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The Gift of Steve Jobs

Contrary to the by-line, this post is by Bob not Joselle. She wanted me to post an item that’s been of interest lately.

As a reader of Mac and Apple rumor sites over the years, I was surprised the night of October 5th when I went to cnn.com to show Joselle a news item which […]

Archimedes, particle accelerators and being visual

I feel like I was pulled into a little whirlpool of interesting bits of info this morning. I was attracted to the title of David Castelvecchi’s blog: Archimedes and Euclid? Like String Theory versus Freshman Calculus. The blog reports the opening of an exhibition at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, showcasing one of three […]

On Wilczek and Symmetry (Inside and Out)

I had the opportunity to attend a talk given by Frank Wilczek, Nobel laureate in physics and author of the book The Lightness of Being. During the Q and A after the talk he was asked if our aesthetic judgment of symmetry could be said to prejudice scientific inquiry. Wilczek first pointed to the rich […]

Modern Art and Modern Mathematics

I just flipped back and forth between reading about 18th and 19th century developments in mathematics (analysis in particular) and 18th and 19th century transitions in art. The language of art history and the language of math history is very different. It does feel a little like going from color to black and white, or […]

Finding The Lightness of Being

I noticed an irrepressible smile on my face as I listened to Peter Sarnak’s lecture in a complex analysis class I took in graduate school. I tried to account for the pleasure I felt about ideas I could just barely comprehend. It seemed I understood the significance of the exploration, that these abstractions were discerning […]

Fibonacci Sequence

My attention was brought today to a very pretty short film visualizing displays of the Fibonacci Sequence in nature on YouTube. The sequence was introduced to western mathematics in 1202. Descriptions of the film’s displays can be found here. A more complete description of the mathematical properties and applications of the sequence can be found […]

A Disappearing Number

It isn’t often that the human experience of mathematics is explored in the arts, but it does happen. A Beautiful Mind and Proof are two recent examples of math-related dramas. But it seems that, by many accounts, A Disappearing Number has succeeded in weaving mathematics itself into the mystery of human lives. The play premiered […]

Ideals in Art and Mathematics: What gets us there?

Most of us begin drawings with lines. And even though those lines may not be in the subject of a rendering, they are nonetheless perceived. Some of the visual information we use to re-present our experience in a drawing is also used in mathematics, geometry in particular. A difficult question to answer but an interesting […]

NPR Story on Symbolic Thought

I just heard a story on NPR’s All Things Considered that centered on when we became mentally modern human beings. In our evolutionary history, the show argues, the appearance of symbolic thought marks the genesis of uniquely human developments more than say, standing upright. And I agree. On a daily basis, we move more from […]

Michelangelo and the Brain

I just read through a series of blogs generated by an article in the journal Neurosurgery, in which two neurosurgery researchers at Johns Hopkins University argue that an anatomically accurate image of the human brain is hidden in God’s neck in one of Michelangelo’s frescos. I was struck by how little the reports and blogs […]