"Topics like linear algebra, topology, graph theory, and machine learning are becoming vital prerequisites both to doing daily work in these fields and, more importantly, to inventing, popularizing, and teaching the new creative tools that are rapidly arising. Without them, artists are forced to wait for others to digest this new knowledge before they can work with it. Their creative options shrink to those parts of this research selected by Adobe for inclusion in prepackaged tools. Instead of the themes and concerns of creative work driving the selection of tools from a growing technical cornucopia, artists find themselves turned into passive users of tools that are already curated, contextualized, and circumscribed by others.

So, I want to do something about this. I want to figure out a way to teach myself and others these more advanced mathematical and computational concepts with a specific eye towards applying them in creative technology."

This is going to be very good. (I'd quote the whole post if I could, but this leapt out at me hardest.) And: on the day Greg's book arrived.

"I would call him the greatest puzzle designer of all time, but that implies that there are lots of people who do what he does and he’s better than them, and that’s not quite right. What I mean is to say is that Raymond Smullyan is the Marcel Duchamp of puzzles, he’s the Brian Eno of puzzles. His work is singular, transformative, genre-defining, in a class by itself."

"You never see anyone using a slide rule in a film. Matinee idol scientists always work out algorithms unaided in their brilliant minds, or scrawl them manically in chalk on giant blackboards. By the same token that unfairly condemns people with colour-coded ring binders as the owners of overly tidy minds, slide rules are supposed to belong only to the pedantic foot soldiers of science, the plodders who have to show us their workings out. But slide rules are lovely things: pleasingly solid, elegantly mysterious in their markings, the perfect marriage of form and function." Joe Moran on slide rules and scientists.

Fascinating: GPS satellites are both high enough, and travelling fast enough, that you need to correct for relativistic effects in order for them to be effective.

"It is not hard to cut a bagel into two equal halves which are linked like two links of a chain." And now you know how.

"Statisticians’ sex appeal has little to do with their lascivious leanings ... and more with the scarcity of their skills. I believe that the folks to whom Hal Varian is referring are not statisticians in the narrow sense, but rather people who possess skills in three key, yet independent areas: statistics, data munging, and data visualization. (In parentheses next to each, I’ve put the salient character trait needed to acquire it)."

The Klein Four are "the premiere a capella group of the world of higher mathematics". Judging from this video: yes, so they are.

"Zillionics is a new realm, and our new home. The scale of so many moving parts require new tools, new mathematics, new mind shifts."

Absolutely beautiful. The video at the end is hypnotic.

Wordpress.com add support for LaTeX into their posts - translates code into inline images with appropriate alt text. Impressive, for the mathematically/scientifically minded at least.

Making gigantic images of tapestries with supercomputing. Real-world stuff, arts and maths colliding