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Image Compression Competition 2014
Every year that I teach the numerical analysis sequence, we end the year with a project on image compression. This year, the students used a technique called Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to sort though large datasets of images, looking for a common structure in the image data. Once they discovered the structure, they could use…
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3d printable tight knots!
I just finished uploading a large collection of my tight knots and links to Thingiverse, where they can be downloaded for 3d printing or sent to Shapeways or another service. The ever-awesome Laura Taalman did a bunch of these over the summer, and I was so inspired that ever since I’ve wanted to put the…
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Full rendered splendor
After another couple of days messing about, I finally understand a few more things about LuxRender. 1.) You can’t make a LightSource of type “area”. Despite the fact that this is (ahem) nowhere in the documentation, you have to use AreaLightSource. The AreaLightSource seems to be a LOT less powerful than a “direct” light source,…
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Victory! (Of a sort)
So I’ve been working for a few days on understanding LuxRender, which if you’ve never seen it is a quite impressive global illumination renderer. I’ve been trying to piece together a Mathematica interface which will allow me to take quick snaps of tubes, knots, random polygons and the like and been completely befuddled. Aside from…
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Rendering solution
So I know I’m dating myself (badly) here, but a lot of my personal art code still relies on PovRay in order to make “nice” renders of things. The problem is that PovRay has been entirely dead for the past six or seven years, and now doesn’t even compile and install on my exciting new…
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Image for PNAS Special Topology Issue
I just finished making a small contribution to this image (hopefully to appear on the cover of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) built by Tammy Cantarella and Aaron Abrams. The structure illustrates some of Aaron’s research on Dehn functions. Aaron’s work is way deeper than this example, but the example is still…
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Radiosity in Math 4510 applied math course
When ambient light is reflected and reradiated in an image, finding the final distribution of light in the image requires the solution of a very large linear algebra problem. The total light R_i radiating from a face i is given by R_i = E_i + Σ F_ij R_j, where i is the light emitted by face i and the Fij are “view factors” describing the…
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The Flocktree
The Flocktree is a sculptural installation of a flock of pigeons cast in an expanding urethane foam supported and grouped by a collection of nesting aluminum frames. The interplay between the rigorous order imposed by the frames and the fluid organic shape of the flock raises questions about the way the viewer makes sense of collections of…
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Cotton Patch Quilters Talk
In August of 2007 I was lucky enough to give a talk on mathematics and quilting to the Cotton Patch quilters here in Athens. The talk was a lot of fun, and taught me quite a bit about quilts! You can read the slides at the link above.
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Images for Cabinet Magazine
In 2006 I did a series of images of tight knots for the art magazine Cabinet. They appeared in issue 20 Ruins, accompanying an article by Kenneth Millett about knots. These are all rendered with the flaky but amazing Electric Image Animation System. I think they look pretty good: