What I Stand For

Oh boy it's been a long time!...again. So busy with other things!

I've been asked to come back to my blog and post some more. So here I am!

I'd like to use this post to essentially put my mission statement out there.

Mission Statement:

I aim to redesign education for the fields of Mathematics and Graphic Design and show that they are more connected than most people think.

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Reasoning:

Why do I want to do this? I studied both Graphic Design and Mathematics in university and I love them both. There is beauty in Design as well as Mathematics but the real challenge is seeing that beauty from every angle. 

Many can see Graphic Design work and see the beauty as an 'art' but underneath that 'art' is a whole world of mathematics that is put together by the designer (whether he or she is aware of it or not). Likewise, Mathematics formulas, theories, laws, etc. are so beautiful in their methods yet many have such a hard time visualizing exactly what that beauty is.

So, the work I want to do is reveal to the world about these hidden beauties. Is it easy? Well no. Do I sound crazy? Maybe a little bit. But it's something I really take a look at when I look at both Design works and Mathematics works. There is art and science both going on at the same time (although really I see both of them as an art).

And why would I invite other people to see what I see? Well I'm tired of hearing three famous words that come out of the mouth of at least 90% of people I've met (both in the US and Japan): I hate math!

Now, I don't want people to suddenly start loving math like I do. Of course not, I wouldn't want other people to sound like a crazy person like me! But rather, I want things to shift from the other side and I want people to stop saying "I hate math." and rather "Math is OK." Because math is everywhere, so if you say you hate math then you essentially hate everything.

My approach to this problem: Start with education. I agree that Mathematics education has a bad reputation and can be 'boring' at times. Even I think some Math books can be super boring by just looking at the pages. But this is where Design can step in and help. If I've learned anything throughout my Design studies it's that a little bit of Design can take your project a long way.

Likewise, designers can benefit from having more mathematics knowledge in their creative works. If designers can visualize how one change to a formula can change the entire solution, maybe they can also see how small changes to their artwork can have a huge impact on the interpretations.

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Now onto my ramblings on my lack of blog posts:

I've been in Japan for the past year holding an English teaching jobs while taking what opportunities I can to teach Mathematics to those who are interested in my abilities. And I've had some success! (I think)

Very soon though, I'm heading back to the US and really going to start my Designematics works by studying more Mathematics education. So far since I've really been able to call myself a Mathematician I've changed a few people's minds about Mathematics; now I want to accelerate and see how much further I can go.

And we're back!

Boop! It's been a long time since blogging but now I have some time to do so! A year (plus) spent doing a mathematics program and a job in Japan will keep one occupied for a time. Must keep up the nerdiness and spew random facts about design and/or mathematics.

Nothing special today, but I'm going to write this small puzzle here for myself to remember. I thought of this on a train here in Japan and I'm pretty sure it's a common puzzle somewhere in the world of mathematics but...

The Number Two
2.
It's an even number.
It's a rational number.

But I say, 2 can be odd.
Without performing any function upon 2 (such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division), how can this be?

end.


Silly puzzle, but short and sweet.

I spy a Fibonacci sequence

It's been a while since my last post and that's because of other projects I've got going on that are becoming quite exciting. But I decided to take a break away from them and I found something worthy enough to make me take some time to post here again.

As I am happily reading (or at least looking) through my fancy Dengeki G's Festival Vol. 20 magazine which covers August's new upcoming game 穢翼のユースティア (Aiyoku no Eustia), I first notice something other than the wonderful illustrations:

I first notice the layout of the spreads, particularly, the sizes of the image boxes that they use within the spreads. At first glance, I say "Hey, that kind of looks phi-ish." jokingly because I know most of the time many designers don't think about phi as much as I would and it just happens to appear on designs. But then I get really curious and I bust out the good ol' ruler. To my surprise, it actually is a Fibonacci design! Behold: 

The width of the spread is 19 inches, which is unrelated to the Fibonacci design but I'm just saying that for reference of the actual spread size. The image boxes together on the spreads measure 13 inches roughly (as the character portrait covers the left edge). The width of the larger image box that goes over the spine measures 8 inches and the smaller image box located on the recto of the spread measures 5 inches exactly.

Then I look at the numbers and think: 13...8...5... I've seen this before. And indeed I have as they are numbers of the Fibonacci sequence which relates to phi. Pretty neat!

Now, I can't be sure if the designers thought about the Fibonacci sequence (or phi) when designing these spreads or if they care, but I certainly care because I thought the spreads looked nice in both design and of course illustration. That and I'm a math nerd...

HV Math; you got your Design in my Mathematics

As I'm doing some homework, placing images of my graphs into a nice little InDesign document to export into a neatly designed pdf that is easy to follow and read, I get curious about what font to use. I know that I'm not, but I certainly feel like the only person doing their math homework that spends 20-30 minutes deciding on what font to use just to write something like: 2x - 5y = 14. Not like that's a bad thing...equations can look pretty too!

HV Math Symbols

Anyways, it gets difficult sometimes to find the right font to do math in, especially when we get to some of the higher up stuff like in Calculus where those crazy math symbols are abundant. And if you do find the font that works for you, usually it's something very standard that you'd see in a textbook and that can get kind of boring.

Well I found something that would at least please the designers that might read this, because there is a font package that I found called HV Math. Although it is specifically for TeX/LaTeX (The Mathematician's version of InDesign, sort of), it's still pretty interesting that this was made for math purposes. HV stands for none other than the one and only HelVetica.

To think that the Helvetica virus would spread even to Mathematics...well at least it gave me a good chuckle.

You can find links to the TeX fonts as well as some more images of the typeface here: http://www.micropress-inc.com/fonts/hvmath/hvmain.htm

Infinitely Remembering This Guy

Well, to me he was more than just "This Guy." As stubborn as I am to say that I actually look up to someone, this is the one person I am proud to have called a role model. While he may not be familiar to most of the population as the President or Michael Jackson, he definitely made a huge impact on the entire world by defining the way we observe things.

"This Guy" was Benoit Mandelbrot, the Father of Fractal Geometry. "Father" is quite the title to have in one's life; to have discovered something that was valid enough for you to be known as the founder of it.

I could post some definitions about Fractal Geometry here, but I think I'll try a nutshell explanation from my own definition. Fractal Geometry is much like viewing recursion. You see something, and the more you want to see (by zooming in) you see more of that same something. If you blow up your image, you will find the pattern of this repetition thus revealing the fractal. These fractals are defined by numbers which may sound super boring but if you just look at them you can find them to be quite stunning.

But I admire Mandelbrot's work and his visions because he viewed things totally outside the box, defied what other people said about him, and just researched for the sake of research. That kind of determination is pretty inspiring for a person like me, who is attempting to blend these Graphic Arts with these numbers of Maths and such.

Benoit Mandelbrot passed away last year (2010) but many people still admire the legacy that he left behind.

I felt like posting about Mandelbrot because I just came across this article on the New York Times from my news read: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/12/26/magazine/2010lives.html#view=beno_t_mandelbrot

Christmas and Maths

Being the nerd that I am, there are just tons of things that we can relate numbers to in holidays. Christmas is coming up and there are a plethora of number related fun that we can have like the probability of obtaining a certain present, estimating the price of a present (taking into account the Christmas "sales" that were present at the time), or the usual estimation of the speed of Santa based on the weight of presents using statistics of popular "wished for" gifts of the year along with average reindeer speed, wind resistance, entry/exit house time, etc.

There is quite a list of things you can do this holiday season, but one that I stumbled upon was this one:

12. Unwrapping Gifts (and Math)

Well, I doubt that anyone will be in the mood, but here goes!

1. Determine the probability that Dad gets a tie.
2. Estimate and time how long it takes to unwrap all the presents.
3. Compare and contrast this with how long it took to wrap them.
4. Chart the number of gifts received versus those given.
5. Estimate and weigh the bags of recycled wrapping paper.
6. Explore nets with the extra boxes, and measure them using cubits.
7. Sort your gifts into Venn diagrams and make a pie chart to illustrate your findings.
8. Line up all the Christmas chocolates into arrays; sort, group and put them into sets.
9. Use the leftover ribbon to explore topology and create a gigantic mobius strip.
10. Try to build a rhombicosidodecahedron out of the recycled wrapping paper or just take a short break from math.

They have more Christmas maths you can do here: http://homeschooling.gomilpitas.com/articles/121106.htm

Fun stuffs!

Theory: Asymptotes and Negative Space

Recently, I've been working with some graphs and the many different types of lines that we can have fun with like hyperboles and parabolas. But among these I start to think about Asymptotes. I think it's a pretty interesting word that has very little use in everyday conversation (unless you are into analytical geometry or something). What is an Asymptote? In a nutshell: An Asymptote is a line on a graph that the graph will never intersect as it approaches infinity. Asymptotes are the DO NOT CROSS lines of graphs with curves.

Image of an Asymptote from Wikipedia

After thinking about it for a little bit, I came to think that an Asymptote is the Negative Space of a graph. Negative Space in a nutshell (from a Graphic Design perspective): The space where content is not usually located around the content. Breathing room, if you will. Negative Space is one of those things that I am interested in as it allows me to view graphic images in black and white creating something I could easily translate into a graph.

Taiwan recycling logo displaying use of Negative Space

While Asymptotes generally deal with graphs that contain curves and you can't guarantee that all your designs will have some crazy curves or parabolas, I imagine that for those designs that do use curves, knowledge of Asymptotes could improve the synergy of your design between the content and it's Negative Space. How? I'm not sure yet, it's just a theory, an idea that came into my mind out of nowhere. But I think that it's worth at least putting out there for a few minutes of thought.