User:Mark
From Prep08Wiki
Mark Duston
Asst. Prof. Mathematics
Johnson & Wales University
8 Abbott Park Place
Providence, RI 02903
mark.duston@jwu.edu
401-598-2960
Johnson & Wales is a career oriented university with Business, Hospitality and Culinary Colleges. The John Hazen White School of Arts & Sciences is essentially a service school and the University does not grant degrees in the liberal arts or sciences. Except for technology majors most students take at most 2 mathematics courses; a 1000 level algebra type course and a basic statistics course (MATH2001).
It's a real struggle to try and interest students in mathematics. We have done a series of interdisciplinary lectures Math & Art,Math & 4-dimension,Math & Time Travel, Math & Psychology, Math & Sociology of Credit etc. In addition the University has allowed use to run MATH2005 Special Topics in Mathematics. This lets us offer courses on varying topics in mathematics without changing the whole course catalog. Generate some interest with a talk as a teaser and follow up later in the year with a related class. The trick is to get at least 10-15 students to use up a precious elective on a math course.
I attended the NES/MAA spring meeting in VT and went to a session on Non-Euclidean Geometries in Art. I'm hoping to find material here that might lead to a Special Topics class.
Areas of Personal Interest
Third generation photo junky. Grandpa did it with a 4x5 Speed Graphic and Zeiss roll film cameras and Kodak Retina 35mm. Dad had a Kodak 35 and graduated to leica screw thread 35mm rangefinders. I started with a Brownie and the Diana. Moved on into 35mm slr's including the cutest little Olympus half-frame model. Did all the darkroom stuff including various alternative stuff (blue, brown prints, bichromate). Going, going, gone digital - but it's not the same! A lot of this is photo related.
Peripheral Photography
Instead of a standard camera with a fixed lens projecting on image on a whole rectangle cut from a roll of film; consider a lens that projects an image on a film gate that is a narrow slit. In one variation the lens and slit rotate across an arc of film. In another variation the film drive is motorized and the film is pulled past the slit at a constant rate.
The subject if small is rotated at a rate synchronized with the speed at which the film passes the gate. If excessively large the camera may be moved around the subject instead. The effect is to surround the subject in a cylinder of film which is slit and unrolled to produce a picture.
Is it proper to interpret the result as essentially similar to a central (equatorial) strip of a mercator projection? (It's not! I think i have the different projections worked out see this http://math.slu.edu/prep08/images/5/57/MercatorAndCamera.pdf )
The earliest I remember seeing this sort of thing was in some photography magazines from the late 40's or early 50's. Grandma was definitely scandalized as some of the pictures were of undressed women. The images were similar to the ones at these sites: http://www.roundshot.ch/xml_1/internet/de/application/d451/d798/f799.cfm or http://www.virginiomoutinho.com/fotografia.html and click on peripheral photography. Others have done similar work see http://people.rit.edu/andpph/pictures.html especially Exhibit 3 and Exhibit 5. I think these show a similarity to portraiture by Picasso. See some of the examples in http://www.miracerros.com/artwork/g_picasso_0.htm . I find it most true where the artist is trying to show multiple views of the facial features on a single canvas.
Systems such as these have a history of being used to make roll out photographs of essentially cylindrical objects like vases and other pottery items. One source cited an example from the Royal Photographic Society in 1895. A cylindrical object is seen with the exterior as a whole in a single frame or photograph. For a current example see http://www.wide-format-printers.org/Mayan_Maya_vase_rollout_book/Mayan_vase_rollout_book.html . Wikipedia article at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rollout_photography .
FishEye Perspective
A fish-eye lens delivers a 180o angle of view onto a circular image. No attempt is made to keep a rectilinear perspective. Depending on the lens/camera combination a rectangular area may be cropped from the image or the whole circle. See wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisheye_lens .
