> -----Original Message----- > From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On > Behalf Of Kirby Urner > Sent: Saturday, February 19, 2005 6:26 PM > To: [email protected] > Subject: [Edu-sig] python satacad: class 6 > > Then we dove into vectors for awhile: translation, rotation and scaling > being the big 3 computer graphics transformations. I started constructing > a > vector class, then switched to a fully developed one. That led us back to > POV-Ray and some pre-rendered polyhedra downloaded off the netlib library.
""" Gentlemen! The course of lectures which I now begin will be an immediate continuation of, and a supplement to, my course of last Winter. My purpose now, as it was then, is to gather together all the mathematics that you studied during your student years, insofar as this could e of interest for the future teacher, and in particular, so show its bearing on the business of school instruction. """ Felix Klein, Elementary Mathematics from and Advanced Standpoint, 1908 Klein being a Great Mind in mathematics at the dawn of modernity, who turned his attention, intellect and energy to the problem of education at the "school" level. To me, he is a great redactor of modern mathematical ideas to his day, and in that sense in the spirit of Euclid. And what Klein prescribes in the end sounds much like a primer on the underlying mathematics and ideas which we now know as the fundamentals of computer vector graphics. Except that we tend to know these ideas, and teach them, out of the their historical and intellectual context. And there is an argument that one cannot truly understand modern intellectual sensibility without some grasp of these ideas, at least in their spirit. Klein also being instrumental in opening his University's math department to women. And apparently, in the eyes of his students, living up his essential ideal as a teacher - "Never be dull" Side-trip: The quaternion: http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Quaternion.html Quaternions - mid-1800's idea extending the concepts of so-called imaginary numbers to new dimensions, and becoming the basis for the development of vector mathematics, mathematical physics, and - in some sense modernity - itself. And a fundamental tool in the mathematics of 3d computer graphics and probably known most commonly now in that context - but too often - out of its historical context, and without understanding of its historical significance. So my short manifesto is only ratifying the importance of where I think Kirby is already going and what he is already doing. Computer graphics, good. Computer graphics with pretense, better. Art _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
