After Tens of Thousands of Pigeons Vanish is an extraordinary tale of what (presumably) happens when a Concorde overflies a mass of racing pigeons — compare the video accompanying How Our Consumer Culture Is Killing Whales.
[ by Charles Cameron — the series continues from six ]
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What a pleasure to discover Matt Damon does graph theory in his spare time!
— or that the female face. similarly, is viewed by some as the basis for graphical analysis:
— and that even war-gaming boards, such as this one from PAXsims’ ISIS Crisis game, can feature the node and edge / circle and line format, along with cards, dice, hexagons…
[ by Charles Cameron — Tarkovsky, Nostalghia, Vivaldi, Mingardo ]
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I trust you are in no hurry. Watching a film by Tarkovsky invites a certain stillness, permeated with wonder. It is in that stillness that the birds..
…in this case, Nostalghia, are born from the Madonna.
I was reading my daily quota of Three Quarks Daily and found Leanne Ogasawara‘s Dreaming of the Madonna — interesting, indeed beautiful — but when it closed with that video clip I was — transported, transfixed. Such luminous beauty.
The woman painted, the woman carried, and the woman walking.
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And then to recall another woman walking, in a clip no less beautiful: the exquisite Sara Mingardo, who has been holding back, listening to and absorbing conductor Rinaldo Alessandrini and Concerto Ialiano performing Vivaldi‘s Gloria from the start of Philippe Béziat‘s movie of that great work, and moves slowly forward to join them to sing her agonized opening notes, “Domine Deaus, Agnus Dei” — “Lord God, Lamb of God”:
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It is entirely possible to be lifted from this world into another world — without the necessity of leaving this one.
[ by Charles Cameron — in which we glimpse the (female) divinity hidden behind infinity ]
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It is one of the curiosities of mathematics that the great Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan claimed to have received many, if not all, of his equations from the goddess Namagiri in dreams — and that this idea is all too often quietly omitted from discussions of his uncanny brilliance.
Now that The Man Who Knew Infinity is out in theaters, it might be wise to explore the connection between Namagiri and Ramanujan a little more closely.
Dream and waking, darshan and mathematics, inspiration and intuition, intuition and proof, quality and quantity — these polarities are all involved..
To its credit, the film contains the line:
You want to know how I get my ideas? God speaks to me.
However, the idea that “God” might be a goddess seems a reach too far for the screenwriters and director.
Stephen Wolfram posted a fine article on his blog last week, Who Was Ramanujan?. He was willing to mention that Ramanujan’s friend and collaborator, GH Hardy, “could be very nerdy — whether about cricket scores, proving the non-existence of God, or writing down rules for his collaboration with Littlewood” — but fails in 31 pages to mention Ramanujan’s own belief that he received his equations from a goddess.
All of which caused me to pose a question to Wolfram’s own algorithmic genie, Wolfram Alpha:
Did Namagiri reveal equations to Ramanujan?
WolframAlpha skipped the words “Did Namagiri reveal” and “to” and concentrated on responding to “equations” and “Ramanujan” — not quite up to par with AlphaGo, I’m afraid, let alone Ramanujan himself, or better, Namagiri.
Below’s the DoubleQuote I made to by way of comment — note that I’ve only had space for the first line of WolframApha’s extended response:
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