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Imagination and the Impossible
Two more sources I’d like to draw from for this fall’s maths for designers-course: 1. Geometry and the Imagination A fantastic collection of handouts for a two week summer workshop entitled ’Geometry and the Imagination’, led by John Conway, Peter Doyle, Jane Gilman and Bill Thurston at the Geometry Center in Minneapolis, June 1991, based […]
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Designer Maths
This fall, I’ll be teaching ‘Mathematics for Designers’ to first year students in Architecture. The past few weeks I’ve been looking around for topics to be included in such as course, relevant to architects/artists (not necessarily to engineers/mathematicians). One of the best texts I’ve found on this (perhaps in need of a slight update) is…
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phase transition
Today, our youngest daughter (aka PD2 on this blog) gave birth to a little boy, Gust. I’m in transition, trying to adjust to this new phase in our lives.
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a monstrous unimodular lattice
An integral $n$-dimensional lattice $L$ is the set of all integral linear combinations \[ L = \mathbb{Z} \lambda_1 \oplus \dots \oplus \mathbb{Z} \lambda_n \] of base vectors $\{ \lambda_1,\dots,\lambda_n \}$ of $\mathbb{R}^n$, equipped with the usual (positive definite) inner product, satisfying \[ (\lambda, \mu ) \in \mathbb{Z} \quad \text{for all $\lambda,\mu \in \mathbb{Z}$.} \] But…
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Bourbaki and Grothendieck-Serre
This time of year I’m usually in France, or at least I was before Covid. This might explain for my recent obsession with French math YouTube interviews. Today’s first one is about Bourbaki’s golden years, the period between WW2 and 1975. Alain Connes is trying to get some anecdotes from Jean-Pierre Serre, Pierre Cartier, and…
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Finnegans Wake’s geometry lesson
The literary sensation that spring of 1939 no doubt was the publication of Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. On May 4th 1939 FW was published simultaneously by Faber and Faber in London and by Viking Press in New York, after seventeen years of composition. In 1928-29, Joyce started publishing individual chapters from FW, then known…