The Polyhedrists

The Polyhedrists PDF Author: Noam Andrews
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0262046644
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A history of the relationship between art and geometry in the early modern period. In The Polyhedrists, Noam Andrews unfolds a history of the relationship between art and geometry in early modern Europe, told largely through a collective of ground-breaking artisan-artists (among them, Luca Pacioli, Albrecht Dürer, Wenzel Jamnitzer, and Lorentz Stöer) and by detailed analysis of a rich visual panoply of their work, featuring paintings, prints, decorative arts, cabinetry, and lavishly illustrated treatises. But this is also an art history of the polyhedra themselves, emblems of an evolving artistic intelligence, which include a varied set of geometrical figures—both Platonic, or regular, like the simple tetrahedron, and Archimedean, or irregular, like the complex yet beguiling rhombicosidodecahedron. Moreover, The Polyhedrists argues that the geometrical depictions of Dürer, Jamnitzer et al. were far more than mere follies from the dawn of perspective, at odds with a contemporary view of the Renaissance, and destined to be superseded by later developments in higher level mathematics. In fact, the evolution of the solids into innumerable “irregular bodies” constituted a sustained moment in the formulation of Renaissance mathematical knowledge and its engagement with materiality. This intense field of experimentation would birth a new language of geometrical abstraction that would ignite a century of novel form-making strategies, ultimately paving the way for developments in geometry and topology in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and even prefiguring the more recent digital turn. The book, in this sense, is not just an applied history of geometry, nor a particular geometric reading of early modern art through some of its more celebrated practitioners, but a manifesto of sorts into the hitherto unexplored wilds of art and science.

The Polyhedrists

The Polyhedrists PDF Author: Noam Andrews
Publisher: National Geographic Books
ISBN: 0262046644
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
A history of the relationship between art and geometry in the early modern period. In The Polyhedrists, Noam Andrews unfolds a history of the relationship between art and geometry in early modern Europe, told largely through a collective of ground-breaking artisan-artists (among them, Luca Pacioli, Albrecht Dürer, Wenzel Jamnitzer, and Lorentz Stöer) and by detailed analysis of a rich visual panoply of their work, featuring paintings, prints, decorative arts, cabinetry, and lavishly illustrated treatises. But this is also an art history of the polyhedra themselves, emblems of an evolving artistic intelligence, which include a varied set of geometrical figures—both Platonic, or regular, like the simple tetrahedron, and Archimedean, or irregular, like the complex yet beguiling rhombicosidodecahedron. Moreover, The Polyhedrists argues that the geometrical depictions of Dürer, Jamnitzer et al. were far more than mere follies from the dawn of perspective, at odds with a contemporary view of the Renaissance, and destined to be superseded by later developments in higher level mathematics. In fact, the evolution of the solids into innumerable “irregular bodies” constituted a sustained moment in the formulation of Renaissance mathematical knowledge and its engagement with materiality. This intense field of experimentation would birth a new language of geometrical abstraction that would ignite a century of novel form-making strategies, ultimately paving the way for developments in geometry and topology in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and even prefiguring the more recent digital turn. The book, in this sense, is not just an applied history of geometry, nor a particular geometric reading of early modern art through some of its more celebrated practitioners, but a manifesto of sorts into the hitherto unexplored wilds of art and science.

The Study

The Study PDF Author: Andrew Hui
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691243328
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
"With the advent of the printing press in Europe, the possibility of assembling a personal library became more and more attainable for the cultural elite. In this book, Andrew Hui traces the historical development of the Renaissance studiolo, a personal study and library, from Petrarch to Montaigne, considering literary representations of the studiolo in Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Marlowe as well as its presence in the visual arts. He explores the ways in which Renaissance writers and scholars engaged with these personal libraries, both real and imaginary, as places for research and refuge, and the impact of their legacy on writers of our own age, such as Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino. Hui is interested in how these workspaces shaped the interior lives of their occupants, and how the bookish sanctuary they offered was cast as both a remedy and a poison for the soul. Painters of the period, for example, depicted such Biblical figures as the Virgin Mary and St. Jerome in studies surrounded by books, and some writers extolled the studiolo as a space for salutary self-reflection. But other writers suggested that too much time spent reading and amassing books could lead to bibliomania: it drove Don Quixote to madness, Faustus to perdition, Prospero to exile. Individual chapters focus on the invention of the studiolo as seen through Federico da Montefeltro's Gubbio Studiolo and Raphael's School of Athens; Rabelais's parodies of erudition and classification; the transformation of private study into self-conscious spectacle in The Tempest; and more. While primarily drawing on works from Renaissance Europe, the chapters range across time and geography, incorporating a more global and comparative approach by drawing on texts from the classical tradition of China. Throughout the book, Hui weaves in accounts of his own life with books and libraries, arguing that to study the history of reading, scholars must also become aware of their own history of readings"--

Sleight of Mind

Sleight of Mind PDF Author: Matt Cook
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262043467
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
This “fun, brain-twisting book . . . will make you think” as it explores more than 75 paradoxes in mathematics, philosophy, physics, and the social sciences (Sean Carroll, New York Times–bestselling author of Something Deeply Hidden) Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician’s purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn’t require tangibles, like rabbits or hats. Paradox works in the abstract, with words and concepts and symbols, to create the illusion of contradiction. There are no contradictions in reality, but there can appear to be. In Sleight of Mind, Matt Cook and a few collaborators dive deeply into more than 75 paradoxes in mathematics, physics, philosophy, and the social sciences. As each paradox is discussed and resolved, Cook helps readers discover the meaning of knowledge and the proper formation of concepts—and how reason can dispel the illusion of contradiction. The journey begins with “a most ingenious paradox” from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance. Readers will then travel from Ancient Greece to cutting-edge laboratories, encounter infinity and its different sizes, and discover mathematical impossibilities inherent in elections. They will tackle conundrums in probability, induction, geometry, and game theory; perform “supertasks”; build apparent perpetual motion machines; meet twins living in different millennia; explore the strange quantum world—and much more.

Early Modern Print Media and the Art of Observation

Early Modern Print Media and the Art of Observation PDF Author: Stephanie A. Leitch
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1009444514
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 764

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Book Description
Early modern printmakers trained observers to scan the heavens above as well as faces in their midst. Peter Apian printed the Cosmographicus Liber (1524) to teach lay astronomers their place in the cosmos, while also printing practical manuals that translated principles of spherical astronomy into useful data for weather watchers, farmers, and astrologers. Physiognomy, a genre related to cosmography, taught observers how to scrutinize profiles in order to sum up peoples' characters. Neither Albrecht Dürer nor Leonardo escaped the tenacious grasp of such widely circulating manuals called practica. Few have heard of these genres today, but the kinship of their pictorial programs suggests that printers shaped these texts for readers who privileged knowledge retrieval. Cultivated by images to become visual learners, these readers were then taught to hone their skills as observers. This book unpacks these and other visual strategies that aimed to develop both the literate eye of the reader and the sovereignty of images in the early modern world.

Proof and the Art of Mathematics

Proof and the Art of Mathematics PDF Author: Joel David Hamkins
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262362562
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Book Description
How to write mathematical proofs, shown in fully-worked out examples. This is a companion volume Joel Hamkins's Proof and the Art of Mathematics, providing fully worked-out solutions to all of the odd-numbered exercises as well as a few of the even-numbered exercises. In many cases, the solutions go beyond the exercise question itself to the natural extensions of the ideas, helping readers learn how to approach a mathematical investigation. As Hamkins asks, "Once you have solved a problem, why not push the ideas harder to see what further you can prove with them?" These solutions offer readers examples of how to write a mathematical proofs. The mathematical development of this text follows the main book, with the same chapter topics in the same order, and all theorem and exercise numbers in this text refer to the corresponding statements of the main text.

Lectures on the Philosophy of Mathematics

Lectures on the Philosophy of Mathematics PDF Author: Joel David Hamkins
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262542234
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
An introduction to the philosophy of mathematics grounded in mathematics and motivated by mathematical inquiry and practice. In this book, Joel David Hamkins offers an introduction to the philosophy of mathematics that is grounded in mathematics and motivated by mathematical inquiry and practice. He treats philosophical issues as they arise organically in mathematics, discussing such topics as platonism, realism, logicism, structuralism, formalism, infinity, and intuitionism in mathematical contexts. He organizes the book by mathematical themes--numbers, rigor, geometry, proof, computability, incompleteness, and set theory--that give rise again and again to philosophical considerations.

Looking at History Through Mathematics

Looking at History Through Mathematics PDF Author: Nicolas Rashevsky
Publisher: MIT Press (MA)
ISBN:
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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Book Description


Mage Merlin's Unsolved Mathematical Mysteries

Mage Merlin's Unsolved Mathematical Mysteries PDF Author: Satyan Devadoss
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262542757
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 117

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Book Description
Sixteen of today's greatest unsolved mathematical puzzles in a story-driven, illustrated volume that invites readers to peek over the edge of the unknown. Most people think of mathematics as a set of useful tools designed to answer analytical questions, beginning with simple arithmetic and ending with advanced calculus. But, as Mage Merlin's Unsolved Mathematical Mysteries shows, mathematics is filled with intriguing mysteries that take us to the edge of the unknown. This richly illustrated, story-driven volume presents sixteen of today's greatest unsolved mathematical puzzles, all understandable by anyone with elementary math skills. These intriguing mysteries are presented to readers as puzzles that have time-traveled from Camelot, preserved in the notebook of Merlin, the wise magician in King Arthur's court. Our guide is Mage Maryam (named in honor of the brilliant young mathematician, the late Maryam Mirzakhani), a distant descendant of Merlin. Maryam introduces the mysteries--each of which is presented across two beautifully illustrated pages--and provides mathematical and historical context afterward. We find Merlin confronting mathematical puzzles involving tinker toys (a present for Camelot's princesses from the sorceress Morgana), cake-slicing at a festival, Lancelot's labyrinth, a vault for the Holy Grail, and more. Each mystery is a sword awaiting removal from its stone, capturing the beauty and power of mathematics.

Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra

Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra PDF Author: Jacob Klein
Publisher: Courier Corporation
ISBN: 0486319814
Category : Mathematics
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
Important study focuses on the revival and assimilation of ancient Greek mathematics in the 13th-16th centuries, via Arabic science, and the 16th-century development of symbolic algebra. 1968 edition. Bibliography.

Geometry of Grief

Geometry of Grief PDF Author: Michael Frame
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022680092X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 175

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Book Description
Geometry -- Grief -- Beauty -- Story -- Fractal -- Beyond -- Appendix: More Math.