Constraints and Creativity in Mathematics and Fiction

I wrote earlier about Hannu Rajaniemi and his wonderful performance at the  The International Science Day. Here is a video from the scene. Mathematics and fiction are not very different.

Hannu Rajaniemi: Escape from the Castle of If (Constraints and Creativity in Mathematics and Fiction) from Suzi McEndoo on Vimeo.

Exploring the Intersection Between Science and Art

I had the most wonderful day Last Sunday. My hometown Turku is one of the European Capitals of Culture 2011 and there are all kinds of events throughout the year. I did not however expect anything very special for me, but it turned out I was wrong. In the local newspaper I found out about The International Science Day - Science Meets Art. I have watched Ted talks and wondered how nice it would be to attend one and now I got the chance to see many outstanding speakers talk about quantum physics, mathematics and how these two hars subjects can be presented in a fun and a creative way.

One of my favorites was Hannu Rajaniemi, the author of Quantum Thief, a new sci-fi book which I love! Hannu is Finnish but Lives in Scotland, has a Ph.D. in Mathematical Physics. He was talking about the differencies and similarities in Mathematics and Fiction. Mathematicians create imaginary objects and determine relations and rules between them and start playing with these imaginary things. That is just what I have tried to tell people about math. It is based on the creativity of the scientists! Other sciences use the results of this play, but it is not relevant for the mathematician. On the other hand Fiction has to have the plot, style, relations between characters and other rules. For me writing is like that; sometimes I am much more comfortable playing with my math than trying to figure out how to write logical, understandable sentences.

I also saw the premiere of the Documentary "Inside the Light", the story about dealing with single atoms and photons and making their presence visible.

Mathematics and quantum physics was used to describe what it looks like in a human's brain, what mathematics has to do with joggling and how music could be created from numbers and arithmetical operations. All the speakers made these hard scientific things so much more comprehensible even for people who don't know the theory so well.

I will get back to more details later, but here is a short video about the conference with a couple of interviews



 

I have never attended a cofenference or a seminar which would have fascinated me more!

Egg in a Bottle

This time an interesting physics experiment I have done sometime in the past. An easy one and can be done at home

Domino in a supermarket

My blog has been a bit quiet lately. I have once again had the exam season and I am also preparing for my holiday week. I have been writing my post for a meme sent me by Jenny Mannion, but it seems to take more time than the usual ones. You will see it soon.

As I wrote last time, I have been socializing in Digg and to my great fun, one video started to spread there and got quite many Diggs. Its title is Supermarket Domino and people were wondering why anyone would be able to do that; why did the boss not watch what his employees were doing and why these people had time to do this.

In the beginning there is a text: "Toiset oli töissä Joulupäivänä…", which means " some people were working on Christmas Day…". Our shops were open till 1 pm on Christmas Eve and I think they were again open on the second Christmas Day. I think these people have just gotten bored at work with very few customers and finished the project after work. With a massive thing like that I would not take the risk customers ruining it.

This is not actually just fun: I am filing it under physics because it shows the law of conservation of linear momentum. It also shows the principle of mathematical induction, a method used to proving things for natural numbers. I teach the method in school and almost always have an argument about this. The textbook tells the principle: "There is an infinite number of dominos and every time a domino falls, it makes the neighbouring domino fall. If we make the first one fall, does the total row fall down? The arguments are against the word infinity, but as always we mathematicians talk about things you can only imagine, not experience. However, this video makes you think there is an infinity…