Thus, what looks to us like a sphere of scientific knowledge more accurately should be represented as the inside of a highly irregular and spiky object, like a pincushion or porcupine, with very sharp extensions in certain directions, and virtually no knowledge in immediately adjacent areas.  If our intellectual gaze could shift slightly, it would alter each quill’s direction, and suddenly our entire reality would change.

Herbert J. Bernstein • “Idols of Modern Science”

Re: Laws of Form • Lyle Anderson
Re: Richard J. Lipton • The Art Of Math

Dear Lyle,

Thanks for the link to the Wikipedia article on Cactus Graphs, which I found surprisingly good for that venue.  I was pleased to see it mentioned the role my own first teacher in graph theory, Frank Harary, played in the history of cactus graphs.  Frank co-authored Graphical Enumeration and many papers with Ed Palmer, my second teacher in graph theory and later my advisor in grad school.

Synchronicity being what it is, one of the jobs I worked on between my undergrad decade and my first crack at grad school was scanning and measuring particle interactions on bubble-chamber filmstrips in a high-energy physics lab, so I got a gadshillion gammas engrammed in my brain from that time.

Regards,

Jon

Resources

• Logic Syllabus
• Logical Graphs
• Cactus Language
• Duality Indicating Unity
• Futures Of Logical Graphs
• Minimal Negation Operators
• Survey of Theme One Program
• Survey of Animated Logical Graphs
• Propositional Equation Reasoning Systems
• Applications • Constraint Satisfaction Problems

cc: Cybernetics (1) (2) • Laws of Form • FB | Logical Graphs • Ontolog Forum (1) (2)
• Peirce List (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (10) (11) (12) (13) • Structural Modeling (1) (2)
• Systems Science (1) (2)