The paradoxical self: duality and ambiguity in the works and lives of Oscar Wilde and Morrissey

Oscar Wilde’s and Morrissey’s lives seem to be full of contradictions. Their art constitutes a reaction against materialism, traditional lifestyle and social standards, as well as defence of individualism and freedom of thought. So far, their works have been analysed only from a very limited perspective of the tension between aesthetics and ethics. Nevertheless, it is worth mentioning that what prevails in their art is the state of ambivalence and ambiguity in relation to the issues connected with religion and morality, innocence and experience, life and death. This article aims at demonstrating multiplicity of personalities of the artists mentioned and ethical ambivalences of their works. Taken together, Wilde and Morrissey’s creative outputs present a clash between different spheres of life, the divided consciousness and the split between body and soul. Thus, the oscillation between opposite standpoints and values excluding each other is not only the result of the artists’ personal experience but it may symbolise the paradox and absurdity of the human existence as well.

Twistors, Self-Duality, and Spinc Structures

The fact that every compact oriented 4-manifold admits spin^c structures was proved long ago by Hirzebruch and Hopf. However, the usual proof is neither direct nor transparent. This article gives a new proof using twistor spaces that is simpler and more geometric. After using these ideas to clarify various aspects of four-dimensional geometry, we then explain how related ideas can be used to understand both spin and spin^c structures in any dimension.

Formal self duality

We study the notion of formal self duality in finite abelian groups. Formal duality in finite abelian groups has been proposed by Cohn, Kumar, Reiher and Schürmann. In this paper we give a precise definition of formally self dual sets and discuss results from the literature in this perspective. Also, we discuss the connection to formally dual codes. We prove that formally self dual sets can be reduced to primitive formally self dual sets similar to a previously known result on general formally dual sets. Furthermore, we describe several properties of formally self dual sets. Also, some new examples of formally self dual sets are presented within this paper. Lastly, we study formally self dual sets of the form $\{(x,F(x)) \ : \ x\in {\mathbb {F}}_{2^{n}}\}$ { ( x , F ( x ) ) : x ∈ F 2 n } where F is a vectorial Boolean function mapping ${\mathbb {F}}_{2^{n}}$ F 2 n to ${\mathbb {F}}_{2^{n}}$ F 2 n .

Towards an M5-brane model. Part III. Self-duality from additional trivial fields

We present a six-dimensional $$ \mathcal{N} $$ N = (1, 0) supersymmetric higher gauge theory in which self-duality is consistently implemented by physically trivial additional fields. The action contains both $$ \mathcal{N} $$ N = (1, 0) tensor and vector multiplets and is non-trivially interacting. The tensor multiplet part is loosely related to a recently proposed action by Sen that leads to on-shell self-duality in an elegant way. As we also show, Sen’s action finds a very natural and direct interpretation from a homotopy algebraic perspective.

Condensation of SIP Particles and Sticky Brownian Motion

We study the symmetric inclusion process (SIP) in the condensation regime. We obtain an explicit scaling for the variance of the density field in this regime, when initially started from a homogeneous product measure. This provides relevant new information on the coarsening dynamics of condensing interacting particle systems on the infinite lattice. We obtain our result by proving convergence to sticky Brownian motion for the difference of positions of two SIP particles in the sense of Mosco convergence of Dirichlet forms. Our approach implies the convergence of the probabilities of two SIP particles to be together at time t. This, combined with self-duality, allows us to obtain the explicit scaling for the variance of the fluctuation field.

Dual addition formulas: the case of continuous q-ultraspherical and q-Hermite polynomials

We settle the dual addition formula for continuous q-ultraspherical polynomials as an expansion in terms of special q-Racah polynomials for which the constant term is given by the linearization formula for the continuous q-ultraspherical polynomials. In a second proof we derive the dual addition formula from the Rahman–Verma addition formula for these polynomials by using the self-duality of the polynomials. We also consider the limit case of continuous q-Hermite polynomials.