Comments on: Galois’ last letter

By: lieven

lieven — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 05:58:54 +0000

@Kea, sorry about that. The pdf-conversion can be found here.

@David, thanks for mentioning the problem with the comment of the Arnold post. Ill fix it and reply to your comment there, later today

By: Kea

Kea — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 02:23:57 +0000

David or Lieven, is there any chance you could convert Arnold’s paper to pdf so that more of us could download it?

By: David Corfield

David Corfield — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 20:57:51 +0000

The comments seem to be closed on your Arnold post, so I’ll pose a question here. Arnold, as you note, sees his trinities as intimately connected – ‘functorial’, ‘commutative diagrams’, etc. So does your alteration in 1 to include the octonions and exclude the reals suggest you don’t find that plausible? Trinity 16 hasn’t been linked to other trinities, has it?

By: k. sris

k. sris — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 14:51:11 +0000

thanks. i look forward to your post.

i got interested after reading the nice groups and their graphs by magnus and grossman. cayley table is so easy to construct with the graphs. i will check out adventures in groups theory.

i have another question that i have been wondering for a while. what is the motivation and history for considering the conjuagte a^{-1}ba. i kind of know that conjugate of b is b modified by a and that it in some kind of way measures the commutativity of a and b. but i like to know how does one come up with this particular combination?

By: lieven

lieven — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 06:04:48 +0000

@david : no, i havent read Arnold's paper yet, thanks for the reference, ill check it out.

@k. sris : Platonic solids and groups are usually covered in a first year course in group theory and is included in many textbooks eg. ledermann. McKay correspondence is an application to the representation theory of finite groups (in antwerp i teach this the second year). perhaps ill post about it later. if you like to have a less dry introduction to finite groups (including details on L_2(p) and the Platonics) i can advise strongly "Adventures in group theory" by David Joyner (published by John Hopkins University).

By: David Corfield

David Corfield — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 18:33:30 +0000

Have you read Arnold on surprising triples here? Page 10 discusses yours.

By: k. sris

k. sris — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 16:37:50 +0000

i enjoy reading your blog. can you point me to an easy reference ideally at undergrad level.

By: Carl Brannen

Carl Brannen — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 09:54:58 +0000

If there is an after-life, and I am so lucky as to meet Galois, I am going to tell him that each time I was reminded of his early demise my thought was “what an idiot!” The reason the military drafts people that age is because when humans reach 25 they’re no longer as willing to die for causes, lost or won, that are quickly forgotten.

By: Kea

Kea — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 23:39:45 +0000

Genus 70 ... Moonshine, Moonshine! Cool! It sure seems that surprises often come in triples… Yes, just like neutrino masses! And ternary logic!