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Nordic Number

“Nine is a very powerful Nordic number.” — Katherine Neville, The Magic Circle See also Arcade Fire in this journal.

The Christmas Theorem

From the preface to Introduction to the Construction of Class Fields , by Harvey Cohn (Cambridge University Press, 1985): “It is an elementary observation that an integral right triangle has…

Titles

From the title page of a book quoted here yesterday: Another title, in memory of a former mayor of Tel Aviv who reportedly died yesterday: “President Reuven Rivlin called…

Misery

The title is the usual pronunciation of MSRI, the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute at 17 Gauss Way, Berkeley, California. The late Scandinavian novelist Stieg Larsson might prefer to…

Big Time

The following post suggests the Spiders and Snakes of Fritz Leiber’s Changewar , a mythology inspired by the hallucinations of delirium tremens .

Good Question

Related material: Here “Lucifer’s temple” refers to Josefine Lyche’s Lynx 760 gallery in Oslo.

Mathematics for Tromsø

Loren Olson, Harvard ’64, a professor of mathematics at Norway’s Tromsø University,* died June 22, 2014. In his memory, a search in this journal for Lie Group. That search…

Pythagorean Selfie

“Rarely is a TV show as brilliant and as terrible as Selfie .” — Kevin Fallon on a new ABC TV show that starts tonight at 8 PM ET…

Pythagoras to Cohn

Harvey Cohn on class field theory and a question that might have been asked by Pythagoras: See also yesterday’s Michaelmas Mystery and Michaelmas Texts.

Michaelmas Texts

This morning’s previous post quoted a sort of invitation to damnation from Princeton University Press: An alternative to damnation: