A tesseract. The hypercube is unfolded into eight cubes. Source.
Michael Johnson's latest Substack piece, "Robert Anton Wilson and the Laws of Form," explores RAW's interest in mathematics, with a particular focus on G. Spencer Brown’s 1969 book Laws of Form.
One of Michael's remarks inspired me to re-read one of my favorite Robert Heinlein short stories, "'=And He Built a Crooked House-'". The story made a big impression on me when I first read it in high school, and I still like it. It's available here.
2 comments:
Terrific piece.
Wilson attended Brooklyn Tech, a highly reputable public school, not Brooklyn Poly, an elite private school. Neither was considered the most prestigious school in the US at the time. Students at Brooklyn Tech would have studied "functional" math in their junior and senior years which would have leaned into collegiate freshman-sophomore level math (calculus) without a formal study of calculus. Assuming RAW chose the Structural Technology student major at Brooklyn Tech (the precursor to civil engineering), he would have learned advanced algebra, trigonometry, and solid geometry, but the assertion that he “matriculated with knowledge of Mathematics that graduate students at university are experiencing today” seems sloppy at best.
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