Software, hardware, art – a blog of process and findings
While looking for another book at the Architecture Library, I found this beautiful book of plates form 1847. I took some photographs, but found that a. my cell phone didn’t do a great job, and b. the New York Public Library did it much better than I ever could.
The book is Traite Theorique Et Pratique De L’Art De Beatir by Jean Rondelet. The book is about 12 x 24″ and absolutely beautiful.
More moire patterns, generated in Processing, this time with two interactive grids rotated by the x/y coordinates of the mouse and variable grid size.
Found at the EcoStores Nebraska.
Former nuclear testing site in Kazakhstan; such strange and seemingly intentional geometry.
Via: Der Spiegel
“Vergence” by Tina Frank
An “oloid” via Wundersames Sammelsurium
“Shortest Path on the Surface of Convex Polyhedron” by Joseph O’Rourke at Smith College.
“Convex Hull Of 1000 Random Points on a Sphere” by Jon McCammond of the Mathematics Department at UCSB.
Reading “Flatland” recently, I came on the term “transcendental geometry”. The citation for this comparison is the following quote from the Feb 27, 1885 issue of the journal Science.
The modern mathematician finds the space of three dimensions, in which our visible universe is containled, entirely too contracted for his conceptions, and is obliged to imagine a space of “n” dimensions in order that his fancy may find room to disport itself. But it is a new idea, on the part of the novelist, to make the conceptions of transcendental geometry the basis for an amusing story.
The very short article goes on to compare “Flatland” with “Through the Looking Glass” and their use of geometry as speculative and imaginative.
In trying to find more about this term, it appears that sadly the intelligent design crowd has laid claim to it. The most I could find (in an admittedly short search) was this related Wikipedia article on “Complex Geometry“:
In mathematics, complex geometry is the study of complex manifolds and functions of many complex variables. Application of transcendental methods to algebraic geometry falls in this category, together with more geometric chapters of complex analysis.
