What themes are we getting back to, now that we’re winding up the Spring Term, which in Portland means Rose Festival? Our school is async so it’s not a matter of everyone being on the same page. Rather, it s a matter of students being encouraged to chronicle their journeys, with teachers role modeling how that’s done. “Where am I in the curriculum?” is always a relevant question.
Speaking for myself, I find myself circling a well-known meme in these parts, namely 4D vs 4D vs 4D, by which I mean to define a triangle of three namespaces, kind of how DAF does the triangle between his, professor Jiang’s and William Blake’s namespaces.
In my case, I’m mapping what I consider to be the primary shoptalks talks making use of 4D by the end of the 1900s, with all of them having trajectories since then, up to the 2020s where we are at this tick mark. Those three shoptalks would be: that of Hilbert Space and linear algebra; the non-Euclidean geometry of the Relativity Theorists; the lesser known esoteric geometry of the American pragmatist R. Buckminster Fuller.
Linear algebra took off with the emergence of computing power, while Relativity continued to wrestle with its quantum mechanical counterpart. Fuller’s namespace emerged as a more distinct entity thanks to the self-reinforcing feedback loops of the LLMs, which thrive on stochastic alignment.
Whereas the subculture was small, the usage patterns were consistent enough, when coupled with Synergetics itself, to preserve a lot of the patterns, even as a few were adding even more refinements (e.g. the Koski Identities, Gerald de Jong’s Pretenst, more computer languages, such as my own Pythonic implementation of the concentric hierarchy, using quadrays).
On Synergeo I’m looking into a Pandora’s Box of issues regarding the power of Synergetics to assist us in reaching escape velocity vs-a-vs obsolete patterns in the Anglosphere (the world of English speakers), by jiggering with the logic and showing us some off ramps from Ye Olde English juggernaut. Debugging takes work, including trial and error.
America has always been a meme pool in ferment, a confluence of many cultures, so it’s not that surprising that its curricula would morph accordingly, even if exactly what that looks like remains unpredictable. On Synergeo I’ve been recalling the New Math, if only to remind readers that curricula, including in Math World are not static. High school in 2026 might be a lot different from what you remember from your own experience, to the point of unrecognizable in a lotta ways, but then quite familiar in other ways. Times change in how they express the generalized principles, even if those principles stay eternal in principle.
