# Tag:Klein

• ## Rotations of Klein’s quartic

The usual argument to show that the group of all orientation-preserving symmetries of the Klein quartic is the simple group $L_2(7)$ of order $168$ goes like this: There are two families of $7$ truncated cubes on the Klein quartic. The triangles of one of the seven truncated cubes in the first family have as center […]

• ## the Reddit (after)effect

Sunday january 2nd around 18hr NeB-stats went crazy. Referrals clarified that the post ‘What is the knot associated to a prime?’ was picked up at Reddit/math and remained nr.1 for about a day. Now, the dust has settled, so let’s learn from the experience. A Reddit-mention is to a blog what doping is to a…

• ## what does the monster see?

The Monster is the largest of the 26 sporadic simple groups and has order 808 017 424 794 512 875 886 459 904 961 710 757 005 754 368 000 000 000 = 2^46 3^20 5^9 7^6 11^2 13^3 17 19 23 29 31 41 47 59 71. It is not so much the size…

• ## the buckyball curve

We are after the geometric trinity corresponding to the trinity of exceptional Galois groups The surfaces on the right have the corresponding group on the left as their group of automorphisms. But, there is a lot more group-theoretic info hidden in the geometry. Before we sketch the $L_2(11)$ case, let us recall the simpler…

• ## Klein’s dessins d’enfant and the buckyball

We saw that the icosahedron can be constructed from the alternating group $A_5$ by considering the elements of a conjugacy class of order 5 elements as the vertices and edges between two vertices if their product is still in the conjugacy class. This description is so nice that one would like to have a…

• ## the buckyball symmetries

The buckyball is without doubt the hottest mahematical object at the moment (at least in Europe). Recall that the buckyball (middle) is a mixed form of two Platonic solids the Icosahedron on the left and the Dodecahedron on the right. For those of you who don’t know anything about football, it is that other ball-game,…

• ## Arnold’s trinities

Referring to the triple of exceptional Galois groups $L_2(5),L_2(7),L_2(11)$ and its connection to the Platonic solids I wrote : “It sure seems that surprises often come in triples…”. Briefly I considered replacing triples by trinities, but then, I didnt want to sound too mystic… David Corfield of the n-category cafe and a dialogue on…

• ## Galois’ last letter

“Ne pleure pas, Alfred ! J’ai besoin de tout mon courage pour mourir à vingt ans!” We all remember the last words of Evariste Galois to his brother Alfred. Lesser known are the mathematical results contained in his last letter, written to his friend Auguste Chevalier, on the eve of his fatal duel. Here the…

• ## Dedekind or Klein ?

The black&white psychedelic picture on the left of a tessellation of the hyperbolic upper-halfplane, was called the Dedekind tessellation in this post, following the reference given by John Stillwell in his excellent paper Modular Miracles, The American Mathematical Monthly, 108 (2001) 70-76. But is this correct terminology? Nobody else uses it apparently. So, let’s try…

• ## Iguanodon series of simple groups

Bruce Westbury has a page on recent work on series of Lie groups including exceptional groups. Moreover, he did put his slides of a recent talk (probably at MPI) online. Probably, someone considered a similar problem for simple groups. Are there natural constructions leading to a series of finite simple groups including some sporadic groups…