Photos of Roger Penrose’s journal
abakcus.com
abakcus.com
It's remarkable how often those two traits coincide.
:)
I think blog author came across this & found it beautiful (good for him!). But IRL this type of doodling is commonplace among math folks.
From their viewpoint, most mathematician's I've met, admire someone's blackboard skills - handwriting, problem layout, & Hagomoro chalks. And the second one would be the witty/intelligent communication in their papers, book or seminal work - which sometimes gain cult status in their small circles.
I'm not a mathematician, but I have journals with pictures of knots, protei folds, chemical structures, graphs (Eulerian), and so on. Are they as beautiful as the Nobel prize winners? Probably not.
I like the diversity on just these pages though - Feynman diagrams, a projective plane, some kind of tiling ...
... all the way out to the digital frontier of professional wacom tablets and 4 feet wide plotters. A fun hobby for some.
1. Penrose obviously is well known, so I’m more likely to pay attention
2. This is more about seeing how mathematicians think and less about a specific individual
3. There’s something cool about seeing that people in the field all start from the same foundation, and it brings Penrose back down to earth a bit
We are humans, and we are social creatures, who care about such things.
[1] https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/home-of-cha...