Monday, January 2, 2017

On Crunchy Numbers



In the Ike era, we grew up on Wonderbread® :  a sort of Brot ohne Eigenschaften whose edulcorated transmogrification is known as Twinkies.
Since that time, we have learned to abjure, not only such treif, but anything not calling itself wholegrain.   Or, better still, multigrain: some brands boast seven grains, a few claim twelve; disparate mixtures  full of gritty, grainy, crunchy goodness.
 
Now  our local upscale supermarket offers a variety of own-branded bread, that boasts (in large letters) no fewer than

27 GRAINS

That really surprised me.   It’s one of the main points of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel  that digestible, domesticable, feasibly growable grains  are not to be had for the asking;  there just aren’t that many of them.   The explanation is that, a little lower down and in smaller font, the label reads

AND SEEDS

In other words, this brand of bread is equally at home in the bakery and in the bird-feeder.

Our son, scoffing at this terminological legerdemain, inquired why the market chose “27” of all things.   Unhesitating I replied, “Because it is three to the third power -- the trinitarian pinnacle of the Perfect Cubes”.  -- Said heir and offspring, himself a nascent mathematician, appreciated the point, but doubted that your average shopper was aware of such things.

And indeed, there is a larger point.   For number-theorists like Ramanujan, each integer has its own flavor, its own biography and backstory -- cf. the famous incident of the taxicab numbers (in which G.H. Hardy plays the straight-man or fall-guy).  But for ordinary folks, like rocket scientists (who deal with contingent analogue quantities, rather than integral transcendent entities) or English professors (surrounded by a midge-cloud of  pre- or sub-arithmetical post-modernists), all but a very few -- small -- integers  will be featureless.   Some will be visually familiar:  3 and 4 (the triangle, the square), 5 (the quincunx on dice), 6 (boxcars, ditto),  7 (a “lucky” number for the superstitious) or 23 (ditto, for the more cerebral), 10 (count your fingers), 20 (with its portrait of Jackson).   Some will be familiar for incidental, non-mathematical reasons, like 100 and 1000 (which owe their prominence to the accident of base-10 notation -- a case of decimal fetishism).   --  Those associations are widely shared;  but there may be others  more individual;  as, (mostly for girls), “sweet sixteen” (or in Latin America, la quinceañera).   Indeed,  any integer small enough that you have lived that number of years (particularly those for which you still kept track of your birthdays).    As, the poem(-collection) “Now We Are Six” (by A.A. Milne), an anniversary in memory still green (and which I teach to the neighborhood children when they reach that delightful threshold).  Or…. 27;  which, even before I had attained that age, always seemed numinous (probably, indeed, for its prime-power nature), and which was ratified as such by my marrying at exactly that age, quite close to my birthday.    Whereas, for most folks, a number like 81 (pourtant a perfect square, as well as  3^2^2, to boot) tells no tale, sings no melody.

~

The preceding remarks are of psychological or anthropological interest, but of no moment for mathematics itself:  They present an external, human-centered view of the integers.  But further considerations suggest a subtle distinction between two ways a given integer may be “interesting” (a more bloodless equivalent of our anthropomorphic term crunchy).   We might dub these internal and external:  both times internal to mathematics as a whole, but in one case only, internal to number theory in its most elementary sense.

Thus, consider 5.  Number-theoretically, it’s a prime and that is pretty much that; but in the geometry of three-space, it is the number of Platonic solids.  Or 17:  Number-theoretically it is both a prime and a Fermat number; but in the geometry of two-space, it is the number of crystallographic planar symmetries.  
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wallpaper_group

Or: 230, the number of space groups.

Here, the integer in question is not a creature or crystal considered distinct and in itself, but a stopping-point one arrives at by calculating and counting.  There might have turned out to be, say, 18 plane symmetry groups, without upending the world; but the internal structures of 17 and 18 are unrelated.


~

This dichotomy of internal versus external interest  chez the integers, represents ideal poles, which are not exhaustive, but bookend a spectrum.  As, probably intermediate: the “crunchiness” of natural numbers as viewed by students of finite groups.    (Here the masticatory metaphor  returns unbidden, for I always imagine finite groups along the lines of a wrinkly-surfaced walnut.  Finite simple groups -- those for which no homomorphism can split out any subchunk as its “kernel” -- the hardest nuts, the ones you can’t crack.)  Simon Norton seems to have had such an intimate gustatory appreciation of individual finite groups, before he Threw It All Away and went off to ride the bus.


~

In light of our training, we know at least one thing to do, should we ever be given an unfamiliar integer and locked in a room, with no other toys to play with.  Namely, we can probe for primality.  (An activity that becomes, indeed, crucial, for cryptographers.)
But now imagine that instead we had been handed some fraction like

      (2 +  √137) /4081

Untrained, we react with dismay.

Yet later, learning of the Golden Section, (1 + √5)/2, and its many remarkable properties -- not the least of these being that it can be represented as the infinite continued fraction consisting of nothing but ones -- we conclude that the critter is crunchy indeed;  and that there are more things in heaven and earth, than are dreamt of here below, and that we must anticipate the afterlife, before we could begin to embrace them.


~

Our treatment focused on what the innumerate are missing, much like what the Daltonist, unbeknownst, lacks of the hues.   But there is such a thing as unearned crunchiness --  a bogus significance assigned to certain numinous numbers, like 19 among the Baha’i’s; the “23 enigma”; 666; 1000 AD as the Millennium; the mumbo-jumbo numbers in “Lost” and "Touch"; for all which, cf. Wikipedia on apophenia.   In the face of such things (which have snared some otherwise rational people -- a close friend of mine, critically brilliant but unmathematical, fell for the “23” business), we are inclined to say, along with Nulla  extra ecclesiam  salus,  that  Nulla  extra mathematicam  ratio.


~

For a rather recondite example of crunchiness, consider the ‘amicable numbers’  (  الآعداد المتحابة) reported by the medieval historian Ibn-Khaldun in his Muqaddima .   Apparently only two of these were known to the Arabic medievals (or: they are the only two numbers characterized by a theorem of Thabit ibn Qurra), and they are not much to look at:  220 and 284;  but they meant something to contemporary practitionars of the talismanic art.

The modern view is summarized here:


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