Mike Wakeford is ARTStem's Project Director and a member of the Undergraduate Academic Program faculty at UNCSA. . . . Came across a flyer about a new book by Steven Strogatz, The Calculus of Friendship: What a Teacher and a Student Learned about Life while Corresponding about Math. Strogatz is a major math guy and a leader in complex systems (remember our ARTStem reading from the summer?), chaos theory, etc. From the sound of it, the book is part Tuesdays With Morrie, part math problems; but as you sense in the radio story about the book, it helps blur the line between math, narrative, and the personal histories of human beings and their relationships. To me, that's a big part of why I think artists should be actively reaching out into the math and sciences world, more aggressively seeking collaborations, etc. But it also expresses the idea that deep math contains with in it descriptions of the world, stories of existence, and powerful ways of "seeing" the human condition for what it is. Anyways, it's a pretty beautiful little radio story worth listening to:
