On 18/6/06 00:57, "Sandy P. Klein" <spklein52@HOTMAIL.COM> wrote:
...when you've got crossword puzzles, and a smart new movie to celebrate them
By RICHARD CORLISS <javascript:void(0)>
The latest fad is Sudoku, a number game in a box, In less than two years, the puzzle has won a popularity that verges on the epidemic. It now appears daily in newspapers on all six inhabited continents and has spawned hundreds of magazines, not to mention dozens of books that elbow traditional puzzle volumes off the Barnes & Noble shelves.
...---... When Humbert Humbert sadly apostrophized his absent inamorata by crying, "Oh my Lolita, I have only words to play with!", he was selling words short. Vladimir Nabokov, the verboleptic who dreamed up Humbert, surely knew this, as do his readers: Lolita is the wordplay lover's favorite novel. Numbers have their power; they can be squared, cubed, extended to infinity. But they can't match the universe of ideas and feelings that come into being when letters collide. Words create worlds. ...---...
Hate to spoil Richard C’s theorizing, but the basic SuDoku is a logical/symbolic not a numerical puzzle. (See my “Anything SuDoku I Can Do Better,” ACM Queue Magazine, Dec 2005). The puzzle uses the numbers 1-9 as a convenience — any 9 distinct symbols can be used. There is (no surprise) a WorldCupSoccer variant called Sven Doku (after the English coach Sven-Goran Eriksson) which uses symbols related to Sven’s active sex life! We need to distinguish Magic Squares from Latin Squares. The former are numeric, the latter symbolic. AND, dear ListMeisters, there are several Nabokovian resonances. Euler, who solved many of the Latin Square problems, is buried in St Petersburg (I’ve made the pilgrimage).
Jansy: many connections with your QUILTS! Not just fancy patterns — practical agricultural applications — dividing fields so that certain combinations of crops/fertilizers/chemicals occupy non-adjacent squares. (I recall VN describing ‘quilted’ fields somewhere in the Butterflies anthology). We mathematicians cringe un peu when false dichotomies are made between “numbers” and “words.”
The underlying, majestic unity of mathematics (whether you call it math or maths!) is pattern/relationship.
Stan Kelly-Bootle