A new initiative co-organized with the School of Art, Media, and Technology and the Fine Arts Program Parsons, this lecture series captures the increasingly trans-disciplinary nature of scientific, academic, artistic and cultural practices and, in particular, focuses on the complex cross-disciplinary settings for art’s production in contemporary life.

In the 4th-century AD the Maya began writing exponentially large numbers to link historical dates to periods deep in time.  They used various glyphs and symbols to write these dates, symbols that include a dot for one and a bar for five and a stylized shell for zero within their positional base-twenty system.  The first known Maya zero dates back to AD 357, carved on a stone stela at Uaxactun, Guatemala.  Why Maya scribes wrote dates so deep in time and how they use, conceive, and visualize their zero has been the focus of Anna Blume’s archeological and ethno-historical research for the past eight years.

This event is paired with a lecture by artist with Josiah McElheny, presented on November 16, 2010.

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Anna Blume has been teaching and writing about art as a particular mediation between what can be seen and what remains un-seeable.  From this perspective, art, in its very making and existence, has within it a metaphysical component and a potentiality to exceed its own materiality towards expression both unleashed and unbound. Her field of research ranges from 6th-century sandstone rock cut temples in central Western India to 9th-century numerical Maya notations carved into limestone stelae. Blume received her PhD in the History of Art from Yale University in 1997. She has taught at various art colleges in New York including Cooper Union, Parson’s School of Design, School of Visual Arts, and is currently Associate Professor of the History of Art at the State University of New York (FIT).  Supported by the Ford Foundation, State University of New York, and the American Philosophical Society, her research on Maya concepts of zero is forthcoming in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society.

Posted on November 30, 2010

A new initiative co-organized with the School of Art, Media, and Technology and the Fine Arts Program Parsons, this lecture series captures the increasingly trans-disciplinary nature of scientific, academic, artistic and cultural practices and, in particular, focuses on the complex cross-disciplinary settings for art’s production in contemporary life. Clustered around specific subjects such as geophysics, system theory, economics, and the physics of time, the lectures are presented in thematic pairs, one week apart from one another. Members of The New School’s acclaimed faculty alternate with external scholars, experts and artists. All lectures are open to the public.

Mathematics is often described as the science of patterns. This implies that it is primarily concerned with visualizing, analyzing and predicting the phenomena we observe in the physical world and in the relationships we see among numbers. But mathematics also looks at the unpredictable, the unexpected. In this talk, Jennifer Wilson explores what it means to be truly random; how the probability of unlikely events changes depending on how the question is asked; and how stable patterns can become chaotic and then stable again as we change the way we look at them.

Jennifer Wilson’s lecture is paired with a presentation on September 11, 2010, of Change Encounters, a new project on probabilities, predictions and prophecies by Vera List Center 2009-2010 Fellows Lin + Lam.

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Jennifer Wilson is Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Eugene Lang College. She received her B.Sc. in Mathematics from the University of British Columbia, and her M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Mathematics from Princeton University in Harmonic Analysis and Partial Differential Equations. Her primary research interests are in mathematics applied to the social sciences, particularly cooperative game theory and voting theory, and has she recently co-authored a series of papers analyzing the Democratic Party Presidential Primary. She is also interested in the role of visualization in mathematics, and is currently working on a collaborative project to examine how illustrations are used to convey financial information.

Posted on August 30, 2010