Wow

From a blog called: This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology & Economics

"As to the improbability of intersection, we open with a shocker. It is, I think, relatively certain that the Chudnovsky brothers enter this network ONLY because certain conditions were fulfilled. The brothers:

1. were immigrants
2. came in twos (brothers insisting that they represent one functional mathematician)
3. failed to get mainstream academic appointments and lived in obscurity
4. pursued a problem regarded as unsolvable
5. built their own computer and stuffed it into a living room
6. did all of this in New York City"
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And ended up being the solution to a problem at the MET concerning Ancient Unicorn Tapestries:
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"Eventually, this problem was found to conceal a still more vexing problem: that the tapestries had shifted during the photographic process so that the tiles could not be reassembled. Only higher mathematics, and, as it turned out, two brothers from Russia, could put the tapestries back together again. And of course they did, using their new supercomputer to perform what the New Yorker calls “vast seas of calculations upon each individual pixel in order to make a complete image of [the] tapestry.”

Cool stuff.

networks in expanding cultural spaces, part I

networks in expanding cultural spaces, part II

networks in expanding cultural spaces, part III

networks in expanding cultural spaces, part IV