Linear algebra and wine

September 30, 2024 @ 2:19 pm · Filed by under Humor

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A recent email from Jean Gallier to the members of Penn's Department of Computer and Information Sciences included this picture

…under the comment "Apparently the Greeks had already figured that there was a connection between wine and linear algebra." The connection to Linear A(lgebra) is provided by Jean's two-volume 2020 book Linear Algebra and Optimization with Applications to Machine Learning.

A glimpse of Jean's personal connections with wine is suggested by this page…

As for the Linear A symbol for wine, it's covered in Ester Salgarella 2020 article "A Note on the Linear A & B Ideogram AB 131/VIN (um)‘Wine’and Its Variants: References to Time Notation?", which includes Figure 1:

The Cretan version is in Figure 2:

And the Egyptian one is in Figure 3:

For the "Time Notation" part, I invite you to read the paper.

September 30, 2024 @ 2:19 pm · Filed by under Humor


4 Comments

  1. Chris Button said,

    September 30, 2024 @ 8:14 pm

    Not sure if I've come across any examples of a temporal context in the oracle bones. But just one example that has come up in LLog before of graphic variation seeming to encode a nuance in meaning for the same word is how 帝 is written differently depending on whether it refers to the god or the sacrifice.

  2. Philip Taylor said,

    October 1, 2024 @ 1:49 am

    I wonder what happened to the inter-word spaces in "quantitiesofwineareincludedintherecapitulative" …

  3. Mark Liberman said,

    October 1, 2024 @ 8:37 am

    @Philip Taylor: 'I wonder what happened to the inter-word spaces in "quantitiesofwineareincludedintherecapitulative" …'

    The spaces are there, just small in order to make the text justification work.

    Note that the label contains no word-hyphenation in the service of justification, which means that spaces must be varied in width.

    (Sorry to unpick your nit…)

  4. Philip Taylor said,

    October 1, 2024 @ 12:06 pm

    My nit is just fine, thank you Mark — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_nit_policy#/media/File:Human_head_louse_egg.jpg

    Incidentally, even TeX has trouble setting that text :

    Overfull \hbox (4.83469pt too wide) in paragraph at lines 8–22
    \basefont quantities of wine are included in the recapitulative|

    but at least it warns the user that that particular line is problematic … Setting \emergencystretch to 1 em allows it to typeset without error, but then the line breaks differ from the original — https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/n8kb2kgeugma902ab3xme/Linear-A-Wine.pdf?rlkey=dqu6ptl6wcwuptje4nv2vo770&dl=0

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