Annals of Poetry:

May and Zan



May Swenson (left)
and Zan Knudson (right)

"It's a similar syndrome to the one Katharine Hepburn's star athlete and her supercilious fiancé have in 'Pat and Mike.'

The fiancé is always belittling Hepburn, so whenever he's in the stands, her tennis and golf go kerflooey. Finally, her manager, played by Spencer Tracy, asks the fiancé to stay away from big matches, explaining, 'You are the wrong jockey for this chick.'

'You know, except when you're around, we got a very valuable piece of property here,' he says, later adding, 'When you're around, she's no good, she's dead, see?'"

"Then she has a vision of herself,
enclosed by an unfolded hypercube,
and then an immense screen
behind it covered by complex,
     ever-shifting patterns...."

"Does the word 'tesseract'
mean anything to you?"
-- Robert A. Heinlein

ART WARS continued:

RELATED MATERIAL

Figure 1 --
Concept from 1819:


(Footnotes 1 and 2)

Figure 2 --
The Third Gift, 1837:



Froebel's Third Gift

Froebel, the inventor of
kindergarten, worked as
an assistant to the
crystallographer Weiss
mentioned in Fig. 1.

(Footnote 3)

Figure 3 --
The Third Gift, 1906:



Figure 4 --
Solomon's Cube,
1981 and 1983:



Figure 5 --
Design Cube, 2006:

The above screenshot shows a
moveable JavaScript display
of a space of six dimensions
(over the two-element field).

(To see how the display works,
try the Kaleidoscope Puzzle first.)

For some mathematical background, see

•  Finite Geometry of the Square and Cube,
•  The Eightfold Cube, and
•  Block Designs.
  

Footnotes:

1. Image said to be after Holden and Morrison, Crystals and Crystal Growing, 1982
2. Curtis Schuh, "The Library: Biobibliography of Mineralogy," article on Mohs
3. Bart Kahr, "Crystal Engineering in Kindergarten" (pdf), Crystal Growth & Design, Vol. 4 No. 1, 2004, 3-9

Mathematics and Narrative, continued:

Cubist Language Game

"Philosophers ponder the idea
 of identity: what it is to give
 something a name on Monday
 and have it respond to 
  that name on Friday...."

-- Bernard Holland 

Monday: From Log24 on August 19, 2003 and on Ash Wednesday, 2004: a reviewer on An Instance of the Fingerpost:: "Perhaps we are meant to  see the story as a cubist  retelling of the crucifixion."

Related material
for today's anniversay
of the birth of philosopher
Jose Ortega y Gasset:

Cubism as Multispeech
and
Halloween Meditations
(illustrated below)



"Modern art...
will always have
the masses against it."
-- Ortega y Gasset, 1925   

ART WARS continued:

Kernel of Eternity
continued from April 29
 

Wikipedia on the Klein group (denoted V, for Vierergruppe):

In this representation, V is a normal subgroup of the alternating group A₄ (and also the symmetric group S₄) on 4 letters. In fact, it is the kernel of a surjective map from S₄ to S₃. According to Galois theory, the existence of the Klein four-group (and in particular, this representation of it) explains the existence of the formula for calculating the roots of quartic equations in terms of radicals.

For radicals of another sort, see A Logocentric Meditation, A Mass for Lucero, and Steven Erlanger in The New York Times-- "France Still Divided Over Lessons of 1968 Unrest."

The Klein Group as Kernel
of a Map from S₄ to S₃:



Click to enlarge.

For those who prefer Galois's
politics to his mathematics,
there is
MAY 68: STREET POSTERS
FROM THE PARIS REBELLION
at London's Southbank Centre
 (May 1 - June 1, 2008).

ART WARS continued:

Synchronicity,
Part Deux



From
"On the Holy Trinity,"
the entry in the 3:20 PM
French footprint:

"...while the scientist sees
everything that happens
in one point of space,
the poet feels
everything that happens
in one point of time...
all forming an
instantaneous and transparent
organism of events...."

-- Vladimir Nabokov

From
"Angel in the Details,"
 the entry in the 3:59 PM
French footprint:

"I dwell in Possibility -
A fairer House than Prose"

-- Emily Dickinson

These, along with this afternoon's
earlier entry, suggest a review
of a third Log24 item, Windmills,
with an actress from France as...

Changing Woman: "Kaleidoscope turning...    Shifting pattern within unalterable structure..." -- Roger Zelazny, Eye of Cat

"When life itself seems lunatic,
who knows where madness lies?"

-- For the source, see 
Joyce's Nightmare Continues.