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The Science and the Arts series is presented by the Science Center and
is part of the Continuing Education and
Public Programs at The Graduate Center, CUNY.
Science and the Art of Fractals:
Appealing to the Senses of Sight and Sound
Presenter: Richard F.
Voss [fractal
link]
Monday, November 5, 2001, 6-7:30pm
Free
Mountains, Clouds, and the Music of the Markets
The intricate shapes and every changing patterns of the natural world
have long been an inspiration and model
of beauty to artists, writers, and musicians.
Mathematics and science, on the other hand,
are often viewed as cold, dry, and uninteresting. If they possess
a
beauty, it is of a perfect symmetry that is irrelevant to the real world:
scientists could send a rocket to the moon,
or predict the perfect symmetry of carbon atoms in a diamond, but they
could not describe a mountain, write a
formula for clouds, predict financial markets, or capture a melody.
The mathematics of fractal geometry and the
science of chaos are now bridging the gaps between math,
science, art, and culture. They treat the messiness of the everyday world.
They are based on natural
self-similarity (a small branch of a tree reminds one of the entire tree)
and observations of complicated behavior
from simple equations. They provide a new mathematical
language for capturing, manipulating, and simulating
nature.
The lecture will illustrate the descriptive and creative power of fractals
and chaos through computer generated
images, animation, sounds, and music. Examples of practical applications
of fractals to economics, DNA
sequences, early Chinese landscape paintings, and x-ray mammograms will
be presented. The unity of building
mountains and clouds from mathematics and generating music from the stock
market will be demonstrated.
Richard F. Voss
Richard Voss is an internationally recognized physicist and popular
lecturer on fractals. He has presented over
150 major invited lectures on fractal geometry and has published over
80 scientific articles.
Born in Minnesota, he received a B.S. degree from M.I.T, a Ph.D. in
physics from the University of California
at Berkeley, and was for many years a Research Staff Member at IBM's Thomas
J. Watson Research Center.
At IBM he collaborated closely with Dr. Benoit Mandelbrot (the "father"
of fractals) and continued his research
in condensed matter physics. His mastery of scientific computer graphics
has been instrumental in the rapid
acceptance of fractals as a useful language. His computer generated images
have appeared widely in numerous
magazines, books, television shows, and IBM commercials. In 1993 he was
elected Professor of Applied
Physics, adjunct, at Yale University where he taught a special undergraduate
course on fractal geometry. In
August 1995 he joined the Center for Complex Systems at Florida Atlantic
University with appointments as
Professor of Physics and Mathematics while continuing association with
IBM Research as a visiting scientist.
His current research interests are applications of fractals and chaos
to science and math education, financial
time series, and medical imaging.
More Information:
Richard Voss' Fractal
Links
All events are held in the Elebash Recital Hall, The Graduate Center,
365 Fifth Ave (at 34th Street)
The Science and the Arts series is presented by the Science Center and
is part of the Continuing Education and
Public Programs at The Graduate Center. Free and open to the public. For
information: phone: (212) 817-8215,
email: continuinged@gc.cuny.edu or visit the web site http://web.gc.cuny.edu/cepp
See ad
for this presentation at this site.
Science and Arts-The Graduate Center-CUNY
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