randformblog on math, physics, art, and design |
Science and the National Science Foundation were pleased to announce the winners of the fourth annual Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge.
We were very pleased to see a slide of our colleague Richard Palais together with Luc Bernard among the competition winners (see above image, First place for illustration). It shows wellknown mathematical surfaces in glassy style.
It is allways an interesting question at what point a picture becomes a symbol, i.e. a representative for something more abstract. This is also what I found to be the most important point which I missed in John Maeda’s commentary in this weeks post. How much is an avatar a symbol for the person behind it?
In the case of a logo the symbol nature is usually easy to manifest, but e.g. in the case of characters – especially from computer games – this depends. Sometimes they are pixymbols – just think of the pac man characters. For the smiley I find this is similar.
In this context it is worthwhile to see how early character design in computer games has transformed by time. And so I stumbled over these funny “round voxel”-3D analogs of game characters by designer Jeremy Dower who did – among others – also character design for the gameboy.
-See also an old randform post about pictoplasma.
-fake (?) space invaders characters e.g. here
trees in the urbanforest.
via slanted.
Today was the opening ceremony of the ICM (the International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid). The ICM which is organized by the IMU (the International Mathematical Union) is the most important social gathering of mathematicians. In particular at the ICM the most prestigious mathematical prizes are awarded. There is no Nobel prize for mathematics and thus the Fields Medal is often denoted as an equivalent. However the Fields medal is only for mathematicians under 40 and rather for their body of work than a particular result. For that reason a special prize had to be created in 1998 for Andrew Wiles who solved one of the longest open problems in math history, but who happened to be over 40. This years winners are: Andrei Okounkov (Russia/US), Grigori Perelman (Russia), Terence Tao (Australia), Wendelin Werner (France).
His Majesty the King of Spain Juan Carlos was honouring the ceremony with his presence. In 1998 the ICM was in Berlin. Neither the president, nor the chancellor attended the opening ceremony. There was even no report on Tagesschau – the most important german public TV news format. I guess this says enough about the current state of public support of mathematics in Germany… So – hopefully good luck for spanish mathematics!
And it is of course very flattering for some of the randform crew to see His Majesty the King of Spain Juan Carlos twisting his head (in the middle with the white jacket) for the new logo of the IMU designed by John Sullivan —since the logo video he is watching had been done with jReality!
Many congratulations to the winners of the various IMU prizes and of course especially to John for winning the logo design competion with his logo and Charles Gunn who realized the video! Thanks to John also for the image.
This is a sort of follow-up post to the LaTeX and Metafont post, because it features (among others) the text editor “emacs” which is THE editor for LaTeX.
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One of the first mathematical visualization clips if not the first is: the impossible map by Evelyn Lambart from 1947. In the film it is explained how to find coordinate maps for a sphere, partially exemplified with a grapefruit.
Evelyn Lambart is usually in the shadow of her frequent collaborator Norman McLaren, with whom she worked together in the fifties.
They both liked to play with graphical and likewise mathematical “entities”, like lines and shapes in the interplay with coulours:
Caprice en Couleurs (1949)
Around is Around (1951)
Horizontal Lines (1962)
Vertical Lines (1960)
But both have in their animations also more “lifelike” shapes, like birds and variation of birds, which are coloured but which are mostly “flat” reminding of “shadow figures” like e.g. in the animations of Charlotte Reiniger. This was partially due to their cut-out and scratching techniques. However also real life appears in their films. Evelyn Lambart did a lot of illustrative animations for other science films, but also for e.g. the film: A Chairy Tale, which reminds me of the earlier mentioned Georges Méliès. (Watch e.g. his film “Un homme de tete” from 1898, which is currently on youtube.com)
Remark: It seems that since two days there is Blinkity Blank by Norman McLaren on Youtube.com, and also parts of Prince Achmed by Lotte Reiniger. I dont know how long the films will be there, and what copyright problems are involved with them, thats why I dont link them.
update 11.10.10: An approximate and by no means accurate visual demonstration of the proposition that the area of a sphere is four times the area of its circular shadow (look also at this comment)
Take half an orange:
Peel the half orange in a spiral. You peel the spiral in such a way that you go around twice in order to peel it fully, while keeping the width of the spiral arm (approx.) constant (that is you peel an archimedian or arithmetic speiral). By looking at the peeled orange one (more or less badly) sees that going around only once, one peeled off a part which covers roughly the area of the circular shadow:
Fold the spiral in the middle and put the two spiral halfs on top of each other:
One (again more or less badly) sees that the middle of the spiral is (approximately) at the point where the spiral had gone around once:
So roughly one half of the spiral covers the area of half of half of an orange (because the two folded halfs of the spiral cover half an orange). In the meantime such a half also covered the circular shadow (i.e. that what you see by looking onto the orange from above), i.e. the second half was more or less perpendicular to the viewer and was thus (almost) not visible.
This is of course no prove of the proposition but gives only a rough feeling, that the proposition could be true.
There are those parties, where you are asked in the very first minutes of a small talk, what you do in your life. And if your answer is “I am a mathematician” then the reaction is usually rather passionate. Either you found some kind of soul mate, someone who understands or – and that happens very often – you are confronted with sentences like: “Ohh – really — I always hated math – I always had problems with the math!”. Now replace “math” with “law” in the last two sentences and look what you get….—OK -put that ittle joke aside- instead of lawyer, plug in: social worker, english teacher, baseball trainer etc. You will rather rarely hear: I was always hated social sciences, english, sport etc. , whereas for math (and physics) it is the generic situation. This is because in nowadays (western?) society it is too often a good thing to dislike math.
If you are on a party it is easy to deal with that disdain – either you stick to the math lovers or you take your revenge by “Oh you just had bad teachers – let me explain the addition theorem of trigonometric functions!” :O (yes this is a nerd joke — happened out of desperation :))
However if the open dislike of math is expressed by a public person like a politician or a journalist than this isn’t fun anymore, because it involves the development of a public opinion about an issue.
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A little follow up to our earlier posts about symmetries, which were a collaborative effort with graphics designer Etienne Mineur, who contemplated at the same time about ambigrammes in a socalled mineur-randfrom Blog pong match.
Sascha Lobo from riesenmaschine found via designboom the page of ambigramme designer John Langdon and found there probably (wo hat er das denn schon wieder ausgebuddelt!) also the link of this very cool ambigramm generator.
A classic topic in intersections between math and art/design are tesselations. This is mostly due to the fact that the included math is almost completely visualizable, which can’t be said for most parts of mathematics.
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