Dialogos of Eide/Home

  • Geometry of Memory

    Socrates: Yes, having now looked again at these two posts, I see more clearly that the geometers were not an incidental historical interest in your work. They were already forming the skeleton of what we have recently called the Geometry of Memory. The first post, No Royal Road to Geometry? (2004), contains the essential seed.…

  • Who is the Clockmaker?

    Crucifixion (Corpus Hypercubus) – oil painting by Salvador Dalí I see a clock, but I cannot envision the clockmaker. The human mind is unable to conceive of the four dimensions, so how can it conceive of a God, before whom a thousand years and a thousand dimensions are as one? From Cosmic religion: with other…

  • Questions on the History of Mathematics

    Arthur MillerEinstein and Schrödinger never fully accepted the highly abstract nature of Heisenberg’s quantum mechanics, says Miller. They agreed with Galileo’s assertion that “the book of nature is written in mathematics”, but they also realized the power of using visual imagery to represent mathematical symbols. For most people I am sure it is of little…

  • Model Building in Life

    “…underwriting the form languages of ever more domains of mathematics is a set of deep patterns which not only offer access to a kind of ideality that Plato claimed to see the universe as created with in the Timaeus; more than this, the realm of Platonic forms is itself subsumed in this new set of…

  • Donald Coxeter

        “I’m a Platonist — a follower of Plato — who believes that one didn’t invent these sorts of things, that one discovers them. In a sense, all these mathematical facts are right there waiting to be discovered.”Harold Scott Macdonald (H. S. M.) Coxeter   While a layman in my pursuance and understanding of…

  • Raindrops

    I dunno. After some thinking, how is it one can think that such an abstraction could descend into the modern mind, and think it reveals the idea of nature in expression? It’s just an artistic interpretation then, nothing more? The cycle of creativity is an interesting circuit to the droplet form. As an idea and…

  • Who said it?

    At this point in the development, although geometry provided a common framework for all the forces, there was still no way to complete the unification by combining quantum theory and general relativity. Since quantum theory deals with the very small and general relativity with the very large, many physicists feel that, for all practical purposes,…

  • Theoretical Excellence

    Although Aristotle in general had a more empirical and experimental attitude than Plato, modern science did not come into its own until Plato’s Pythagorean confidence in the mathematical nature of the world returned with Kepler, Galileo, and Newton. For instance, Aristotle, relying on a theory of opposites that is now only of historical interest, rejected…

  • E8 and the Blackhole

    “I’m a Platonist — a follower of Plato — who believes that one didn’t invent these sorts of things, that one discovers them. In a sense, all these mathematical facts are right there waiting to be discovered.”Donald (H. S. M.) Coxeter There are two reasons that having mapped E8 is so important. The practical one…

  • Pasquale Del Pezzo and E8 Origination?

    “I’m a Platonist — a follower of Plato — who believes that one didn’t invent these sorts of things, that one discovers them. In a sense, all these mathematical facts are right there waiting to be discovered.“Donald (H. S. M.) Coxeter There are two reasons that having mapped E8 is so important. The practical one…

  • Donald Coxeter: The Man Who Saved Geometry

    “I’m a Platonist — a follower of Plato — who believes that one didn’t invent these sorts of things, that one discovers them. In a sense, all these mathematical facts are right there waiting to be discovered.”Harold Scott Macdonald (H. S. M.) Coxeter Some would stop those from continuing on, and sharing the world behind…