Response to "From Fish to Infinity" by Steven Strogatz

There are occasions when the origin of a mathematical concept is mentioned by a teacher during their instruction, and I think of "their philosophical status": "Where exactly do numbers come from? Did humanity invent them? Or discover them?" Steven goes on to explain that mathematical concepts are concrete and we created them, yet "we can't control them." Throughout this article Strogatz writes of the use of numbers (giving the example of counting fish from a Sesame Street episode)and the fact that addition is built upon numbers and that more mathematical concepts are built upon the idea of addition until you can reach infinity. This article is just one of a new series Steven Strogatz has started to explain the "elements of mathematics, from pre-school to grad school."

∞

Infinity comes from the Latin word infinitas meaning unboundedness.
Though the infinity symbol's origins are unknown, a man by the name of John Wallis who is credited with introducing the symbol in writing in 1655 in De sectionibus conicis.
The infinity symbol may come from the Roman numeral 1000 which was taken from the Etruscuns numeral for 1000, which sometimes means many and happens to look like this, CIƆ. Another possibility is that it may have been derived from the last letter of the Greek alphabet, omega, ω.

Purple Infinity
Julia Garcia

Math Questionaire

Q. Why do people hate math?
A. Some people may not like math due to the fact that math is a building subject. Each year of education builds on top of the other. Since each year, the student learns a new building block, each year they will (usually) have another teacher and may have different experiences. If one year the teacher does not relate to a student or the student does not pay attention, the student will lose the building block and will struggle from then on unless the building block is later regained. This may be the reason why some students struggle with math which leads to the dislike of math.

Q. Do you like or hate math? Why?
A. We like math because it is very straight forward. The answer is not ambiguous, and there is a certain method to reach the answer. If the answer the student gives is incorrect, there is always a reason why the answer is incorrect, and proof to back up the correct answer. The proof is the method, and is not subjective.

Q. Do you think Math is important for "Artists"?
A. Math is not suitable for observational drawings. When drawing from observation, the artist uses the right hemisphere of the brain in order to perceive what is actually there rather than what the artists knows to be the symbol of the object. The symbol system derives from the left hemisphere of the brain as does math. However, some people make beautiful art from math, but it is not usually an observational drawing.

Olafur Eliasson

Q. How can math education improve?
A. We think that the math department should have a standard test that tests all areas of math ranging from kindergarten to the current grade. That way the teacher can assess the weakness of the students and offer personal assistance for the weaknesses to regain the building blocks a student may not have in their education. T.A.K.S. should also be eliminated because we believe it does not contribute to the joy of learning.

Camille Brewer, Codi Fant, and Alexandria Henry

Data Design

I've recently learned that data is not only used to create statistics, but people actually turn it into art.
Artists: Jer Thorp, James Paterson, and Mario Klingemann have combined data and design.










These pieces were exhibited at the Pink Hobo Gallery in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

For this exhibition these artists have been brought together by Flashbelt.

One of the Artists, Jer Thorp did a 60 square foot piece which "represented all of the players in the economic crisis" another piece of his at the same size is a "visualization of the financial crisis using newspaper data."

Article Website



Jer Thorp is out of these three artist, I have discussed in this post the one, that uses data and art the most.


"British Columbia's 'liberal' government has announced its plans to make staggering to arts funding over the next year."

"I created a dataset from the September Budget Update (bcbudget.gov.bc.ca/2009_Sept_Update/) to get a better handle on how these cuts fit in with the rest of the budget."

"There are 114 items in the budget with expenditures of $1M or higher. Arts & Culture funding moves from the 57th highest expenditure at 19.5M in 2008/2009 to the 100th highest expenditure in 2009/2010 with less than 3.7M in funding."

"When the 114 expenditures are ranked by gain or loss, the picture becomes even more clear. With a loss of more than 80%, Arts & Culture is suffers the second worst cuts - with the worst being another Arts-related line item!"







"GoodMorning! is a Twitter visualization tool which shows about 11,000 tweets collected over a 24 hour period between August 20th and 21st. The tweets were harvested to find people saying 'good morning' in English as well as several other languages."

"The tweets appear as blocks and are colour-coded. Green tweets are early in the morning, orange tweets are at about 9am, and red tweets are later in the morning. Black tweets are 'out-of-time' messages (sent at times that aren't in the morning at that location)."

"Built in Processing (processing.org) using Twitter4J, and a home-brewed client for MetaCarta's geo-parsing APIs."

Though this data has little use, it is graphically pleasing and more of Jer Thorp's work can be viewed by clicking on his name.

James Paterson

Mario Klingemann