Day 2 Sunday June 2: Sky

• Sit spots: Hemachandra (´Fib’) poems ( see separate blog post on this)
• Paint chips and the colours of the forest — something we didn’t have time for yesterday,

• ( near noon) Sky, sun, seasons and shadows: Awareness of the apparent path of the sun at solstices and equinoxes

We can track the path of the sun in the sky with our bodies, here in Quebec at 46.8º north latitude, or wherever we happen to be!

Here’s a video of an activity like the one we are trying out today, and a handout from that workshop.

Many thanks to astrophysicist and physics educator Benoit Pfeiffer for initiating this activity, and to UK mathematical artist Nick Sayers for teaching us how to do 6 month solargrams

Six month (solstice to solstice) pinhole camera solargrams…

…showing the path of the sun in the southern sky at the UBC Orchard Garden

• Justin Dimmel: using analytic geometry to model multiplication – Sun rule that can multiply. We can construct, understand and use this! <http://www.archive.bridgesmathart.org/2023/bridges2023-453.html#gsc.tab=0>

  
  
  

  •What is the shape of a cloud? Clouds as fractals – clouds as smoothed-out polygonal structures – how to draw a cloud? Self-similarity at different scales, turbulence patterns at the edges… See this short piece by Katharina Von Bulow. Here is Lovejoy’s 1982 article in Science using the ratio between area and perimeter of clouds to calculate their fractal dimension.

  
  

  And here is the link to a film called Clouds Are Not Spheres. It’s a bio and extended interview with the late, great mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot (of the Mandelbrot Set fractal), and a lovely introduction to the fractal shapes of so many things, including clouds, mountains, trees, and also economics graphs and other human-generated shapes. 

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Homework Day 2: Some short readings from Galileo and Kepler linked here!