G Spencer Brown resources

[Up: Favorite authors] [Robot Wisdom home page]

G Spencer Brown resources on the Web

NEW: German edition of Laws of Form claims to include 4-color-map proof [info]

New: synopsis of Lion's Teeth [info]

Bio:

1923: born 2 April, in Grimsby, Lincolnshire, England (father engineer, chessplayer, painter, writer)
1936-41: Mill Hill; University of London
1941-43: London Hospital Medical College
1943-47: Royal Navy (telegraphist, radio mechanic)
1947-52: Trinity College Cambridge (chess, gliding)
1949-50:. Racing driving with Gavin Maxwell
1950-51: Philosophy with Ludwig Wittgenstein
1951-52: Perrott Student in Psychical Research (hypnosis)
1952-58: Christ Church Oxford
1953.: "Statistical significance in psychical research" published in Nature
1958: "Probability and Scientific Inference" [cited]
1959-61: Chief Logic Designer, Mullard Equipment Ltd
1963-64: Adviser to British Rail
1964: Soccer Correspondent to the Daily Express
1960ff: Worked with Bertrand Russell in Foundations of Mathematics
1961: Unpublished ur-LoF "An algebra for the natural numbers"
1963-68: Senior Lecturer in Formal Mathematics, University of London Department of Extramural Studies
1968-69: Professional psychotherapist
1969ff: Department of Pure Mathematics and Mathematical Statistics in the University of Cambridge
1969: "Laws of Form"
1969: UK seminar for Assoc of Teachers of Mathematics [eyewitness]
1970: Founder of publishing imprint Cat Books
1970: "23 Degrees of Paradise" poems (as 'James Keys')
1971: "Only Two Can Play This Game" (a comparison of western and eastern modes of thought and methods in the arts, philosophy, religion, and the sciences) as James Keys
1972: Founder of publishing imprint Spencer Brown & Co
1973: Esalen lectures on Laws of Form [transcripts]
1975: Publishes melody-index "The Directory of Tunes" by Denys Parsons
1976: Visiting Professor of Mathematics in the University of Western Australia
1977: Married 'by special contract' Katherine Lynn Parker of Denver Colorado. Separated.
1977. Visiting Professor, Department of Computer Science, Stanford University
1977: Consultant to Xerox PARC
1977-78: Stanford and Palo Alto lectures: The Four-color Map Theorem as a Problem in Formal Quaternions
1979: Laws of Form republished
1980-81: Visiting Professor, University of Maryland; lectures: What is Mathematics, Formal Arithmetics of the Second Order, and Cast and Formation Properties of Maps.
1982: Founder of publishing imprint Universal College Press
1982: "The Falkland Papers"
1985: UNI-OPS-sponsored conference postponed indefinitely by "mutual agreement"
1980s? Professional gambler (card counting); designing a board game
1991: Jorn Barger visits GSB in London, turned off by megalomania
1994: Laws of Form republished
1994: "A Lion's Teeth" announced, 'fantastic tales'
1995: Sentinel Training announced
1996: Lecture on graphs at University of Vienna [announcement]
"Recreations include shooting, tennis, cricket, soccer, chess, piloting, exploring, photography, maps and map-making, listening to Mozart, cooking, composing and performing songs and ballads, constructing ingenious machines that actually work, and inventing astonishing games that can actually be played. "

Is it Mr Brown, or Mr Spencer Brown, or Mr Spencer-Brown?

Apparently he now prefers Mr Spencer Brown.

Address: http://members.aol.com/lawsofform/gsb/index.html

Main source: http://members.aol.com/lawsofform/gsb/vita.html (badly scanned)

Bibliography: http://members.aol.com/lawsofform/bib/index.html

Laws of Form:

Buy: [Bibliofind]

Summary: http://www.dnai.com/~jfox/laws.html

Great quote:

"To arrive at the simplest truth, as Newton knew and practiced, requires years of contemplation. Not activity. Not reasoning. Not calculating. Not busy behaviour of any kind. Not reading. Not talking. Not making an effort. Not thinking. Simply bearing in mind what it is one needs to know. And yet those with the courage to tread this path to real discovery are not only offered practically no guidance on how to do so, they are actively discouraged and have to set about it in secret, pretending meanwhile to be diligently engaged in the frantic diversions and to conform with the deadening personal opinions which are continually being thrust upon them." Source

More quotes

John Miller's interesting notes: http://lclark.edu/~miller/spencer-brown.html

LoF theory: http://members.aol.com/lawsofform/interpretations.html

Discussion: http://www.kevinmcgee.com/resources/journals/observer/observer06.htm#gsbrown

Scholarly citations, ditto

A thread from 1995, initiated by LoF's illustrator: http://forum.swarthmore.edu/epigone/geometry-puzzles/71

John Lilly's tribute: http://www.garage.co.jp/lilly/teachersx.html

GEORGE SPENCER BROWN, mathematician: The protologic behind logic determines the logic. Let us find a protologic and then construct new systems of logic. The Laws of Form is not a handbook on how to go to far-out spaces, but a handbook on how to get back once one is there. In the protologic of The Laws of Form the observer is a marked state (the Brownian operator). The Laws of Form poses a dilemma: where is the writer and where is the reader? When one severs a universe by making a distinction, who is doing the severing? Is this the Brownian operator, the marked states and voids alternating ad infinitum? Alternatively, is the one making the severance separate from this system? Is he creating (with a continuous consciousness) discontinuous universes?

Inspired Jorn Barger's Anti-Math: http://www.robotwisdom.com/ai/antimath.html

Links: http://www.formal.com/boundary.html

Four-color map theory:

1976 claim to Nature: http://members.aol.com/lawsofform/gsb/nature.html

Conway on GSB's 4CM: http://forum.swarthmore.edu/epigone/geometry-puzzles/71/Pine.SUN.3.91.950629155718.8995F-100000@mace.Princeton.EDU

Consensus: interestingly wrong

Lion's Teeth

Some search engines still list this, but the page is gone: http://www.bohmeier-verlag.de/html/body_engbook.htm

English Books ! A Lion's Teeth - Löwenzähne English/German First-Edition by George Spencer-Brown writing as Richard Leroy ISBN 3-89094-287-3, 148 Pages,...

GSB's sanity:

Jeff James on LoF 1994: "A fourth preface was added in which he talks about "triunions" or "triple identities" such as of reality, appearance and awareness, or imaginability, possibility and actuality, or what a thing is, what it isn't and the boundary between them. He claims/ acknowledges that Sakyamuni (the Buddha) is "the only other author who evidently discovered these laws." He invites the reader to join a siblinghood and help found a school of his methods for intuitively feeling and naturally acting upon the consequences of there being nothing. He calls the method and the siblinghood "tarati." An extraduction was also added in which he claims to be, since before he could talk, a liberated being with unlimited thinking, superior to Bach, Mozart, Newton and Gauss, and asks for money and volunteers to help him found schools for superintelligent children such as he was."

Rumors and observations (by Jorn):

- brother DJ is imaginary (or died young?)

- GSB likes to be called by another, made-up name (I forget what, but not James Keys or Richard Leroy)

- asked for pot

- claimed Blake's ability to project his consciousness into other living creatures

The Directory of Tunes and Musical Themes: http://bruichladdich.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/HandelWWW/movements2/HandelShapes.html

(publisher, not editor)

Describes the opening bars of ~15k melodies in terms of movements up or down the scale.

Inspired an online tune recogniser: http://wwwipd.ira.uka.de/tuneserver/

This book does not only include the full database with 10,370 classical tunes and musical themes, but also more than 5,000 popular tunes from the time between 1920 and 1975, as well as a list of national anthems.

Suggestions

You can submit a new URL or any other suggestion for this page by typing it into the box below. It will instantly become visible to anyone at this comments page. I should get around to checking it out and updating it above within a week or three, at which point I'll delete it from the comments page.

If you want credit, include your name and email (otherwise it's anonymous). You can use HTML but you don't have to.

[Up: favorite authors] [site map] [Robot Wisdom homepage]
(Feedback to jorn@ robotwisdom.com)

How to make resource pages like these: tutorial
Amazon royalties from these pages go to Sam Smith's Progressive Review

Before you leave this site: Be sure you've checked out Jorn's weblog which offers daily updates on the best of the Web-- news etc, plus new pages on this site. See also the overview of the hundreds of pages of original content offered here, and the offer for a printed version of the site.

Hosting provided by instinct.org. Content may be copied under Open Web Content License.