Nad
Since the beginning
Works in Berlin Germany

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DISCUSSION

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: the random


Dirk Vekemans wrote:
>Magna res est vocis silentii tempora nosse
woooo.
big thing? is voice silent time our?
a silent voice is a big thing in our times?

???????
i was choosing french in school instead
of latin...and somehow i had in my mind that this would
be more useful for e.g. communicating with some belgians!
apparently i was wrong...

> ...couldn't resist to follow up on Pacioli, started browsing
> http://turnbull.mcs.st-and.ac.uk/history/ which is pretty solid. When
> i got
> to Leibniz and the brachistochrone problem (hey Dan Brown, here's
> another
> book title:
> http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk/~history/HistTopics/Brachistochrone.html)

do you know that you also get a cycloid if you
look at a bicycle reflector attached to the wheel
in the night ?(it has to be close to the wheel rim)
here you see a flintstone version of this
(tim - the other part of the daytar group did it for his
students):
http://www.math.tu-berlin.de/~hoffmann/interactive/cycloid.shtml

> i wondered whether you math folks still hold this kind of
> competitions.

of course...win 7 million dollars...you only have to solve
some math puzzles....:
http://www.claymath.org/millennium/

..for this money you could buy 700 holography displays!! (:-))

> Apparantly they worked wonders at the time, although most of them were
> written out by mathematicians who had solved the problem themselves
> first,
> so they'd shine among their colleagues.
>
actually usually they are not pre-solved. and the above are also not
of this type....just to warn you :-)

> This MacTutor 's great although i think it's rather funny some British
> still
> seem to have a hard time admitting Leibniz and Newton discovered
> differential calculus simultaneously and independently. The page on
> Leibniz
> is rather downplaying the man, and the account of the big
> Newton-Leibniz row
> over who was first is told very differently from what i read in books.
>

yep nationalism is a bad thing....

> Another thing that has always intruiged me is that Christian Huygens,
> the
> Dutchman, was such a brilliant scientist and his brother Constantyn
> is, for
> me at least, the best Dutch poet ever. It seems the great divide is
> not a
> thing of the mind but of cultural and educational conditioning.

there is no great divide. there is even sometimes an overlap.
like look at generative arts: its pure math
in the hand of an math-untrained artist who combines it
with aesthetic/whatever considerations.
the goal is to get nice/conceptionally important/beautyful/whatever output.
mathematical visualization is the same: its pure math
and this time the aesthetic/whatever considerations are in the
hand of an art-untrained mathematician.
the goal is (usually) to get important mathematical outcome
(which is "conceptionally important" to mathematicians). I know a lot of
mathematicians who spend much more time
in choosing the colors for their math viz piece than they should...
...and there are a lot of generative artists around who
love to dig out weird math....
the important thing is to keep mutual respect for the
different disciplines. get me right-its good to ask and to
think and use things, also if you are not an expert.
so with being respectful i mean: you have to be really
willing to learn....and you may be erranous.

> Equally, mathematics, for those seriously into it, is an entirly
> different
> matter than what we think of based on school experience, as you have
> previously attested to...
>

yep-. and thats not only the mathematicians fault. I remember
when my sister (she is two years younger than me) suddenly
had some basic set theory in school. i was envying her for
haveing such a nice math stuff on the plate. but the kids
parents and some politicians (that was in bavaria, munich, seventies, franz-josef-strauss....)
where completely against it...so they abolished it again.
how stupid.

..and i remember my calculus students (umass, amherst usa)
who demanded to get "recipes" for solving some standard problems in order to get through their exams....this is not mathematical
thinking...this is even not engineering, but a lot of calculus
textbooks are built like this.

to be more precise lets say: the try and error method
(try a recipe and see wether it works) works well
for a lot of standard things, but well yes ---it works
usually for the STANDARD things.

nad

DISCUSSION

Re: Re: Re: Re: the random


Dirk Vekemans wrote:

> My own collection of math books is growing, btw.

reminds me of leonardo da vinci who apparently at one point
in his thirties started collecting books....
however most of it was in latin...(and leonardos
latin was not so good..)

..just joking...

interestingly among the few books leonardo probably actually read was euklids geometry book (it is most probably that he read it together with a mathematician friend called luca pacioli)

DISCUSSION

Re: Re: the random


Dirk wrote:
>
> Who ever mentioned novelty, btw? Soit. En disant: assumptions are
> wicked,
> you can't discuss things based on assumptions.

answer:
of course you can. and actually usually the contrary is
rather true - if you discuss things you have to
specify your assumptions. almost all of math (hmm)
is based on axioms...which are more or less
assumptions you do not want to discuss further.
---> see e.g. axiomatic set theory:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiomatic_set_theory

and by the way every physical theory is just an ASSUMPTION about how
the world is, no physicist claims that the world IS like
that, she just ASSUMES that the world is like that.

Dirk wrote:

>Any point of view is
> meaningless. In the end.
>

depends on the meaning of meaning i would say....:-)

> Everything of course. Manovich will have it declared illegal by the
> end of
> the year. April will supposedly be the cruellest month.
>

is April assumed to be the new end of year?

> Jim's little historic expos� expertly shows the 'mediatic' use of
> random,
> that can ofcourse only be advantageous in the working process. Going
> over to
> music one could add a spiritual dimension to that, referring to Cage's
> approach that explicitly favours the stochastic element over the
> forced
> authoring/ordering in order to generate a playfullness, a Zenlike
> affirmation of life. Pierre Boulez invented the term aleatory music to
> post-modernistically differenciate his habit of giving his performers
> the
> liberty to partake in the composing process from what seemed highly
> suspect
> at that time, a positive impulse towards the spiritual.
>

i had already some weeks ago a little discussion with jim on this
forum about aleatoric music....may be i am wrong but
to my knowledge it was not
pierre boulez who introduced the term "aleatoric music" but
werner mayer eppler. apparently he used this term e.g. in his paper:
Werner Meyer-Eppler, Statistische und psychologische Klangprobleme, in: die reihe 1: elektronische Musik. Informationen uber serielle Musik. Wien 1955, p. 22. see also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aleatoric_music
and apparently he took the term from the book:
Theorie des fonctions aleatoires von Andre Blanc-Lapierre und Robert Fortet....which is i think a math book.....

nad

DISCUSSION

Re: Re: draw-something


Pall Thayer wrote:

> Perhaps random is "the spiritual in digital art." However, not being
> of a spiritual nature, I agree with Dirk. Conceptually, random is as
> empty as it gets.
>
> Pall
>
Hi Pall, Dirk,Zev, and others

here you can find another funny contemplation about randomness:
http://www.musicoftheprimes.com/gauss.htm

nad

DISCUSSION

Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: 3D Holographic projectors?


Regina Celia Pinto wrote:

> Unfortunatelly the information I have is the information I sent you in
> my
> first email, which is the information of the exhibition catalogue.
> Also I
> have searched web but with no result.

Hello Regina,

yes i also searched the web with no result. and as it seems
nobody of the rhizome community (who is reading this thread...:-))
knows about it either. if you should ever get more
info i would be glad if you could let me know. thanks,

bye, nad