A Mathematician in a School of Art
mathvalues.org
mathvalues.org
Quasi-periodic Islamic wall tilings are a whole interesting black hole, e.g. see this paper https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1135491
This really resonates with me. Unfortunately "the two cultures" polarizes people into viewing artists as airheads doing random artifacts or mathematicians as weirdos working on mostly useless stuff - the "I'm bad at math" confession to bond with people is common.
How can we encourage more people to study both art & math? Or Humanities and Science in general, e.g. English and Biology?
I've always fantasized about having $10M discretionary money (haven't done the math, really, just a random figure) and opening a "Arts and Sciences Academy", which would be a high school where Arts trivium (music, literature, sculpture) would be studied on equal footing and intertwined with Sciences trivium (math, physics, biology) - I know an eclectic mix.
I don't know why the very rich not pursue setting up schools like this?
Imagine if your maths class was getting you to draw curves and make art from tilings with a view to making art as opposed to the same 6 recycled examples about how fast a car is going or how to tile a floor.
Mathematics funnelling students into engineering has to be one of the biggest trapping in local maxima strategies in all of education.
I don't think that is eclectic at all. It ought to be that way. I attended the Louisiana School for Math, Science and Arts [0] during high school and it left an indelible mark upon me. I was kicked out of my abusive childhood home at 15 after refusing to confirm the Catholic faith, and so I applied for LSMSA and got in after a few rounds of interviews with the administration.
The school is publicly funded and does not charge a tuition, and so I felt extremely blessed to be able to continue my education despite my circumstances. Most of the teaching faculty had PhDs except for the math department, who mostly had masters degrees (plenty good enough for high school mathematics).
It was very self-directed study. The courses I took included C programming, poetry, world history, chemistry, digital design, trigonometry, Russian, etc. My days were highly varied and stimulating and I loved most of the classes. The high school is a boarding school embedded within a college campus, so there was plenty access to the arts infrastructure and collegiate arts projects. Being surrounded 24/7 by interesting people was the icing on the cake. A lot of people decried the prevalent drug use and sexual promiscuity among the student body, but it's fucking high school man. I hear it was a wild time there in the 80's and 90's. I was introduced to psychedelic drugs there, which only aided in my understanding of the world and increased my love for learning. We need more institutions like this.
[0]: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~sequin/ [1]: https://www.josleys.com
They have a lot of more or less mathematically inspired metal sculptures for sale, for instance a functioning Klein bottle opener: https://www.bathsheba.com/math/klein/
The ads usually feature several shirts. The above one, and 5 others that advertise the wearer is an asshole (e.g. https://www.geeksoutfit.com/products/my-level-of-sarcasm-is-...).
I see these ads in the New York Times app.
Unfortunately, the typical art audience rarely appreciates the elegance of mathematical theorems, especially when they deal with something as complex as, say, the Riemann hypothesis. Similarly, scientists often struggle to understand the appeal of performance art, where an artist might, for instance, stare at an apple for an hour.
It is one thing that there is not enough audience for a niche thing, but the lack of criticism is even worse in my opinion.
I'm probably being a bit too harsh here, and I'm probably just jealous, but it's something that keeps frustrating me. "Circuit-bending" [1] was a particular annoying crossover of art and electronics that still makes me shudder. Using the golden ratio for no good reason is also up there.
Currently, undergrads take double majors (Witten was a history grad!). But, this doesn't tend to happen at the graduate level. The obstacles can be getting funding(siloed into departments), and courses being demanding enough already for one subject.
Faculty sometimes do hold a side appointment in other departments. But, the main incentive emerging from the academic job system is to get specialized expertise and publish in high reputation journals.
I assume it'd be a smoother animation at a smaller number of jump days, I'd like to see that.
Edit: I finally got it working by changing the parameters, going to the order page, then clicking on the qr link. I did it with 1 jump day. But it still flashes like crazy (colors inverting ever frame) and there's massive moire patterns, among the low resolution and other graphical glitches. I think the idea is cool so I'd like to see something more fleshed out. Is this something you could do on e.g. shadertoy?
It really forces one to bring back that obscure subset of analog-era skills... "This oscillator is almost never used because of bad Vcc-related frequency drift and distorts output in presence of even slight parasitics? Great, let's put it into the design!"
(Note that making entire circuit out of DFN parts with 3 mil traces, and then leaving large prominent test points is considered cheating :) )