art and craft with science

male speaker: i'd liketo thank everybody for coming today for thislunch talk, our authors talk with margaret wertheim. margaret is the director ofthe institute for figuring. many years ago, inher collegiate years, she studied math, physics,and computer science. but for approximatelythe last three decades, she's worked asa science writer, and i think she'd probably callherself a science communicator,

correct? and in really working to connectand bring together and explore three different communities, ithink, vis-a-vis the sciences. one would be the communityof scientific professionals, with degrees from accrediteduniversities attached to institutions, and publishingin peer-reviewed journals. and then what is sometimescalled laypeople, or the layperson, who thinkthey knew nothing of science, but in fact do thingsin the realm of science,

or procedurally scientificactivities every day. and also a third group ofscientific enthusiasts, which are sometimes pejorativelyknown as outsider scientists, or outsider physicists, whoare quite certain they know much about science andalso know that much of what we know aboutscience is wrong. those are very-- three veryinteresting communities that aren't as distinctas we think they are. and i think much of theadventure of the institute

for figuring, andmargaret's project overall, has been to unsettle whatwe know about science, and get us to rethinkwhat science is. so very happy to haveher today to talk about the institute for figuringand many of its programs. margaret wertheim: well, thankyou for inviting me, max. it's a real delight to be here. as max said, i studied computerscience many years ago. and i think backthen, we could only

imagine the kindof possibilities that you guys are actuallybringing into being right now. so it's really fantastic tosee the possibilities that have been realized bythis new science, just even in my lifetime. there are lots of waysto talk about what i do. max specifically asked meif i would make some remarks about the angle of mywork, which is about trying to communicate scienceand mathematics to much more

diverse audiences. and i raised this as anissue because a lot of people don't actually realize that alot of science communication doesn't actually reacha very diverse audience. some years ago, i was invitedto give a talk on this subject. and i did all the research,looking at the top 10 science magazines in america, and whoactually reads them and buys them. and in a nutshell, thefacts are like this.

about three quartersof the people who read science magazines arewell-educated, white, over 35, and male. now, i've been a sciencecommunicator and science writer now for close to 30 years. and i'd always had aninstinctive understanding of this, but it wasn't untili actually looked at the facts and gathered all the statistics,that the full frontal power of this fact came through to me.

and so the question that'sreally propelled my career as a science communicatoris how can we reach a diversity of audiences,along with that group of people? how can we also reach women,minorities, younger adults, teens, and kids? and i think partof understanding how we can communicatebetter about science means literally understandingwho our audience is.

one of the things ilike to say to people is that when we talk aboutscience communication, a lot of the discussionis about how can we be better transmitters? how can we understand thescience more as writers, and communicate it better,or transmit it better? but in order to be a goodcommunication network, as you guys allknow, communication is a two-way street.

it involves not onlytransmission, but reception. people have to have thereceiving packages, as it were. and that's the bit ofscience communication that's never reallytalked about, even in science communication forums. we don't really spendmuch time considering who the audience is, howthey might be engaged, what their needs are,and what actually their methodologiesof interest are.

and so a lot of mywork has been driven by trying to understandand ask that question. who are the people we'retrying to communicate to, and how can weactually engage them in ways that areappealing to them? and i think this is actuallya very different way of looking at the issue. it's not just how can we servethe science audience, who are already engaged indoing the wonderful science,

but how can we serve the restof the public, many of whom, in my experience, reallydo want to be engaged, but are basically notever going to have a subscription to scientificamerican or discover. they're the 99% of people whosay they picked up "a brief history of time" andcouldn't get past chapter 1. and some of you mighthave had that experience. so i think we reallyneed to spend some time, if we care aboutscience communication,

we care aboutscientific literacy, actually really trying to thinkthrough how to communicate to a wider diversityof audiences. so that is whati've been thinking about for a very long time. and one way thati've come to, is that i think that wecan present science in a much more dynamicand interesting way, by looking at it withina wider cultural context.

and one of the thingsthat means, i think, is not just sort ofpresenting the facts and the discoveriesof science, but also its sheer beauty and poetry. when i was at universitystudying science and mathematics,we were all there, basically, because we loved it. we thought it was beautiful. very few of us wereactually thinking

of doing applied things. we just loved it forthe sheer beauty of it. and i think that this isan aspect of science that's not sufficiently availableto the general public. so i'm just going to talkvery briefly about a couple of the things that i havedone throughout the years. one thing that i've done thati feel immensely proud of is, for 10 years inmy native australia, i wrote regular monthly columnsabout science and technology

for women's magazines,like "vogue" and "elle." i think this is probablyone of the hardest things i've ever done. it's harder to write aboutcosmology or bioremediation for "vogue" than it is towrite for the new york times. because when you writefor the new york times, you can assume a fairlyliterate audience. when you write for "vogue,"as has happened to me, there'll be my articleabout cosmology here,

and an ad on the otherpage about cosmetics. and how do you engage,and keep people engaged, when they want to know aboutthe latest trends in skirt length or a high heelshoes, but you also want them to readabout things like, the big bang theoryand evolution. it's quite achallenge to do this, and i feel immenselyproud of it. to my knowledge,i'm the only person

in the world who can say theyever have run a regular science column in a women's magazine. but one of thereasons i did this is because if you look atthe readership of women's magazines, there are 17million women's magazines, just the top 10women's magazines, sold each month in america. and 70 million peoplea month read them. there are only about 1 and 1/2million science magazines sold,

and very few women read them. so my philosophyhere was if we're serious about communicatingscience to women, instead of demandingthat women all come to us and get a subscriptionto scientific american, let's go to where they are. i thought about it asmy missionary work. another thing i did in australiajust before moving to the us is i spent a couple of yearsmaking a six-part television

science seriescalled "catalyst," that was aimed atthe teenage girls. and the reason fordoing this series was the samereason, that we have people talking about a need toengage girls in middle school here in the us. because in themiddle school period is the time when girlsdrop out of science. and i know to google'simmense credit

that you are launching programs,particularly to engage girls with computer sciencein middle school. and i think that's brilliant. in my efforts tolink, to embed science in a wider culturalcontext, i write books on the culturalhistory of physics. and for me, beginning to writethese books after studying formally in physics-- studyingscience in a university, it was kind of arevelation to me

when i started to write books,to understand how science related to the widercultural landscape. and the book that i'm mostwell-known for is called "the pearly gatesof cyberspace," but the real name of thebook is its subtitle, "a history of space, fromdante to the internet." and what the bookdoes is it traces our evolvingunderstanding of space, with the dawn of the scientificrevolution in the 16th century,

then on through thenewtonian revolution, then the einsteinianrevolution, and now we have hyperspace theoriesand string theories-- all of these differentconceptions of space. and what i becameinterested in, was how do theseconceptions of space relate to wider ideas in ourculture, ideas in philosophy and theology and in the arts? and it kind ofblew my mind when i

was researching this book,how much intersection there has been historicallywith scientific thinking about space, and widerphilosophical, theological, and artistic currents. it really is anamazing story that i think needs to be morewidely understood. and it's this interesting spacethat ultimately led to the work that i'm going to talk toyou about in a minute, that's my more current work.

but i'll just mention the bookthat i've most recently had out, because i believethis is the one that max has ordered for your store. my most recent book is called"physics on the fringe." and it's basically a lookat what i call "outside of physicists"-- people whohave little or no training in science, but spend theirtime dreaming up alternative theories of particle physics,cosmology, and indeed, the entirety of theories--they have their own theories

of everything. that's worthy of atalk in and of itself. and so i don't want tolinger on that today. but apparently you're goingto receive copies of that, for those who'd like. but i'd like to come backto my thinking about space, because it was when iwas writing this book, looking at how physicists inthe early scientific revolution had come to the modernconception of space--

the idea that spaceis euclidean void that can be described by mathematics. this seems natural tous now, but in fact it was a revolutionary idea. and there wasactually-- historically, there was a great dealof opposition to it. and in fact, it wasartists who were trained in perspectival representationwho basically first imagined this mathematical conception ofspace, which later was adopted

by physicists and then ledto the great revolutions of galileo and newton andonto einstein, et cetera. so while i wasresearching this book, i came to see that there weredeep resonances between art and science,historically-- resonances that had largely been forgotten. and i began to thinkabout science differently and thought, can we re-injectthat kind of symbiotic thinking between the arts andsciences to engage people

with science in new ways? and as i was nearing theend of writing this book, i came across this amazing quoteby welsh writer merrily harpur. and she said, "theduty of artists everywhere is to enchantthe conceptual landscape." and i love thisquote, because i think it suggests that art isnot tied to any medium, but in some sense, toan ethical and moral and aesthetic responsibility.

and it occurred tome that this could be applied to science also. i don't know if it's the dutyof scientists and mathematicians to enchant ourconceptual landscape. but it is, in fact,one of the things that science and mathematics do. for those of uswho love science, particularly i think inthe mathematical sciences, we are enchanted.

that's why we do it. yes, it can change the world byintroducing new technologies. but it's the sheer beautyof the ideas that engage us. and so i wanted to bringforth the idea of science as a resource forconceptual enchantment, and to have a frameworkfor presenting things-- events, workshops,lectures, exhibitions, about the poeticdimensions of science, technology, and mathematics.

and so about nineyears ago, i decided to start an organizationof my own to do this. it's called theinstitute for figuring, and we're based in los angeles. and i really saw it asan outgrowth of my work as a science writer, asa science communicator, to say, how can we reach morediverse audiences by focusing on the beauty and poetryin science and math? one way we think of ourselvesat the iff as a play tank.

and i think that's a term thatmight resonate with you guys. google seems to me to bea bit of a play tank also. and the term comesfrom-- it's a sort of related to theidea of a think tank. we have these thinktanks in our society, where people go andthink great ideas. and they write booksand write opinion pieces and try to engage people withideas through formal written texts.

but my sister, who formedthe iff with me, and i, we believe that people can alsoengage with ideas through play, by methodologies, playfulpractices like cutting and folding paper and makingthings, weaving bamboo sticks together--kindergarten-like practices. so we now have anexhibition space of our own in chinatown-- just need thechung king road artistry. we invite you tocome and visit us. practically speaking,what we do is

we have a very large website. we put on exhibitions, we puton lectures and workshops, and we publish small books aboutmathematical and scientific themes. but what we'remost known for now, and what we've been engagedwith for the last five or six years pretty much full time, isdoing large-scale participatory projects that engagehundreds and if not thousands of people in thesekinds of practices.

the project we'remost well-known for is the crochetcoral reef project. we're literallycrocheting a coral reef. and it is now the biggestparticipatory science and art project on the planet. more than 7,000 peoplearound the world have been doing thiswith us for the last-- it's almost eight years now. and it's really aproject-- we've shown it

all over the world, in artgalleries and science museums, such as thesmithsonian's national museum of naturalhistory in washington, dc and the haywoodgallery in london, which is one of themost important art galleries in the world. and it's a project thatreally fuses art and craft with science, marinebiology, mathematics, and ecological consciousness.

one of the whole pointsof doing this project is to highlight the fact thatcoral reefs the world over are being devastatedby global warming. and they're dying out. it's conceivable,scientists are now saying, that the co2 problem in theatmosphere is getting so bad, and so much of the co2 isbeing absorbed into the oceans and warming it,and acidifying it, that it is possible thatwithin our lifetimes,

perhaps by as early as2030, that coral reefs may stop growing altogether. so the project isan artistic response to the most criticalenvironmental crisis on our planet. it's proof-- thedevastation of living reefs is proof that globalwarming is here and now. it's not in the future,it's here and now. we've lost 70% of caribbeanreefs in the last 30 years,

and a third of the great barrierreef has also been devastated. so this is really acritical time for corals. and if we can't changeour practices about co2, they are the most diverseecosystems on the planet and they may literallydie out in our lifetime. now, some of you are probablysitting there thinking, well, that's nice. you're combiningart and science. you're making a coral reef.

but why on earth areyou doing it in wool? what is the point ofdoing a crochet reef? why not chisel it in stone,carve it in marble, paint it? but there a logicallynecessary reason why we are doing it in crochet. and that's because all thesefrilly, crenellated forms that you see here, theyare crochet invocations of a kind of geometrycalled hyperbolic geometry. and that is the geometrythat is naturally

realized in a lot of coralreef organism, like sponges and kelps and coralsthat you see here. so these are allsponges and corals. and you see these swooping,crenellated, hyperbolic forms. they also show upin other creatures, like nudibranchs and kelps. so nature has been manifestingthese hyperbolic structures very widely in themarine world for hundreds of millions of years.

but it turns out thatit's difficult for humans to make models of this. and indeed, for a longtime, mathematicians thought that you couldn'thave models of it. but then in 1997 a mathematicianat cornell, dr. daina taimina, discovered thatin fact you could make models of hyperbolicgeometry with crochet. and i'd like to showyou some of them. pass those around and you can--

so these ones are allmathematically precise models. so they are actually--you could use those for teaching hyperbolicgeometry at a university course. and in fact, dr. taimina andher husband david henderson, who is a greatgeometer, they indeed do use these models toteach non-euclidean geometry at the university level. and you can also stitch theoremsonto the surfaces of these, and understandthe different ways

that things like parallellines and triangles and other geometric forms behavein hyperbolic space, which is different to the way theybehave in euclidean space. so these are powerfulteaching tools. and it so happens that this iswhat nature has been realizing in a lot of coral reef biology. so very briefly, so the projectof the crochet coral reef is really not only aboutproducing a beautiful art object that respondsto global warming

and the environmentalcrisis of the sea, it's also a way toteach people geometry. and 3 million people havebeen to these exhibitions that we've had. and in everyexhibition, whether it's in an art galleryor a science museum, we have information aboutthe hyperbolic geometry. and so it's been a way to dowhat's called informal science education to expose 3 millionpeople to geometric learning.

and that is something that ifeel extraordinarily proud of. and when we give workshopsand talks on this, we actually do quitea bit of geometry. and it's amazing howsophisticated people's understanding of it canbe by the end of this. and it's proof thatactually, people are capable of learningand understanding a lot more mathematicsthat either they usually give themselves credit for, orsociety gives them credit for.

so i'm just goingto tell you very, very briefly-- some of youprobably already know this, but for those of you who don't,you will pick it up quickly. what is hyperbolic geometryor hyperbolic space? well, it's an alternative tothe two kinds of geometries you're already very familiarwith-- euclidean geometry or euclidean space,and spherical space. now, there are lots of ways ofcharacterizing these spaces, but one way is to lookat the curvature of them.

so euclidean spaceis a flat space. spherical space-- think ofjust the surface of a sphere, like a beach ball--is positive space. it's curved space thatwraps around on itself. and hyperbolic spaceis the opposite. it's space that-- it'snegatively curved space. it curves away from itself. so it's the geometric equivalentof the negative numbers. and that's a reallybeautiful thing.

just as there is zero, positivenumbers, and negative numbers, so it turns out there is zerocurvature, positive curvature, and negative curvature space. that discovery introduced arevolution in mathematics, and ultimately led to the fieldof non-euclidean geometry, which is the mathematics thatunderlies general relativity. so the discoveryof hyperbolic space ultimately led not onlyto a transformation in the whole foundationof mathematics,

but also to radicaldiscoveries-- it made possible radicaldiscoveries in physics that would come a centurylater with einstein. but one way you canrepresent these spaces-- you can represent hyperbolic space--is with these beautiful paper models that you'll see inthe exhibition outside. but these paper modelsare difficult to make. and as i said, they're notreally completely true models. they're great, but they'renot entirely accurate.

but crochet is by farthe best way to do it. and in the process ofdoing this project, we have done it all overworld, in countries and cities on five continents-- fromnew york to chicago, sydney, melbourne, latvia, germany. we're just startingthe process now of doing it in abu dhabiin the middle east. and hundreds andthousands of people get involved in thisproject, and produce

vast woolen reefs of theirown, in the process learning about ecologicaldevastation and mathematics. i have to put in an outrageousproduct placement here. we have long dreamed of doinga book about the crochet coral reef project, and we in facthave a kickstarter campaign going on now. so i hope some of you mightbe interested in spreading the word, or perhaps--basically, we're offering the opportunity forpeople to pre-buy the book.

the iff's interest inmathematics and material play also extends to other subjects. and the other big subject iwant to talk to you about today, in my remaining minutes,is another project that we've been doing overthe last two years, which is engaging people in themathematics of fractals by folding business cards. so you can basically take astandard american-size business card, which is two inchesby 3 and 1/2 inches,

and fold it into cubes. and the cubes canbe linked together to make these fantastical sortof architectural structures. and last year, ispearheaded a project at usc to build a giant model of afractal known as the mosely snowflake sponge out of50,000 business cards. the project was dreamed upby an engineer, dr. jeannine mosely, who is anmit-trained engineer, in fact, computer scientist.

and she dreamed up thisthing called business-- this technique called businesscard origami, in order to make giantmodels of fractals. and over nine monthslast year at usc, we had hundreds ofstudents all over usc spend over 3,000 hours buildingcomponents and assembling them into this giant structure. and we can talk morein the question time if you like about exactlywhat fractals are.

but i'm sure youguys are probably fairly familiar with them. so this was thefirst and only time this object has been assembled. it actually turned out to be alot more difficult engineering challenge than we imagined. but we finally did it. and it was on display atusc until very recently. in the process of doing that,i became really fascinated

with dr. jeannine mosely'sfolding techniques. and i came to wonder,what if you just had a bunch of fabulouslybeautiful business cards, and allowed people to fold,to do these techniques. are there other structuresthat are possible? fractals are onething, but they're very-- it's a very kindof rigid process to make, and we have to makea lot of little units that are all identicaland link them together

until you get thewhole object, which is similar to itselfon every scale. and it's a very rigorous,precise, engineering exercise to do that. and i wondered, what ifyou just let people play? what could they produce? are there other kinds ofmathematically inflected objects that might be possible? so i was conceiving thisas a kind of exercise

at the interface ofmathematics, making, and just free-form play. and [inaudible] we especiallydesigned 60,000 business cards and got them printed up. and we held workshops over thecourse of the first six months, at the beginning of this year. and we just invited people tocome and attend the workshops and learn the techniques. and lots of people came,and they started playing.

and first of all, we just sortof made interesting new color variants on dr.mosely's fractals. but then peoplestarted to invent new ways of folding, newways of linking cubes, and they even producedoff-kilter things, like this fabulous wayof folding tetrahedrons that was developedby jake dodson. and people like jakestarted to make really interesting, off-kilter,different kind of structures

that again, were algorithmic andrigorous in their construction, but just used a whole varietyof new folding techniques, for instance, to be able tomake things go at angles, and to produce verticesin these new, off-kilter, non-rectilinear fashions. so that is a lot ofthe work that you see on display in the google--in the exhibition space down the hallway, that whatyou see in that exhibition is a number of the modelsthat we now contribute

is like jake made during thecourse of the exhibition. jake also is-- thatexhibition finish at the iff a couple of months ago. and currently, we haveanother exhibition on, in which in fact jake isbuilding a different kind of geometric structuresout of thousands of bamboo sticks woventogether and linked into these huge networksof platonic solids. so jake called himselfa liberation geometer,

and what he's interested inis how can you use geometry as a kind of playful toolwhich will lead to not only beautiful forms, butultimately, hopefully, forms that can be realizedat an architectural scale. so now if you visitthe iff, we're building things out of thousandsof these fabulously dyed bamboo sticks in hundredsof beautiful colors. and again, we'rehaving workshops to teach people thebasic techniques

to turn these sticks intonetworks of tetrahedrons and octahedrons and cubes, andthen how can you build them up to make giantarticulated structures. so again, this is an exercisewhere what we're doing is engaging peoplein what i like to think of as a kindof applied, experimental mathematics. we all think aboutmathematics as something that we usually engage withthrough purely symbolic means,

by reading textbooksand/or learning equations. but you can also engage withmathematical ideas, at least some mathematical ideas,by playful methods of materiallyembodied practices. and that in itself constitutesa rich form of learning. and we hope that many of youmight visit us at the iff, and if you want tocheck this out more, we are available online. so thank you very much, and letme open the floor to questions,

comments, anythingyou feel moved to say. audience: youcertainly got the idea behind [inaudible]of mathematics down. i'm interested in whatyour perspective is [inaudible] moreabstract [inaudible] qualities [inaudible]various [inaudible]. do you have any plans[inaudible] mathematics? margaret wertheim: i have alot of mathematical subjects that i'd love to do shows andexhibitions and events about.

and i think eachparticular topic needs to have its ownmethodologies, if you like. so, i mean, let me tellyou about one topic we've done that was a muchmore-- in some ways, a much more abstract topic that'sbeen very successful. we've done a number of eventson the subject of knot theory. and we've had one ofthe world's great knot mathematicians, dr. kenmillett from uc santa barbara, come and do events with us.

and knot theory, asyou know, is an area of mathematics that isnow regarded as absolutely foundational, andit links vast areas of mathematics-- topology,geometry, and algebra. but it's evolved from one of thesimplest things of all, which is just simply taking a bit ofstring and tying a knot in it. and in fact, dr. millettclaims in his talk that knotting is the oldesttechnology known to humanity. there doesn't seem tohave been any culture

in the entire history of theworld that hasn't invented some form ofknotting, because it's the first system forfastening things. so fishing nets, making baskets,tying things to your clothing all involve knots. and so this is awonderful branch of mathematics which sortof reveals the richness and power of the subject. you can take the simplestmaterial thing, tying

a bit of string,and ultimately it leads to what we nowunderstand-- knot theory links these vast areas ofmathematics in ways that are not understood. we do not understand how thealgebraic aspects of knot theory relate to the topologicalaspects, but they are there. and it is a foundationalquestion in mathematics-- how to do that. so i think that sort ofanswers you question,

that i believe that youcan take these very highly complex subjectsand find ways in. now, it doesn'tmean that everyone who comes to our events isgoing to pass a university exam. they're not. but they're going tounderstand a great deal more than they understood whenthey walked in the door. audience: do youthink that there's a way to inject the beautifulcrochet fabric that's

hyperbolic intofashion, and sort of use that as a foot in the doorfor discussing more heavily read by women'smagazines [inaudible]? margaret wertheim: toanswer your question very specifically,there is a guy at the university oftechnology, sydney, who is doing his-- i can'tremember if he's doing a ph.d. or a master's thesison this very topic. so he's a fashiondesign student,

but has a very, verygood spatial sense. and his fashion is abouttrying to incorporate non-euclidean surfacesinto his fashion. so he's learningvery elaborate, and pioneering very elaboratemeans of pattern cutting that enable him tosew non-euclidean surfaces and he's been incontact with us, and one of the thingsthat he wants to do is to have hyperbolicsurfaces in fashion.

and indeed, i don't actuallyhave it on this powerpoint here, but there, in fact, isnaturally hyperbolic surfaces in fashion, becausepeasants, ballerina skirts where they'revery flutey and frilly-- they actually make them fromtaking a lot of circular strips and sewing them together so youget a very, very frilly, flutey surface. and some peasant dancingskirts are like that. and they actually arehyperbolic surfaces

that the women-- nobodyrealized they've been doing it. and also, womenhave been crocheting ruffled, basically hyperbolicruffles for hundreds of years, and those-- lots of techniquesin knitting, tatting, and crochet to do this. and people have beendoing it without realizing that they weremathematical surfaces. male speaker: margaret,it's interesting to me that a lot of whatyou do with the iff

was more common as a pedagogicalapproach in the 19th century and early 20th century. you think even today,like waldorf schools, montessori havemuch more embodied learning like this-- you go backto maybe elizabeth [inaudible] in her teaching throughobjects, like object lessons. and now there's this movementto get a lot of technology in the schools and everybodyhas ipads and so on. we're moving away from thatform of embodied learning.

i was wonderingif you could speak to the tension betweenthese two approaches, and how we might somehowintegrate them better. margaret wertheim: yes, i thinkthat's very important point that you're making, max. and in fact, all of thoseembodied learning methods, like montessori and waldorfand steiner schools, they actually havea predecessor. and the predecessoris friedrich froebel.

froebel was a mid-19th centurygerman crystallographer. and he invented theconcept of kindergarten. so you and i, we allwent to kindergarten. but the kindergartenthat we experienced was a very watered-down versionof what in the mid-19th century was a very formalizedsystem of education that was developed by thisman, friedrich froebel, based on the science ofcrystallography, which was all about understanding thegeometric structures

beneath crystal minerals. and froebel believedthat little children should be introduced to themost abstract geometric ideas as young as possible. and he did it by having them dothese formal exercises, where they would makethings out of sticks. just literally, they weredoing this sort of thing, making geometric structuresout of sticks and blocks and weaving paperstrips together,

and other material practices. and the froebelianeducation system, which only existed fromabout 1860 to about 1910, was a very rigorous learningsystem, all based on geometry. and it revolutionizedmodern thinking because, one, there's a veryinteresting book written about kindergarten, called"inventing kindergarten," by a man namednorman brosterman. and he claims that the twogenerations of children

who went throughfroebelian kindergarten and did all theseplayful material exercises, which were basicallymathematical in nature, they are the people who wenton to found modern art-- people like klee, paul kleeand kandinsky and frank lloyd wright. they had froebeliankindergarten in their childhood. and norman's claim is that wherethey got modernist aesthetics from was from doing theseexercises with blocks

and strings and sticksas little children. and it's a very profound thesis. and i think when you seehis book and read it, it's convincing argument. it's also the case that thefounders of modern physics are the right ageand generation, and lived in the rightpart of the world, germany, to have gone to froebeliankindergartens too. richard feynman said point blankat one point in an interview

that that is wherehe got it from. he had some experience withfroebelian kindergarten practices as a child. his father taught it to him. and he claimed that that'swhat made him be a physicist and enabled him to then havethis pictorial, spatial idea about physics later onthat he's so famous for. so i believe that we needfroebelian learning ideas back. and in fact at the iff,we regard ourselves

as froebeliankindergarten for grownups. and i completely agree. i think it's wonderfulthat children can do all thisstuff with computers, and computer games canbe profoundly helpful in all sorts of ways. but i also think thatthese embodied practices are absolutely critical. yeah?

audience: you spoke earlierabout mathematically and scientificallydisenfranchised groups. [inaudible] theminorities [inaudible]. and i'm curious, [inaudible]for inclusion distribution to minorities, or isthere something deeper in educational [inaudible]? margaret wertheim:i haven't really looked into that question. so i can't really comment on it.

my feeling is thatit's probably part of the general difficultiesof getting minorities into mathematics and science. i don't know specificallyif anyone's done research on why they don't readscience magazines, or how to get sciencemagazines to them. but i know it's a hugefact that they don't. and i think-- i was listeningto npr the other day, and they had a segmenton a society of-- it's

called "blacks in technology." and the guy-- i can'tremember if he worked-- he didn't work at google, butit was one of the other big tech companies. and he was talking aboutfounding this society, because he saidthe problem is not that there are blackkids who might not be interested ingoing into technology. but they don't getthe encouragement.

they don't get the mentoring. they face a lot of peerpressure to do other things like hang out and do drugs. and that the goalof this society was to take those kidsand young students at universities andcolleges, and encourage them in their interest. so his claim was thatit's not that they're not kids and young people outthere who are interested,

but how do we retain them? and i don't know if googlehas any projects in that line, but i imagine it would bevery fruitful to do so. can i ask you guys,do many of you feel like you had alove of math and science when you were really little,or did it come to you later? [interposing voices] margaret wertheim: that'smy general impression of the people i know who arein the computer science world,

is that that love andpassion for these kind of algorithmic thingscomes pretty early. and it's a thing that childrenare incredibly facile with. and part of why ibelieve this is important is, i actually thinkthat all people are naturally gifted at mathematics. mathematics is a language. it's the languageof pattern and form. human beings.

this is the most fabulouspattern recognition system on the planet. and why is it thatwe lose that ability? we're all born with it. and people like you areproof of what-- google is a proof of what can beachieved with that power. what are we missingout on by having so few people in our societyretain that interest and love. and i think that'swhy this matters, is

that we are squanderingthe potential of 99% of our population. i mean, the number of peoplewho come up to me and say you know, i always wantedto be good at math, and i thought i was wheni was really little. and then something happened,usually around middle school. and i couldn't doit anymore, or i was told i couldn'tdo it anymore. but when they come and dothese kind of activities

at our workshopsand events, they get really engaged and enthused,because it's proof to them that they actually dohave a mathematical mind. and one of thebiggest comments we get from people in thecrochet coral reef project is how criticallyimportant it is to them-- and most of thesepeople are women-- that in the course of doing ahandicraft with which they feel is both beautiful andcomfortable and pleasurable

to them, that at thesame time as that, they're being taught aboutnon-euclidean geometry and shown some insight into themathematics that going to lead us to understand space and time. they're doingsomething embodied, but their mindsare being engaged. and they're being shownnot just that they can do something beautifulwith their hands, but that theirminds are actually

capable of comprehendingthese extraordinary ideas. and that's what propels meas a science communicator. and that's why dothe iff, is because i love math and science. i want other peopleto be able to love it, and to enjoy the sheer pleasureof understanding something like hyperbolic geometry. it's just drop-deadwonderful thing. and why is it that oursociety has not only not been

able to retain so manypeople in these fields, but in some senseactively expelling them. and we could have-- myview is if we did better with math and sciencecommunication and math and science education,we could have 10 googles on planet earth. and wouldn't that be wonderful? look what onegoogle has achieved. what could 10 of them do?

maybe we'd actuallyget to alpha centauri. not just mars. male speaker: thanks a lotfor-- when we convinced thomas and others to dedicatea certain part of the campus to an exhibitionspace, it was precisely institutions like theinstitute for figuring that i know i had in mind. there's a long tradition ofalternative organizations in los angeles like[inaudible] center for land use

interpretation. even before then,[inaudible] workshop that brought industry,science, and art together. and i think it results ina holistic communication of principles in veryinteresting ways. so thank you verymuch for coming,

and thanks for helping usorganize [inaudible] very happy that you came today. margaret wertheim: my pleasure,well, thank you for having me,

max.