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Bolts from the Blue: Art, Mathematics, and Cultural Evolution (Paperback)
$14.95
On Our Shelves Now
Description
We have discovered a pattern for cultural bifurcations involving artists making significant contributions to the history of mathematics. How much of this material would you recognize as mathematics on the basis of your school education? How much appears on standard tests? And what kind of training best supports the development of your natural mathematical skills? How is the integration of mathematics and culture faring today? The six stories of this book-in addition to being examples of cultural ecologies, mathematical mentalities, and bolts from the blue-exhibit the integration of math and cultural history, the basis of a new way of teaching math in school.
About the Author
RALPH H. ABRAHAM has been Professor of Mathematics at the University of California at Santa Cruz since 1968. He has taught at Berkeley, Columbia, and Princeton and is the author of more than twenty texts, including eight books currently in print.
Dr. Abraham has been active on the research frontier of dynamics (in mathematics since 1960 and in applications and experiments since 1973, including speculative work on consciousness) and has been a consultant on chaos theory and its applications in numerous fields (medical physiology, ecology, mathematical economics, psychotherapy, etc.)
Another interest of Dr. Abraham's concerns alternative ways of expressing mathematics, for example visually or aurally.Ê In 1975, he founded the Visual Mathematics Project at the University of California at Santa Cruz (which became the Visual Math Institute in 1990), with its very popular Web site. He has staged performances in which mathematics, visual arts and music are combined into one presentation. Students are often allowed to earn extra credit by writing papers on the history or social impacts of mathematics, areas about which Dr. Abraham has written extensively. In the popular literature, he is well-known for publishing the Trialogue series of books, written with Terence McKenna and Rupert Sheldrake.
Dr. Abraham is a member of cultural historian William Irwin Thompson's Lindisfarne Association and was a co-designer, with Thompson, of the curriculum for The Ross School (www.rossschool.org).
