Science, Faith, & Bad Movies:

(with a nod to Matthew McConaughey and his films Contact and, more recently, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past).

In this morning's news:

Wednesday, May 13, 2009  10:31 AM

Annals of Academia:

Feds Rescue
Mathematical
 Ponzi Victims









Amen.

Sunday, May 10, 2009  6:29 PM

A Puzzlement:

Rick’s Tricky Six Puzzle:
S₅ Sits Specially in S₆
by Alex Fink and Richard Guy

Abstract. Rick Wilson identified a sliding block puzzle, the Tricky Six puzzle, in which a uniquely small fraction of the possible scrambled arrangements of the six moving pieces can be restored to the solved state. The permutations one can perform form the abstract group S₅, the symmetric group on five letters, but surprisingly they aren't any of the "obvious" copies of S₅ in S₆ that fix a single point and allow the other five to be permuted arbitrarily. This special S₅ comes from the outer automorphism of S₆, a remarkable group-theoretic map whose presence is felt in several combinatorial objects. We track down this outer automorphism in the Tricky Six puzzle as well as the projective plane of order 4, the Hoffman-Singleton graph, the Steiner system S(5,6,12), and a couple of error-correcting codes.

Meanwhile:

Click to enlarge.

Background:

A pair of matronly women
gave readings of
bad mathematical poetry
on April 28 at

the MAA's Carriage House
Conference Center in
Washington, D.C.

Wednesday, May 6, 2009  11:07 AM

Annals of Humor:

Joke

"My pursuits are a joke
in that the universe is a joke.
One has to reflect
the universe faithfully."

-- John Frederick Michell
Feb. 9, 1933 -
April 24, 2009 

"I laugh because I dare not cry.
This is a crazy world and
the only way to enjoy it
is to treat it as a joke."

-- Robert A. Heinlein,
The Number of the Beast

For Marisa Tomei
  (born Dec. 4, 1964) --
on the day that
   Bob Seger turns 64 --

A Joke:
Points All Her Own

Points All Her Own,
Part I:

(For the backstory, see
the Log24 entries and links
on Marisa Tomei's birthday
last year.)




Points All Her Own,
Part II:

(For the backstory, see
Galois Geometry:
The Simplest Examples.)



Points All Her Own,
Part III:

(For the backstory, see
Geometry of the I Ching
and the history of
Chinese philosophy.)



In simpler terms:

Smackdown!

Sunday, May 3, 2009  7:59 AM

Today's Sermon:

Annals of
Sacred Geometry

(The phrase "sacred geometry"
is of course anathema to most
mathematicians, to whom
nothing is sacred.)

From "The Geometric
Art of John Michell":

From this morning's
 New York Times:

Michell, who wrote on Glastonbury
(a site associated with King Arthur)
and on sacred geometry, seems to
have had a better education than
most sacred-geometry enthusiasts.
He is said to have studied at
Eton and at Trinity College,
Cambridge.

He is not to be
confused with an earlier
Trinity figure, mathematician
John Henry Michell,
who died at 76 on the third
day of February in 1940.

Related material:

See the Log24 entry
from the date of death
 of the later Michell --

  April 24 --

and, in light of the later
Michell's interest in
geometry and King Arthur,
 the Log24 remarks for
Easter Sunday this year
(April 12).

These remarks include the
following figure by
Sebastian Egner related,
if only through myth,
to Arthur's round table --

-- and the classic Delmore Schwartz
poem "Starlight Like Intuition
Pierced the Twelve."

Which of the two John Michells
(each a Merlin figure of sorts)
would be more welcome in
Camelot is open to debate.