consideration like an angel came
introductory ramble
i’ve been passing around the “spring 2011”
issue of MEdZ pretty freely and’ve posted
quite a bit *about* it.
but it isn’t very well-organized.
so in hopes of finding a curious reader
hoping to learn about the pictures in the zine
(MEdZ S’11 is in pictures-only “lecures
without words” format… an 8-page
micro-zine “unstaplebook” made by copying
all 8 images [including the front & back
covers of course] onto a single standard sheet
and cut-and-folded into tiny-booklet form;
this is the first issue in color and very much
my personal favorite [of the moment]), i decided
to poke around in the ol’ Archive for the ‘Graphics’ Category
(and so on) and write out some connecting remarks.
prehistory of MEdZ S ’11
the title is 
i pronounce this “ess is isomorphic
to the dual of ess” if i read it
symbol-for-symbol; one might also
read it (more freely) as
“S is a self-dual space”.
in some sense, this zine is about
spaces isomorphic to their own duals.
whatever that might mean.
in Some Finite Projective Spaces (01/07/11)
are several lectures-without-words shots
from earlier zines. including this one:
.
this was something of a breakthrough drawing for me.
(Self-duality of the Fano Plane, one might call it
[were it not a lecture-without-words].)
somehow i’d finally stumbled on a “visual” representation
for duality. this inspired a great deal of graphical
fiddling around by me. the same algebraic tricks
used in constructing the 7-point-to-7-line duality
for fano space could *also* be used on any n-point “space”
having n = 1 + q + q^2,
where “q” is some power-of-a-prime.
fano space is the case q = 2. so i did q=3 and q=5
(and the results are in the post i’ve linked to above)
and published ’em. by february 1, i’d developed
a much cleaner-looking graphical presentation
for these (projecive-planes-of-small-order).
but the next real “breakthrough” ideas
came with the case of q=4. in this early draft
i went a little bit “deliberately weird looking”.
a later version of Self-duality of the Projective
Plane Over the Field of Four Elements
became the last display of the (black-and-white)
edition of Spring 2011 and i announced it
on april 17.
but now i have to backtrack. i haven’t done any of the math.
okay. enough for today.
PS. fall quarter finds me doing two sections
of Calc !V at big-state-u. i met the lecturer
wednesday and met my students thursday. whee!
the livingston review 
September 24, 2011 at 1:23 pm
Calc IV? Is this school on trimesters? What’s covered?
I have yet to teach Calc III, which (at the cc’s I’ve taught in) is multi-variable calc. I’d like to teach it sometime in the next few years, so I’d be interested in thinking about the material.
September 24, 2011 at 2:16 pm
we’re on quarters. it’s (the rest of)
multivariable stuff, mostly (intro to
vectors is in III). we did much the
same material in the 80’s at indiana
in a two five-semester-hour
“freshman calc” sequence followed
by a three-hour “calc III”.
IV existed but it wasn’t required
and i didn’t take it. i don’t even
properly know yet *what* i’m doing
this quarter… but some of it’ll be
stuff i never studied formally.
it’ll be fun. and sometimes
nerve-wracking.
September 24, 2011 at 2:23 pm
PS
some of the comments-thus-far
(for example, these remarks
on the fano-plane panel
are found, not in this blog at all
but in the lectures without words
posts in the blog next door.
so it’s even worse-organized than i thought.