The Logic Alphabet
From a piece by Christine Werthehim in Cabinet Magazine:
In 1953, while working a hotel switchboard, a college graduate named Shea Zellweger began a journey of wonder and obsession that would eventually lead to the invention of a radically new notation for logic. From a basement in Ohio, guided literally by his dreams and his innate love of pattern, Zellweger developed an extraordinary visual system - called the “Logic Alphabet” - in which a group of specially designed letter-shapes can be manipulated like puzzles to reveal the geometrical patterns underpinning logic. Indeed, Zellweger has built a series of physical models of his alphabet that recall the educational teaching toys, or “gifts,” of Friedrich Froebel, the great nineteenth century founder of the Kindergarten movement.
February 10th, 2006 at 3:11 am
The instant I saw Mr. Zellweger’s logical alphabet I immediately recognized it. We are kindred spirits. Like him, I have been laboring away in obscurity for 30 years now working on a very similar project which I call the Starmaze.
The structure depicted in his sculpture of blocks is what I call a binary trickle pattern:
http://www.cartania.com/starmaze/glossary.html#trickle
It is, among other things, a 3-D representation of a tesseract. The 16 “logical connectives” can be represented as the set of all possible 4-bit binary numbers. When you connect any two of these numbers that differ by a single bit, the result is a tesseract.
Back in the 70s and 80s I used to make binary trickle patterns very much like his out of colored yarn and tinkertoys. I would hang them from my ceiling and watch the sun cast shifting square and diamond patterns.
Like Zellweger, I continue to play with these logical structure simply because I find them beautiful. My “starmaze” is an extension of this sort of structure to 9 dimensions. I recently posted a description of my strange obsession, replete with many beautiful diagrams and maps, on my website:
http://www.cartania.com/starmaze/intro.html
I would welcome comments and questions from anyone brave enough to wander in my maze. My compliments to Mr. Zellweger!
John Cartan
March 30th, 2006 at 10:21 am
[...] Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society » Blog Archive » The Logic Alphabet this pretty cool. series of small logic puzzles that show the underlying visual patterns of logic. (tags: logic) [...]
April 15th, 2006 at 12:00 am
Dear Mr.Cartan, Huge,,,this is hugely interesting to me though I am not proficient in logical puzzles AT ALL. I read your 1st page [of yr web site] before messing with your puzzle and can tell you I’ll be spending hours there trying to grasp and visualize and comprehend. I’m fascinated to say the least. Shall return QQ. sheyda
April 15th, 2006 at 12:04 am
PS, Mr Cartan, is there a way to leave you a message on your Starmaze web site? Kind Regards, Sheyda
May 4th, 2006 at 4:38 am
Sheyda,
I would love to talk with you about the Starmaze. You can reach me by signing my guestbook:
http://www.cartania.com/guestbook.html
John
December 6th, 2006 at 2:06 pm
As Mr Cartan observes, Zellweger’s logic alphabet sculpture represents a hypercube. I’ve done my own mapping of the alphabet onto a more obscure method of projecting a hypercube into 2-dimensional space.
January 10th, 2007 at 5:15 pm
An exhibition of Shea Zellweger’s Logic Alphabet models and diagrams will open in February at the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Culver City Los Angeles……a pre-view pic of the show attended by none other than Brittany Spears is available on flickr…just type logic alphabet into google and you’ll get the link….
January 9th, 2008 at 2:17 pm
I also devised a 16 logic connector system. Only to find that Mr. Zellweger had came up with it 40 years earlier. I have since then e-mailed back and forth with him. A brilliant mind!