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| Visible Mathematics, continued
Today's mathematical birthdays:
Saunders Mac Lane, John Venn,
and Sir William Rowan Hamilton.
It is well known that the quaternion group
is a subgroup of GL(2,3), the general linear group on the 2-space over GF(3), the 3-element Galois field.
The figures below illustrate this fact.
Related material: Visualizing GL(2,p)
"The typical example of a finite group is GL(n,q), the
general linear
group of n dimensions over the field with q elements. The student who
is introduced to the subject with other examples is being completely
misled."
-- J. L. Alperin, book review,
Bulletin (New Series) of the American
Mathematical Society 10
(1984), 121
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| Epiphany Term
"In Epiphany Term, 1942, C.S. Lewis delivered the Riddell
Memorial Lectures... in....
the University of Durham.... He
delivered three lectures
entitled 'Men without Chests,' 'The Way,' and 'The
Abolition of Man.' In them he set out to attack and
confute what he saw as the errors of his age. He started by
quoting some fashionable lunacy from an educationalists'
textbook, from which he developed a general attack on moral
subjectivism. In his second lecture he argued against
various contemporary isms, which purported to replace
traditional objective morality. His final lecture, 'The
Abolition of Man,' which also provided the title of the
book published the following year, was a sustained attack on
hard-line scientific anti-humanism.
The intervening fifty years have largely vindicated Lewis."
-- J. R. Lucas, The Restoration of Man
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By SALAH NASRAWI
The Associated Press
Tuesday, August 2, 2005 9:50 AM EDT
RIYADH,
Saudi Arabia -- Muslim leaders and Saudi princes bade farewell to King
Fahd on Tuesday, saying prayers in a packed Riyadh mosque and then
burying him in an unmarked desert grave in keeping with the kingdom's
austere version of Islam. |
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| Today's birthday:
Peter O'Toole
"What is it, Major Lawrence,
that attracts
you personally
to the desert?"
"It's clean."
Visible Mathematics,
continued --
From May 18:
Lindbergh's Eden "The Garden of Eden is behind us and there is no road
back to innocence; we can only go forward." -- Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Earth Shine, p. xii
"Beauty is the proper conformity of the parts to one another and to the whole."
-- Werner Heisenberg, " Die Bedeutung des Schönen in der exakten Naturwissenschaft," address delivered to the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, 9 Oct. 1970, reprinted in Heisenberg's Across the Frontiers, translated by Peter Heath, Harper & Row, 1974 Related material:  The Eightfold Cube
(in Arabic, ka'b)
and
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| Final Arrangements, continued
Kismet
From yesterday's Log24 --
Clive Barker's Weaveworld:
Another of the angel's attributes rose from memory
now, and with it a sudden shock of comprehension. Uriel had been
the angel left to stand guard at the gates of Eden.
Eden.
At the word, the creature blazed. Though the
ages had driven it to grief and forgetfulness, it was still an angel:
its fires unquenchable. The wheels of its body rolled, the
visible mathematics of its essence turning on itself and preparing for
new terrors.
There were others here, the Seraph said, that called this place Eden. But I never knew it by that name.
"What, then?" Shadwell asked.
Paradise, said the Angel, and at the word a new picture appeared in Shadwell's mind. It was the garden, in another age....
This was a place of making, the Angel said. Forever and ever. Where things came to be.
"To be?"
To find a form, and enter the world.
If I stand starry-eyed
That's a danger in paradise
For mortals who stand beside
An angel like you.
-- Robert Wright and George Forrest
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