So I’m here at the Gaudino talk, wishing all if you were here as well! Anyway, we must get Satyan Devadoss to come talk with us, not only because his area of study is topology (which we got a glimpse into with Julia.s paper and presentation today) but also because he, too, is obsessed with the visual display of information, and makes these beautiful drawings of strange four-dimensional objects folded through 5-dimensional space with flexible sides and other things that make my brain hurt. And he is fascinated with the idea of bringing art and mathematics together in such a way that both lead to greater understanding and discoveries in their own fields through the exploration of the other. As he says (and he and I have had this conversation previously as well), most of the time with artists and mathematicians come together, the mathematicians end of making bad art, and the artists end up presenting math that is 300 years old and thinking it’s new and cutting edge.
He previously once talked to me about origami and the new mathematics of Folding as being an example of this thing that he is interested in — where as the art of folding started pushing the boundaries of the form it began requiring a mathematics in order to create thes new, complex shapes. And this desire led mathematicians to create a mathematics of folding, which did not exist and was a truly new field of mathematical thought. (Watch Between the Folds
, and watch it now, if you have no idea what I am talking about and think origami is just folding cranes….)
Are there other profs or people on campus that you think we should bring to class, show some work to, or pick their brains?
A friend of mine is in an English class that Shawn Rosenheim’s teaching about Documentary Fictions. Course description says the class “investigates the various ways in which electric and electronic media have affected our sense of what’s real, and the kinds of stories we tell about the world and ourselves.” His might be a brain to pick in terms of both what we’re studying and what we intend to create.
Well, and especially since he (Shawn) has already, inadvertently, contributed material to 228, by pointing David to the video of the crazy-wonderful mapmaking doodle guy. And maybe he also knows about the Atlas of Remote Islands — David and I found that one in parallel, and I can’t remember who told him about it.
Prof. Eppel, would you like to talk to Shawn about visiting sometime?