randform

I just found this link about the upcoming meeting on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems, which will soon take place in Boston.

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Just some images from an interesting architectural application of solar cells.
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another mathematician’s blog on math, music, art, and stuff.
incidentally he is at TU Berlin at the moment…

The Technical University of Munich (TUM) has handed out a styleguide defining a corporate design for the university (agency: ediundsepp , for the webdesign see also mytumportal). From the guide:

“Jedes Mitglied der TUM wird durch den schriftlichen und grafischen Auftritt automatisch zum Werbetraeger der Universitaet.

Unser Anspruch muss darin bestehen an jedem Ort, in jedem Schriftstueck und der Begegnung mit allen Mitgliedern der TUM, die Technische Universitaet Muenchen spuerbar zu machen.”

A LED’s thing by future factories

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I am aware of the fact that it may be funny if a mathematical physicist speaks about theatre.

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Ist das ein goldener Schnitt? Is this a golden mean? Ceci un nombre d`or?

Besides the already mentioned digital technique of rapid prototyping the digital technique of laser cutting was under scrutiny at the designmai exhibition. See above image of a gold foil cut by laser by Tord Boontje. You can see the shape of my body reflected as shadow while taking the photograph.

As the interested randform reader knows I like to report about popular experimentation trends in science (like e.g. this post about resonance rice or this post about cornstarch music (which is linking also to the famous diet coke experiments, whose popularity seems to be unstoppable)), here is a new trend, namely: ripping phone books in half.

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The theme of this years designmai was “digitalability”. Interestingly for product design this seemed to be ultimately linked to 3D-rapid-prototyping – at least in the main exhibition.
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A remarkable mathematical conjecture (proven 1995 by Sabitov) is that there exists no rigid bellows. This means if you have a closed volume which is formed by (triangle shaped) “plates” and if you deform it then the volume stays always constant (i.e. if it would have been a bellows then you couldnt press air out of it). This is why accordions need some elastic fabric in order to allow for deformation. May be also a useful knowledge for architecture, since it means that if you press a (closed) house on one side it would bulb on some other side.

The workshop Rigidity and polyhedral combinatorics is discussing related problems.