Wrinkle in Time,
Chapter 5,
"The Tesseract"

-- and of
September 2
(with update of
 September 5)--

"There is such a thing
as a tesseract."
-- A Wrinkle in Time  

Thursday, September 6, 2007  11:00 AM

 

Sunday, September 2, 2007  5:11 PM

Annals of Quantum Geometry

Comment at the
n-Category Cafe

Re: This Week’s Finds in Mathematical Physics (Week 251)

On Spekkens’ toy system and finite geometry

Background–

• In “Week 251” (May 5, 2007), John wrote:
  “Since Spekkens’ toy system resembles a qubit, he calls it a “toy bit”. He goes on to study systems of several toy bits - and the charming combinatorial geometry I just described gets even more interesting. Alas, I don’t really understand it well: I feel there must be some mathematically elegant way to describe it all, but I don’t know what it is…. All this is fascinating. It would be nice to find the mathematical structure that underlies this toy theory, much as the category of Hilbert spaces underlies honest quantum mechanics.”
  
• In the n-Category Cafe ( May 12, 2007, 12:26 AM, ) Matt Leifer wrote:
  “It’s crucial to Spekkens’ constructions, and particularly to the analog of superposition, that the state-space is discrete. Finding a good mathematical formalism for his theory (I suspect finite fields may be the way to go) and placing it within a comprehensive framework for generalized theories would be very interesting.”
• In the n-category Cafe ( May 12, 2007, 6:25 AM) John Baez wrote:
  “Spekkens and I spent an afternoon trying to think about his theory as quantum mechanics over some finite field, but failed — we almost came close to proving it couldnt’ work.”
  

On finite geometry:

• In “Week 234” (June 12, 2006), John wrote:
  “For a pretty explanation of M₂₄… try this:
  … Steven H. Cullinane, Geometry of the 4 × 4 square,
  http://finitegeometry.org/sc/16/geometry.html”
  

The actions of permutations on a 4 × 4 square in Spekkens’ paper (quant-ph/0401052), and Leifer’s suggestion of the need for a “generalized framework,” suggest that finite geometry might supply such a framework. The geometry in the webpage John cited is that of the affine 4-space over the two-element field.

Related material:

• Some links on finite geometry and quantum information theory, and
• The geometry of qubits.

Skotiniotis et al. note that the group actions on the 4x4 square described in Spekkens' paper [1] may be viewed (as in Geometry of the 4x4 Square and Geometry of Logic) in the context of a hypercube, or tesseract, a structure in which adjacency is isomorphic to adjacency in the 4 × 4 square (on a torus).

Hypercube from the Skotiniotis paper:

Reference:

[1] Robert W. Spekkens, Phys. Rev. A 75, 032110 (2007),

Evidence for the epistemic view of quantum states: A toy theory,

Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, 31 Caroline Street North, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 2Y5 (Received 11 October 2005; revised 2 November 2006; published 19 March 2007.)

"There is such a thing
as a tesseract."
-- A Wrinkle in Time