Lucky me

Yesterday was a day full of mixed feelings. I would like to share the good moment though. I won two tickets to the finals of Cricket World Cup 2011 in the Pepsi Change the Game Contest. ;-) Would be a first hand experience to watch the finals in Wankhede. :)

Longest Ambigram by me - KalyanaramanGanapathiSubramanianIyer

Kalyanaraman Ganapathi Subramanian Iyer - My friend Kallu gave me the opportunity to make the longest ambigram I did till date. ;-)

Happy Earth Day

My name is Gauhar Khan

Congratulations to Vikram Sampath. I was pleased to see this article on The Hindu. I met Vikram sometime back and had the privilege to attend his talk on the book he was writing and his research on music.

Congratulations to Vikram once again. You can have a look at Vikram's site too.

Wow! Sketchcrawl in DNA bangalore

Hahaha.. Really a popular event now.

I would upload my sketches soon.

Here's the link of the paper coverage.

Democratisation of Art

I met Sujata a fortnight back at Oxford Book Store, Leela Palace. And it was very exciting to know about her life, the transition from a main line engineer to a full time artist. Her works are really impressive and you get even more impressed when you know that she has learnt everything by herself.

So we talked about Art and Art Initiatives and she invited me to her workshop to give a talk on whatever I have learnt on the inter relation of Mathematics and Arts. I'm honored. :)

Take a look at her site and her blog.

Her Motto:
What is art? Is it aesthetic, feelings, painterly skills? There are as many definitions about art as one can find.But for me:"If it touches you heart, it is art..."

Her Workshop Details:

"Democratisation of art"
29th and 30th August
11:00 am to 7:00 pm
Rotary Club, Indiranagar,
Bangalore

Sketchcrawl yet again - in Timeout Bengaluru

Hmm..
Sketchcrawl has become a popular event. It was covered in the local magazine Timeout Bengaluru in last fortnight's edition. Here's the online print.

Sketchcrawl on The Times of India

Great! The Times of India covered our Sketchcrawl in today's edition in the Tribal Instincts section.

Visitor from Paramount

I noticed on Saturday that I had a visitor from the IP (204.110.112.2) which belongs to "Paramount Pictures", on Saturday on my site and my blog via LinkedIn. ;)

My entry for the RUPEE competition

How is it?

23rd March

It's a pity that no news channel in India is featuring the martyrdom of Bhagat Singh, Sukhdev and Rajguru today.
They were one of the greatest martyrs of all times for India.

Happy Holi

HAPPY HOLI to all of you!

Three Qs

Elections are round the corner in the country. I have three questions in mind.

Ever wondered, how you are being controlled by the society, by the leaders and more so, by the business bigwigs?

Since the onset of money in our civilization, money became the ruling power indirectly or directly? Agree?

Shakespeare said, "The world is a stage...". Shouldn't it be, the world is a stage, majority of the humans are puppets in the hands of few powerful and ruthless beings?

A lovely gift!

My mathematical artist friend "Karl Kempton" sent me this lovely gift on my b'day today. Thanks Karl!
BTW. I share my b'day with Levi Strauss, Victor Hugo, Micheal Bolton and a dutch artist friend. Incidently, all have had artistic capabilities.
;-)

New Year 2009

Wishing everybody a successful year!

This is fantastic!

Just came across this on FROGBLOG on my Google reader.

"In an historic partnership between frog design, Pop!tech, iTeach, Praekelt, Aricent, Nokia Siemens and a number of other collaborators, Project Masiluleke (which means "lend a helping hand" in Zulu) is using mobile technology to tackle the worst HIV epidemic in the world in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa, where infection rates are over 40%."

Take a look at the video on FROGBLOG here.

Hey! My company is part of the program too. ;)
Kudos!

Experience of a lifetime - Finale

Picture of one of the works by Yvonne Kracht

I forgot to mention one of the best moments for me. I met Carlo Sequin who is the main juror of the conference. I gave him my introduction. To my surprise, he knew me. Oh! My god. I'll never ever forget that moment. A person of his stature knew me. He is a gem of a person and anything is less to write about him.

Anyways, the next day, the conference started. Carlo gave the introductory speech which triggered a thumping start to one of the best events of my life. The next five days involved phenomenal talks by Rinus Roelfs, Chaim Goodman Strauss, George Hart, Dick Termes, Paul Prudence, Javier Barrallo, John Sullivan, Benjamin Storch, Akio Hizume, Erik and many others. Of course, it is needless to say that all the talks were extraordinary. Also, I happened to see original works by M.C. Escher. The Escher foundation had organised the exhibit in the university.

On one of the days, we went for an excursion to 7 churches. Exhibits of 7 mathematical artists were organized in these churches. I was dumbfounded as I realized that people had done so much work in this field and I never knew about it. Those works were not only logic driven but also remarkably beautiful.

The time for departure had come. I learnt so many things in those few days which cannot be explained just by writing. You have to be at the place to feel it and learn from it.

I'll write about Amsterdam and the museums some other time.

Experience of a lifetime - Contd.

After meeting Benj, I met other mathematical artists (mostly mathematicians) who had come. Elaine, who is a retired professor, makes mathematical quilts. Honestly speaking, they are wonderful. You must have a look at her site. She told that she took 382 hours to make one of the quilts. It had Leonardo's claws in it.
Umphh.. there is so much to write. I would suggest you guys should go to the sites of the respective mathematical artists and check out their works. Some time I'll try to put up all the links of the artists.

Benj, Edmund and his girl friend and David Bailey had come from UK on a car. It was evening and I had met most of the people by now. I was feeling hungry. Benj and others were going out. I accompanied them. We went to Dutch restaurant SPINOZA (It seems that Spinoza was some famous person of the Renaissance period). I, being vegetarian had to bear a lot in the foreign country. :-(
So, I had the Italian Lasagna. We tried the Rosa Beer.

We headed for the boat hotel. On the boat, we met Robert McDermott and Nate. And also not to forget, Erik Kurvenbau. Robert is quite old but a lovable personality. He is the head of the Visualization Department at the University of Utah. Robert shared a lot of his experiences with us through out our stay on the boat hotel for 5 days. Nate is an undergraduate student at the UCB.
Erik - I would like to mention the style of his introduction. "My name is Erik with a K not C." Erik is a Scottish who is the owner of a company which owns the Tess3D software. He has a fantastic sense of humor and his Scottish accent of English speaking is clumsy but nice.

Soon, Eva Knoll and Simon Morgan arrived. Both are mathematicians and teach at universities in US.

We sat on the dining and started chatting after an informal introduction.

Contd..
I'll try to finish in next post. :D

BTW, I met Matt in Amsterdam who just forwarded me a link. I strongly recommend to see the link. It is just marvelous.

Experience of a lifetime - Arrival

I would like to share my experience at Bridges 2008. Oh! I must say it was an experience of a lifetime. So here it goes...

I reached at Stenden University on the morning of 23rd July. I was just wondering how would it feel to be with people from so many countries. How would they behave? Would they appreciate what I have done? Lots of questions hovering my mind.
Nevertheless, I was there. The first persons I met were Eliane and Robert Fathauer. They saw my work and appreciated the use of pencil. I was the only person with a mathematical art done in pencil out there. Robert said, "There are lots of computer works." Good to know that I brought something different with me. I never felt that I was in a different country with different people (I mean non Indians). Then I met Nathan Selikoff and his wife Amy. Nathan has done enough work as an artist which you can make out from his site.

Now more and more people were coming. Hans Dehlinger is a German Artist who seemed to be a fantastic person. It was really nice talking to him.

Then we started to put up all our works on the panels. We started to arrange the panels so that they were in the proper order. So, people kept coming and the round of introductions never ended. :)

Soon, most of the artworks were on their right places.

I was awaiting a guy named Benjamin Storch with whom I had  done lots of correspondence recently. We were to stay in the same boat hotel which we booked ourself. Then, I met Benj(as I use to call him). A very light hearted and phenomenal person. His work "Manifold" was an exquisite piece of art which was built on Lorentz equation. Most of the people loved it.

What more?
There are so many things to write. Through the whole next week, I'll try to write all I can and share my experiences with you all.

My experience at Bridges 2008

AWESOME!!

I'll write about my experience sometime later.
For now, you guys can take a look at the pics from the conference.
They are here. Also pics of Amsterdam and Leeuwarden.
:-)