In our beloved Champaign Urbana (Champaign Urbana) several interesting encounters, my eyes and ears are attracted by the digital world, from zero to nine, there is always someone doing something. Before I realized it, one door led to another.
Bring your gloves and hat, or an umbrella, and enjoy what creative people do with numbers. I am immersed in the strategies of number whispers and math phobia. They found that they had more in common than they thought.
As a writer, I started with this year’s Small Press Fest, where I was very interested in a book by Debra Domal, an artist, graphic designer, and art editor of Smile Politely, as well as Restoring New Yorker, Bagel Snob and devotee of BuffyVerse. She recently created "Digital Confession" (Coronavirus Edition), which led to the Digital Story Project. For someone who thinks she is firmly on the side of words and art and numbers, this may be unexpected, but she grew up in the company of an accountant father, who smiled smartly and told her that numbers always do. tell a story. She inherited many beautiful ledgers from him, and wanted to find suitable projects to establish common ground between her and his world.
The prolonged epidemic isolation has spawned many companies. "Digital Confession" is Domal's creative response to her daily confrontation with the new figures that dominate the daily headlines-how many new cases, the number of people in the ICU, and the final number of deaths due to COVID? Is the number going up or down? They suddenly have the power to shape our daily reality. Domar gave them the benefit of doubt in the opening: “It’s not always easy to be a number.” She took a deep breath and expressed her voice with the numbers in her imagination, using the way she imagined. Acknowledge their fears and share their hard-won wisdom". Each emotion is matched with a figure made of the number itself, with the front facing up, the inside facing out, and even flowing in the shape of angel wings.
Reward yourself through her imagination. In the city, you can pick up a copy at the Art Coop in Lincoln Square.
After the book was published, she became interested in the idea of inviting the community to participate in a larger conversation. With funding from the Urbana Arts and Culture Project, she created the Digital Story Project. You can tell what the digital COVID story is through poetry, text or graphics for the collective "recall and healing from our crisis experience." Look for upcoming presentations about the project in the Art Coop window.
New numbers came to my mind. When I visited the Urbana Market in the Plaza recently, I was attracted by the luminous shapes and colors of Kathryn Swift’s handcrafted dragon ink dice, which was designed to please game player.
What an eye-catching and beautiful digital display. What is new to me is the diversity of the dice-the different numbers of faces described by "d" indicate how many faces the dice have. The D&D set consists of seven: one each for d4, d8, d12, and d20, and two d10.
Swift’s game of choice is vampire; her father is a big fan of Dungeons and Dragons. He made a plan to celebrate the digital event on January 20, 2020 through a D&D challenge on Twitch, and mentioned that it would be cool to have custom dice. She just got a job in a bookstore that was closed due to the novel coronavirus pneumonia. What could make use of her time better than studying the technology, art and mystery of die casting.
Over time, she continued to refine her skills, using fonts designed by Elizabeth Komer, a member of her Facebook dice team. She began to prepare a 3D printer for the masters, use them to make silicon molds, pour the resin, and then put them in a pressure tank for 6 hours of curing. The materials are toxic; they need respirators and nitrile gloves as well as a well-ventilated room and a sturdy filter. To finish, the dice can be placed in the tumbler, but in most cases she will sand them by hand with Zona paper. Colors and special effects are limited to ingenuity; she uses glitter in eyeshadow, acrylic paint, and even embeds amulets or baby scents in special projects. Swift is attracted by the combination of art and function; these luminous dice add something to the game player's experience.
In order to briefly introduce how random numbers are woven into fantasy and warfare, I visited Sam Snyder, a friend and D&D enthusiast. Dungeons & Dragons was designed in the 1980s and is a groundbreaking model that all role-playing games follow. It is essentially an impromptu performance of a world composed of dwarves, elves, halflings, humans, etc. The player develops a character and gives it attributes such as strength, agility, physique, intelligence, wisdom, and charm. The number of each attribute is specified by the d20 volume. Then according to the quality and quantity of weapons, armors, gold coins and all actions, a specific dice among the seven kinds of dice is rolled. The details of the story and the way the characters interact depend on the ingenuity of the dungeon master. Some hints in the introduction to the Player’s Manual hint at these possibilities: "A tall human tribe man strode through a blizzard, clothed in fur, holding his axe... a half-orc roared and challenged her to the barbarian tribe. The newest challenger to the authority...foamed at the mouth, and a dwarf slammed his drow enemy in the face with his helmet." You get it. In each question in the storyline, the rules indicate the throwing of a specific dice, and the numbers from low to high indicate the strength or success of the attribute or gameplay. Then the dungeon master draws details around the numbers to enrich the story of each battle.
The dice introduce random elements to the story, but since each player throws the dice according to their character's attributes and behavior, they give a sense of agency. What is the chance of life and death? For Snyder, the dice add to the tension of storytelling. It is ultimately a game with a lot of philosophy. Opportunities and numbers have increased some of their power. Let us look at the nature of numbers: 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10. Humans have ten fingers, and both numbers and fingers are called "digits". This is no accident. Our language, communication and thinking systems begin with human experience. Teaching children to count is one finger after another. The earliest known artifact to indicate counting is the Lebombo bone, which shows 29 grooves and dates back to 35,000 BC. It is likely that population growth and the need for more resources led to trade, which promoted the computing system. Due to the dependence on agriculture, it is advisable to predict the season and time division. Human ingenuity and the joy of challenge have led to numerical analysis of the motion of stars and planets, measurement systems, and more evidence we have found in past civilizations. Written mathematical symbols can be traced back to the Sumerians around 3000 BC. “Numbers” go beyond simple numbers, expounding positive and negative, rational and irrational, truthfulness, complexity, etc. in detail.
To give an insightful introduction to the academic disciplines surrounding numbers, I found a generous guide from Professor Bruce Reznick, who lives in the Department of Mathematics in Altgeld Hall. He is known for his skills and dedication in teaching "Basic Numerical Facts" and more advanced and esoteric mathematical analysis. An advanced solution awarded him the portrait on the beer label. Please forgive the brief sampling of terminology.
The long-term mathematical challenge presented by Eberhard Becker is called the "Champagne Problem." He proved that for every even number m, B(t) can be written as the sum of m powers of a rational function with rational coefficients, and challenged others to provide concrete examples. Reznick wrote the formula you see below, which shows the exact example of the smallest case, in the fourth order.
Starting from a brewery, its goal is to develop a rough style of IPA, its own "champagne problem", an operations manager with a degree in advanced mathematics, and some unlikely clues integrated into long-term mathematical challenges, beer The recipe and a complex solution provided by a professor living in Champaign. This is a celebration of numbers.
Reznik was also attracted by the simpler puzzles and patterns that mathematics can uniquely illuminate. Since he was a child, he has been fascinated by numbers and the challenge of using numbers to find patterns. For him, the essence of mathematician research is to try to answer questions; when looking for promising challenges, he looks for a "natural" problem, a problem that can be simply described. The most popular is the Fibonacci sequence, whose number is the sum of the first two, 1-1-2-3-5-8-13-21 and beyond. This series describes the growth of the seed wheel in the sunflower head and the growth of the bracts surrounding the pine cones. As the numbers get larger and larger, they approach a ratio called the golden section, which has long been considered an aesthetic ideal for vision and rhythm. It is reflected in the proportions of the Parthenon, the modulus of the architect Le Corbusier, musical works, and even the ratio of text to margins in the book design.
Reznick caught my attention. He called Bach's exploration of composition patterns and changes as the embodiment of the QED mathematical concept, "Quod erat Demonstrandum", which means "something to explain". The natural and satisfactory conclusions made by the notes show the same resolution as the mathematical proof. Our Western music is indeed based on the number system of seven notes in the octave and the harmony established between different intervals. A satisfactory song involves predictable and surprising number interval patterns.
Some people think that numbers can represent a destiny, just like in a dice game. There are systems that use numbers—including gambling, numerology, and astrology—that advocate numerical determinism. Humans’ desire for patterns is deeply ingrained. The numbers will not dispute whether it is true or not.
As Domar said at the end of "Digital Confession", "By telling these stories, numbers help us remember...the numbers always have power."
This is an Abecedarian Amble, what about the letter N? Its earliest root seems to be the glyph of the Egyptian snake, a kind of wavy line, some people call it a wave. A later variant, which evolved from Phoenician to Greek, ends with the letter "nun", which means fish. And our N results.
Cope Cumpston is a resident book designer, printer, and community enthusiast. Abecedarian Amble's archive is here.
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