Anatomy and Art

a blog by Sara Egner

Archive for the ‘math’ tag

Area and Volume of a Cube

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Just a nice little math visualization that I made in Cinema4D and recently posted to YouTube

 

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November 22nd, 2013 at 8:36 pm

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Rocky

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I started to post something tonight, but had a moment of doubt about my terminology.  So instead, I’m now deleting that and taking a personal moment to show off my awesome new dog named Rocky.

 

Rocky

He’s a shelter rescue mutt, part welsh corgi and part pit bull they say.  If you’ve ever doubted the significance of genetics, just look at dogs.  They come in such a variety of sizes and shapes, and good portion of those moves have been intentional on the part of humans.  It’s a weird deal.  But I sure am glad to meet this guy.

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November 18th, 2013 at 11:16 pm

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Math and Color

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There’s a math book on the horizon so lately I’ve been giving a lot of thought to art and math again.  I have this tendency to want to represent numerical values with color value, and working in digital art only feeds that thought process.  The other day I put together a little piece on median and mean, trying to utilize color like that.

 

 

I feel like there is a lot to work with to improve clarity in mathematical concepts.  I don’t know if color is the answer for everyone, but I think it’s a strong tool that is generally under utilized.  When you think about it, color is like pitch in that it all comes down to wave frequency.  And any time you use color in a digital program it all comes down to numerical values of either red, green, and blue, or cyan, magenta, yellow, and black.  I found a site that lays this out pretty well…

http://resources.esri.com/help/9.3/arcgisengine/dotnet/8d81aed9-9643-4e22-930c-3cadcb816891.htm

In fact I’ll steal one of their charts right here to further illustrate what I mean

I’ve often thought that I might have been more invested in math early on if I’d had a better understanding of it’s potential.  It is not an opposite field from art, it is in fact the groundwork upon which art is based.

Actually, I got into a conversation with the man who helped me buy my house just the other night and learned that he is his own kind of math geek when it comes to finances and investments.  I’ve known the man for years without realizing what a data cruncher he is, and sometimes on very intuitive level.  I believe that we all do some really advanced math on a very intuitive level, but it’s so often unrecognized.  I feel like tapping into color and other art techniques can only help to express mathematical concepts in more intuitive ways and help to bridge that connection for students that might not quite see it yet.  And I think that the more students take in about math theory and practice early on, the better they will be when it comes to assessing the everyday things where such calculations come into play, whether it’s in the creation of art, or thinking out investments, or just timing when to cross the street and how quickly in traffic.

It’s food for thought.  And I hope to have further solidified my thoughts on all of this by the time we start that text book.  I want to work with the power of animation too!  I mean, c’mon, we make digital text books!  You get to do so many cool things with that!

Ok, enough ramblings for tonight.  I haven’t been posting as much lately, and it’s nice to get back to it.  Big thanks to all of you regular readers out there.

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June 4th, 2013 at 10:26 pm

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“Math Is Not Linear”

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Sometimes I let myself diverge here into matters generally scientific or mathematical, rather than outright anatomical because I feel these topics are all related, especially with regard to teaching.  Well, Alison Blank has created a wonderful flash project conveying the non-linear nature of math, specifically the matter of learning/ teaching math to students.

If you take the time to explore the piece, you’ll find that you can either click through and be lead from one point to another, or you can simply zoom in and out at your own accord and let your mind wander the topic freely.  The medium itself becomes a fantastic exercise in the point itself, that math does not have to be taught linearly.  I would say that the same principles hold true with regard to many fields of learning, anatomy and health being no exceptions.

Where there is often frustration diving into such fields, because inevitably those first lessons come without the benefit of understanding related topics, this piece embraces those relationships between ideas and presents a more circular approach to them.  It’s really a quite thoughtful, creative, and artistic expression of math and how it can be taught.

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April 23rd, 2010 at 1:38 pm

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