Conversation: Serpentine Gallery ~ Edge: Map Marathon
A roadmap for eliminating viruses from industrial microbes (& possibly agriculture and humans). It shows the "Genetic Code" used in every living thing on our planet -- all 64 possible triplet "codon" combinations of 4 bases: A, C, G, U. The numbers represent how many times each of these occurs in the star of genome engineering -- E.coli. The 3-letter names in black are the 20 amino acids encoded by the triplets. The 3-color uppercase symbols represent the "anti-codons" in the tRNA molecules responsible for the decoding. We are using this map to design and construct new genomes with new codes.
This is a map of the Internet in 1901. Surely there was no Internet in 1901? But each technology is built on top of the previous technology, and the Internet is no exception. It was built on top of the telephone network, which was built, in turn, on top of the telegraph network, which already girdled the world by the end of the Victorian era, in 1901. So here it is. The Internet in 1901.
Economic Triptych: Marginal Revolution II. These panels are actually maps of maps designed to show mathematicians and physicists that economics has the same deep structure as fundamental physics and differential geometry. The first panel shows the 'indifference map' and budget constraints of a consumer painted onto a so-called fiber bundle generalizing the x-y plane. The second shows economist François Divisia's 1925 economic theory of price and quantity indices for this consumer has the structure of an electromagnetic potential capable of reproducing the 1959 Aharonov-Bohm physical effect. The last panel shows that the theory of economic welfare has the structure of an infinite dimensional principal bundle whose symmetries are well-known to string theorists as the Virosoro group. It is depicted here in 3 visual dimensions as the mathematician's Hopf Fibration.
Deception REPUTATION MANAGEMENT BY NAME RECONFIGURATION. Jean Jaurès apparently once said, “Quand les hommes ne peuvent changer les choses, ils changent les mots.” By mapping old names to new ones, this piece hopes to capture the spirit of that quote as well as some of my research on shame and reputation.
Conversation: IN MEMORY OF BENOIT MANDELBROT: 1924 - 2010
Photo: Marvin Minsky
Initial image of a Mandelbrot set zoom sequence with a continuously coloured environment
Benoit Mandelbrot, Budapest, 16 October 2003 [Photo: George Dyson]
FORMULA FOR THE 21ST CENTURY [10.13.07] WHAT IS YOUR FORMULA? YOUR EQUATION? YOUR ALGORITHM?