Math is Pretty

I’m misusing twitter now as a personal micro-blog.

Go to szymborska there now to read about Alice and the Mad Hatter at the Washington Park Arboretum, the best library in Seattle, and to see Frog becoming friends with a horse name Amos.

The move up to Seattle to join Amazon was an old fashioned road trip. I traveled up here in my old Honda with my Pop, Sky, and Frog. We visited Powell’s and Japanese tea gardens in Portland and had a barbecue at a friends on our first night here. It was a great bonding experience and the best way to move to a new city.

Frog and I have been traipsing through the downtown, finding dog parks, art galleries, Pike’s market, and breakfast places.

I have a lot more time now that I’m not working at Lina and have been spending it reconnecting to the world and my personal loves. Thus far, I’ve taken two art classes (”Drawing Faces”, “Cartooning”) and have four more art classes (”Illustrating Children’s Books”, “Understanding Perspective” “Introduction to Drawing,” and “Figure Drawing”)  coming up in the Fall.

I hope to post some work this fall, but it will be some time and hard work before it will be as imaginative as a three year old’s drawing or as skilled as an eight year old’s.

I’m also reading again and going to plays like “As you Like it” by Green Stage (a local Shakespeare in the park troupe) and plan on going to Wicked which is visiting Seattle in September and October.

Frog has made the transition well and seems to love the long walks we take checking out the Capitol Hill neighborhood and Downtown Seattle. Here he is smiling in front of Elliot Bay Bookstore.

At Pike’s Place Market, I ran into a wonderful subversive giving away free hugs instead of charging them. Look up the free hugs campaign on Youtube and – if you’re ever lucky enough to have the opportunity – participate. The hugs are of very high quality and you will walk away with a smile on your face.

I was hired by Amazon three months ago to work on large systems — i.e., software that spans thousands of computers. Amazon is one of only a few companies that works with software at this scale. I’m currently working in their cloud computing division that allows you to rent virtual computers online, scalably send messages to virtual queues, and store terabytes on the Web.

Which brings us to this blog. While I worked at Lina, the focus here was on Lina. With this change in employment, this blog can be focused on a topic of my choosing. I have chosen mathematics and the blog’s title has changed as a result from “Code to an Imaginary Number” to “Math is Pretty.”

The title of the blog reflects my experience of mathematics as a beautiful aesthetic whose value transcends its truth statements. I believe most mathematicians experience mathematics this way and one of the main gaps between people who love mathematics and those who don’t is a lack of development of this aesthetic sense. My hope with this blog is to help readers bridge that gap and learn to see beneath the equations and numbers.