Art

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Flickr: Mathematics Photos

June 23, 2009 in Art | No comments

As an artistic diversion, I decided to search Flickr for the words “mathematics”, “math”, and “probability” on Creative Commons licensed photographs. The results were wonderful. Some of my favorites are below. Click on the photos to see explanations from the authors or to see more of their work!

Klein_Art

Klein bottle (procrastination), by Pragmagraphr

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love_math

Love & Mathematics, by Lost Archetype

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veggie_math

Vegetable Meets Mathematics, by anroir

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nnplusone

n(n+1), by Jan Tik
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torus

Torus with pairs of Villarceau circles, by Seb Przd

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railroad

Railroad Math, by Adamcha

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portraitprob

The Portrait of Conditional Probability, With A Third Ear Maybe, by DerrickT

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onebillion

One in a billion, by Micah Sittig

JAME Fractal Graphics Platform

February 21, 2009 in Art, Software | 2 comments

While browsing Apple’s website for various openly available math related downloads, I came across JAME, the Java Real-Time Multi-Threaded Fractal Platform. It’s awesome. The JAME website provides the following description:

JAME is a Java real-time, multi-threaded fractal graphics platform which supports images and animations. The core of JAME is the graphics engine which supports layers, filters, effects and alpha composition. JAME creates Mandelbrot and Julia fractals and supports zoom, rotation and colours shifting.

The software is entirely free (under GPL3) and is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux as long as you have met some minimum memory requirements and have an up-to-date version of the Java Runtime Environment installed. The website for the project contains some wonderful tutorials to help get you started, and your creations are exportable to various photo and movie extensions. I created the following clip entirely with JAME:

[ Javascript required to view QuickTime movie, please turn it on and refresh this page ]

Now, the rendering of this clip took a while on my Macbook Pro, so if you start playing around keep in mind that the rendering of various movie clips could take a significant amount of time, especially if you increase the frame rate, etc. But the clip above took about 5 minutes to create minus the rendering time. That’s pretty awesome for out of the box capability, let alone all of the customizations that are possible once you learn more about the environment.

There’s a gallery of photos on the site to give you an idea of what’s possible to create more a more advanced user, and some awesome photos have been bundled together into a book that can be purchased here. I’ve seen various movies online that show fractal exploration, but it’s a whole other thing entirely to be in control of the exploration. If you have any interest at all in fractals or mathematical art, I highly suggest checking out the software.

Pi Music Experiment

December 26, 2006 in Art, Logic/Math | 1 comment

Music to my Ears.I love when people intentionally mix together mathematics and art, and one of the best examples of this merger that I’ve seen for awhile can be found here. As the site itself says, “this experiment attempts to convert the first 10,000 digits of pi into a musical sequence.” You have the ability to choose several preset music scales, or can choose 10 notes either manually or randomly. It takes a few minutes to play through the sequence, and the sounds are quite transfixing. Even though this meshing of pi and music is somewhat artificial, the result is wonderful. It’s worth checking out.

Glass In the Garden: Chihuly

June 2, 2006 in Art | No comments

1, 5, 4, 9, ...Last week Emily and I had the fortune to visit St. Louis, Missouri for several days during our Midwestern tour vacation. We asked several locals what sites they recommended seeing while there, and each person without exception told us that we needed to see the Glass in the Garden exhibition at the Missouri Botanical Gardens. The installation was designed by Dale Chihuly, who amongst other achievements holds both a Masters of Science in Glass Blowing and a Masters of Fine Arts in Sculpture.

I must admit that art museums are often tiresome to me. Large galleries are a sensory overload. Walking through one is an inundation of passive information in a generally sterile environment. In other words, it’s hard for me to actually experience the art. With exceptions, I am merely an observer rather than a participant. Part of what I enjoyed so much about the Chihuly pieces was their experiential nature. I felt that I was part of the art, and that my being present actually mattered.

If I had to summarize my impression of the installation, I would use the phrase “entwinement of the inorganic with the organic”. While walking through the nearly uncountable species of plants in the gardens there are pieces of ornamental glass decorating the landscape. Sometimes it actually appears as if a plant is growing glass branches. In one of my favorite pieces there are tubes of iridescent blue glass standing amongst an army of cool green bamboo. It almost looks as if the two could easily coexist together in nature. Around every corner was a merger of glass and plant. I almost felt like a child on an Easter egg hunt, just waiting for the next treasure to appear unexpectedly. If you’d like to see more examples of what I mean you can see Emily and my pictures here.

While I wouldn’t count Chihuly as my favorite artist (this “honor” is held by James Turrell), I have to thank him for his creative methods. Both Turrell and Chihuly design art which is experiential rather than merely observable. Both use light and color with beautiful effect. Both blur the lines between organic and inorganic. These traits, to me, embody art at its fullest.

Mathematical Photography

October 22, 2005 in Art | 1 comment

So thanks to Boing Boing I came across a beautiful page of art created by a person named Justin Mullins (Mathematical Photography). His art focuses exclusively on mathematical equations. I must say that I enjoy this site immensely, both for its vision and information. What adds to the beauty of this site is the brief poetic explanation the artist provides for most of his pieces. I especially suggest that you read the entries for the pieces entitled “Beauty” (Euler’s Relation) , “Ugliness” (the Four Color Theorem), “Mystery” (Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem), and “Power” (Aleph One).

I have such a hard time when someone (usually a speaker who knows nothing or relatively nothing about mathematics) uses an analogy that paints the field as the dull black and white objectified reality. First, this is not math. This is some strange twisted view of math that either you learned in second grade or that you have been fed by our culture. This view is pervasive and ugly. Math has so much more to do with elegance and beauty and the greater search of making sense of possibility.

I’d like to see two changes in the popular perception of mathematics. First, I’d like to see a greater effort by the mathematics community to make their material accessible to the popular masses. I believe this can be done by pursuing some of the artistic or philosophical implications and questions brought on by a particular technical result or problem. There are a few people who have done this, and off the top of my head I’d name Ian Stewart as an example. For instance, if one really looks at Euler’s Relation, and digests it like one would a Monet, I believe there’s just as much beauty to behold.

Second, I’d like to see postmodern theologians taking a more mature view of mathematics. Rather than painting it as the personification of the Modern era (and thus mostly an unhelpful and inorganic subject), I’d like each and every one of them to gain a familiarity of the subject and what it means for the twenty-first century. With this aim, I suggest that these readers refer to Godel’s Incompleteness Theorem, with some of the philosophical questions behind it.

Check out the site. And if you have a moment try to engage one of the pieces. Thank you Justin Mullins for taking such a simple idea and running with it.