I.E. Block Community Lecture: Stylish Mathematics
Wednesday, July 9
6:15 PM - 7:15 PM
Room: Town & Country
Chair: Cleve Moler, MathWorks, Inc.
All too often we see mathematics and the arts as two sides of the science/humanities coin. In this talk we'll see a place in which the two come naturally together in exciting new research. For in today's world in which almost all aspects of life are brought to the common medium of the computer, it is now possible to quantify and extract the style of an artist via computation. Examples are gleaned from the literary, visual, and dance arts, and include applications to the problem of authentication as well as to the more general problem of quantifying one's personal style. Taken together, this body of work shows just how "stylish" mathematics can be!
Daniel Rockmore
Dartmouth College
Followed at 7:15 PM by a Community Reception.
Followed at 8:15 PM by a film (running time is 53 minutes)
"Mind in the Machine: The Discovery of Artificial Intelligence"
Wendy Conquest, Bob Drake, and Dan Rockmore
In the summer of 1956, a small group of mathematicians met at Dartmouth College. Their goal was no less than to understand the very nature of human thought through the power of mathematics as embodied in a relatively new and as yet, still, not so well understood technology called the computer. They called this new discipline "artificial intelligence" and, in doing so, initiated a field of study that today lives at the frontier of computing, philosophy, mathematics, and psychology. Through interviews with those intellectual pioneers and lively original footage, "Mind in the Machine: The Discovery of Artificial Intelligence," a video documentary, by Wendy Conquest, Bob Drake, and Dan Rockmore, captures the excitement of those first days of AI and the spirit of those who are some of our most intrepid intellectual explorers.
The film will be shown again on Thursday during Lunch at 12:45 in the Town & Country, with an introduction by Dan Rockmore.
Dan Rockmore was a consultant for Mathematics Illuminated, a 13-part multimedia learning resource and educational series produced by Oregon Public Broadcasting. There is an accompanying website.
