‘Have you ever made a claim to know your own educational development and subjected the claim to public criticism? If you have, what does such a claim to educational knowledge look like?’
Jack Whitehead.
How about you?
computer code poetry
When I was 25 I thought the lines of the computer programming language ALGOL I was being paid to write were like lines of poetry. So I tried to write poems (in my own time!). And, the doodley spaced out pictures that I was making in my spare time became my models of reality, mimicking mathematical models which I was now finding to be clumsy and unresponsive.
mathematical artist: what's that?
In 1983, I persuaded the art curator, who was responsible for arranging events at Theatre Gwynedd, to agree to me having an exhibition of my poems and pictures. I called the exhibition ‘Love and Laughter’. Arts Council of Wales gave me a small grant and some bottles of champagne! I made some flyers and put them on the department of mathematics staff coffee room table. The flyers designated me, 'mathematical artist’ the job title I believed that was now ‘my new I’!
'tuo decaps', or 'spaced out' to my friends, oh dear!
If mathematics is 'thinking deeply about simple things' (Carl Friedrick Gauss) then what has this got to do with a 'brain and hand dance'? 'It's not uncommon for people to have breakthrough ideas while mindlessly working on something with their hands' (Susan Biali Haas, award-winning physician and writer). So, where does this leave the relationship between the mathematics I love, my living values and the doodles and fairy tales I create?