# Recent Advances in Packing

The weekend before last, I overcame my reluctance to travel and went to a mathematics conference, the American Mathematical Society’s Spring Central Sectional Meeting. I gave a talk in the “Recent Advances in Packing” session, spreading the word about SICs. My talk followed those by Steve Flammia and Marcus Appleby, who spoke about the main family of known SIC solutions while I covered the rest (the sporadic SICs). The co-organizer of that session, Dustin Mixon, has posted an overall summary and the speakers’ slides over at his blog.

# 3, 8, 24, 28, Eureka!

The news has been so unrelentingly bad these past few weeks that I’m taking momentary refuge in good old numerology. I happened to re-read this blog post by John Baez about the free modular lattice on 3 generators. This is a nice bit of pure math that features rather prominently the numbers 3, 8, 24 and 28. The numerological part is that I noticed the same numbers popping up in a problem that I had studied for other reasons, so I figured it would be fun to write about, even if my 28 isn’t exactly equal to Baez’s 28, so to speak.
Continue reading 3, 8, 24, 28, Eureka!

# New Paper Dance

B. C. Stacey, “Geometric and Information-Theoretic Properties of the Hoggar Lines” (2016), arXiv:1609.03075 [quant-ph].

We take a tour of a set of equiangular lines in eight-dimensional Hilbert space. This structure defines an informationally complete measurement, that is, a way to represent all quantum states of three-qubit systems as probability distributions. Investigating the shape of this representation of state space yields a pattern of connections among a remarkable spread of mathematical constructions. In particular, studying the Shannon entropy of probabilistic representations of quantum states leads to an intriguing link between the questions of real and of complex equiangular lines. Furthermore, we will find relations between quantum information theory and mathematical topics like octonionic integers and the 28 bitangents to a quartic curve.

All things told, SIC-POVMs are just about the damnedest things I’ve ever studied in mathematics.

(Also listed on SciRate.)

# New(-ish) Publications

I’ve had a few scholarly items come out in the past several weeks—new stuff, and updated versions of old stuff. Here are their coordinates:
Continue reading New(-ish) Publications

# On the arXivotubes

Michael Schnabel, Matthias Kaschube, Fred Wolf, “Pinwheel stability, pattern selection and the geometry of visual space” (arXiv:0801.3832).

It has been proposed that the dynamical stability of topological defects in the visual cortex reflects the Euclidean symmetry of the visual world. We analyze defect stability and pattern selection in a generalized Swift-Hohenberg model of visual cortical development symmetric under the Euclidean group E(2). Euclidean symmetry strongly influences the geometry and multistability of model solutions but does not directly impact on defect stability.

Note to self: file alongside Bressloff, Cowan et al. for future reference.

# Carnival of Mathematics #24

The twenty-fourth Carnival of Mathematics is online at Ars Mathematica. To Ars, 24 is a special number because the Leech lattice lives in 24 dimensions (and, really, what could be creepier than a lattice of leeches? — methinks that could be the title for the sequel to The Halting Oracle). It’s also interesting to the secretive, cultish cabal of quantum gravity research, since it’s 26 (the critical dimension for bosonic string theory) minus 2 (the dimensionality of the string world-sheet). These two occurrences are actually related, although there’s a reason the relationship falls in a domain called Moonshine theory. . . .

# Lent of Physics Blogging

For a while, we had a blog carnival of physics writing, Philosophia Naturalis. However, it looks rather moribund today: the last installment to date was on 4 October (at Dynamics of Cats), and the “next available hosting opportunity” was the first of November, which is already almost a month gone.

Combined with the recent description of the physics blogoweb as “an intellectual wasteland,” and we’ve got plenty of excuses to feel a little depressed.

Oh, and have you noticed that ScienceBlogs.com still can’t do math notation? So much for discussing science the way that, you know, actual scientists do. So much for reflecting the increasing quantitative aspect of the life sciences, discussing interdisciplinary work, or doing anything beyond the same old carping over innumeracy. Maybe they’re intimidated by that old “each equation cuts the readership in half” bromide. Or maybe they think that allowing the use of calculus and other such scary mathematics would be “bad framing.”
Continue reading Lent of Physics Blogging

# Psychedelic Bibliographies

Advances in the History of Psychology, a blog operated out of York University, has posted annotated bibliographies of psychedelic research, both on general psychological research and on studies focusing specifically on LSD.

(Hah! And you thought I was just trying to make a strange juxtaposition in my title.)

The AHP folks note something which I find interesting but not wholly unexpected: while plenty of papers have been written about LSD and marijuana, the academic literature doesn’t appear to have histories dedicated to the two-carbon phenethylamines like 2C-B or other significant drugs like DMT, DOM or mescaline. These remarkable little molecules sometimes get mentioned in general discussions or in studies of other drugs, but they don’t appear to have peer-reviewed literature of their own. PiHKAL (1991) and TiHKAL (1997) seem to be the end of the line.

One unfortunate consequence of this lack is our inability to judge the universality of neurological reactions to chemical stimuli. In this context, I’d like to bring up the paper by Bressloff, Cowan, Golubitsky and Thomas in Neural Computation (2002), “What geometric visual hallucinations tell us about the visual cortex.”
Continue reading Psychedelic Bibliographies

# Einstein Summation and Levi-Civita Symbols

PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT: if any of you saw me wearing black corduroy pants and a purple T-shirt emblazoned with a picture of my friend Mike wearing a squid on his head, yes, it was laundry day. Rest assured, the reality disruption was only temporary, and normal service should be resumed shortly.

Now, to the business of the day. Earlier, we took a look at rotations and found a way to summarize their behavior using commutator relations. Recall that the commutator of A and B is defined to be

$\{A,B\} = AB – BA.$

For real or complex numbers, the commutator vanishes, but as we saw, the commutators of matrices can be non-zero and quite interesting. We recognized that this would have to be the case, since we used matrices to describe rotations in three-dimensional space, and rotations about different axes in 3D do not commute. Looking at very small rotations, we also found that the commutators of rotation generators were tied up together in a way which involved cyclic permutations. Today, we’ll express this discovery more neatly, using the Einstein summation convention and a mathematical object called the Levi-Civita tensor.
Continue reading Einstein Summation and Levi-Civita Symbols

# Rotation Matrices

My group theory teacher, Prof. Daniel Freedman, had some interesting professorial habits. When invoking some bit of background knowledge with which we were all supposed to have been familiar, he would say, “As you learned in high school. . . .” Typically, this would make a lecture sound a bit like the following:

“To finish the proof, note that we’re taking the trace of a product of matrices. As you learned in high school, the trace is invariant under cyclic permutations. . . .”

Prof. Freedman also said “seventeen” for “zero” from time to time. After working out a long series of mathematical expressions on the blackboard, showing that this and that cancel so that the overall result should be nothing, with the students alternating their glances between the board and their notes, he would complete the equation and proclaim, “Equals seventeen!” At which point, all the students look up and wonder, momentarily, what they just missed.

“Here, we’re summing over the indices of an antisymmetric tensor, so by exchanging i and j here and relabeling there, we can show that the quantity has to equal the negative of itself. The contraction of the tensor is therefore, as you learned in high school — seventeen!”

One day, I managed to best his line. I realized that the formula currently on the board had to work out to one, not zero, so when he wrote the equals sign, paused and turned to the class with an inquiring eye, I quickly raised my hand and said, “Eighteen!”

Incidentally, truly simple topics like Euler’s formula and trigonometric identities were supposed to have been learned in middle or elementary school.

Today, we’ll talk about one of the things Prof. Freedman said we should have covered in high school: the rotation matrices for two- and three-dimensional rotations. This will give us the quantitative, symbolic tools necessary to talk about commutativy and non-commutativity, the topic we explored in an earlier post.
Continue reading Rotation Matrices

# Lolquarks

From Snakes on a Blog. Other possibilities naturally suggest themselves: “I has a spin” (or “scalar cat can has no spin!”). If anyone can make a picture appropriate for the caption “SO(3) Cat can has double covur,” I’ll award you the first-ever Sunclipse Group Theory Popularization Medal.

For earlier entries in this genre, see Science-Themed Lolcats.

# Group Theory Homework

One reason I call this site a “blag” and not a “blog” is that I’m always late.

For example, I’m finally typing up the group-theory homework assignment which Ben gave last Monday (and which will be due next Monday). During our seminar over in BU territory, we discussed the relations among the Lie groups SU(2) and SO(3) and the manifolds S3 and RP3. Problems will be given below the fold.

Also, Eric will be discussing statistical physics this afternoon at NECSI.
Continue reading Group Theory Homework

# Group Theory Tonight at BU

Just a reminder:

This evening at 17 o’clock, or shortly thereafter, we will be meeting in Boston University mathematics territory to discuss group theory. Ben will be leading the discussion, poking us to consider the various transformations of the type

$f: \mathbb{R}^2 \rightarrow \mathbb{R}^2.$

What are the different structures of interest which these mappings can preserve? What types of maps preserve distances, angles, areas, orientation (chirality), or topological properties? Notes for past group-theory sessions are available in PDF format, or as a gzipped tarball for those who wish to play with the original LaTeX source.

(Don’t forget your stat-mech homework!)

# Are We Covering the Wrong Subjects?

Uh-oh. It looks like the time Ben has spent teaching groups, semigroups and monoids might have all been for naught. Just look at what Dr. Ray has to say:

Cubicism, Not group theory.
If ignorant of the almighty
Time Cube Creation Truth,
you deserve to be killed.

Killing you is not immoral –
but justified to save life on
Earth for future generations.

# First Session on Group Theory

Yesterday evening, we had our first seminar session on the group theory track, led by Ben Allen. We covered the definition of groups, semigroups and monoids, and we developed several examples by transforming a pentagon. After a brief interlude on discrete topology and â€” no snickers, please â€” pointless topology, Ben introduced the concept of generators and posed several homework questions intended to lead us into the study of Lie groups and Lie algebras.

Notes are available in PDF format, or as a gzipped tarball for those who wish to play with the original LaTeX source. Likewise, the current notes for the entropy and information-theory seminar track (the Friday sessions) are available in both PDF and tarball flavors.

Our next session will be Friday afternoon at NECSI, where we will continue discussing Claude Shannon’s classic paper, A/The Mathematical Theory of Communication (1948). The following Monday, Eric will treat us to the grand canonical ensemble.