Edward Weston and Boy's Surface Manifold

Mustafa Umut Sarac submitted a new resource:

(there was a url link here which no longer exists) - Edward Weston and Boy's Surface Manifold

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That mathematical , physical concept from 1901 and I think source of imagination of Weston's peppers.

Manifolds are the main research area of string and super string theory also. I believe like all ages artists , he impressed from the developments of science at his time.

Weston :
At this same time he met Canadian painter Henrietta Shore, He asked to look at her...

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(there was a url link here which no longer exists)

"Trimmed" by request.


It is more likely that Weston, like Henry Moore, was influenced by the human form, rather than Boy's Surface.


RR

No , they all used scientific findings at their art , it takes time to understand that AFTER reading hundredS of books on physics , mathematics and art.

You can trim your post also.

The book "EW 100: Centennial essays in honor of Edward Weston" has an article by Mike Weaver. His seems a simpler explanation of Weston's intrigue with form.

Many years ago I had the great pleasure of being in Henry Moore's home and studios. Fortunately for me he was in Paris at the time and my wife and I got to spend a couple of hours with one of his sculptors. He showed us how the monumental metal sculptures were made as well as taking us into Moore's study where he kept the stones, bones and other found objects from which he got his inspiration. He was keenly aware of form as I suspect Weston was. I have also seen many vintage Weston prints and don't think either artist was really concerned with mathematics or physics. They more likely were extremely talented artists who greatly appreciated and saw beauty in the forms most people pass by every day without noticing.

http://www.jeffreyglasser.com/

Mustafa Umut Sarac said:

No , they all used scientific findings at their art , it takes time to understand that AFTER reading hundredS of books on physics , mathematics and art.

You can trim your post also.

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Hi Umut,

While I could imagine you are right about some photographers (say Andreas Feininger or Ralph Morse or Wynn Bullock - a few science-minded photographers I can think of)... I believe it is more likely that the Boy's Surface Manifold is reflected in Nature (as in fractals and other mathematic constructs)...

And it's just a coincidence that Weston studied Bell Peppers... It's the peppers who developed their surfaces perfectly to meet the model, by their nature.

When I was a mathematician, I was a 3-manifold topologist. That stuff is fun, it contains visual inspirations aplenty, but it would astonish me if Weston were keeping up with leading technical discoveries in projective geometry (published in German, no less). Boy's surface isn't a particularly well-known construction even in that world---it's a neat curiosity, but there's not much you can do with it once you've noticed that it exists.

IIRC, Man Ray did take some explicit inspiration from geometers.

-NT

3d spirograph

if anybody that is "into nature" like weston was influenced by anything, it probably wouldn't be unnatural "manmade" mathemetical objects like these--it would be the natural shapes--things that show growth. everything in nature shows evidence of growth--branching growth (leaves) and cyclical growth upon existing growth (spirals)--or combinations found in nature. nature is based on growth, these mathematical constructions are not. The mathematical constructions show no beginning point where they "grew from", whereas all things in nature do have such a point where the growth began. The mathematical surface is the same for all time--forever repeating a periodic pattern, the natural objects change in time continuously until death.

The mathematical constructions show no beginning point

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Dont you believe in big bang ?

Ahh--yes of course, but the pure mathematical 3-space surfaces are in 3-space for all time--there is no starting and no ending point for them--they exist in the theoretical 3-space for ever and never change.

John,

I believe these manifolds can change from one shape to other. Perelman proofed the Poincare conjecture and it was about proof of evolution of todays universe shape from big bang or one point. And he showed us the heat loss on surface and the surfaces reaction to this detail loss.
I read many things but I cant do nothing on mathematics.

What do you say to above.

Take care,
Umut

What you say is true, but only when you add in the fourth dimension of time. For example imagine the cube--it is a cube forever in 3-space. However, if you add in the 4th dimension, only then can it start from a point (sides lengths = 0) and grow in time to a finite size--and perhaps again shrink in time. 3-space transformations from one shape to another require something to happen--in time--to change them. It is a fine point only and I do understand now what you are saying--what you say is true if you assume that the 3-space objects are only for a certain instant of time.

Mustafa Umut Sarac said:

I believe these manifolds can change from one shape to other. Perelman proofed the Poincare conjecture and it was about proof of evolution of todays universe shape from big bang or one point.

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No, it's not. The Poincare' conjecture has no cosmological content, it just says that the only 3-manifold with a certain technical property is a sphere. (That's the 3-dimensional sphere, which you can't visualize easily because it takes 4 dimensions to embed it.)

Perelman's *proof* of the conjecture uses this concept called Ricci flow, which is kind of about a structure in the manifold that allows the concept of "distance" to change over time. The quantum-gravity people and other mathematical physicists do some things with Ricci flow, but Perelman just used it as a tool to show "this hypothetical object can't exist, because when you apply a Ricci flow to it it would do something impossible". It's a rather elegant approach to the problem but it doesn't say anything about the "real" universe (whatever that means).

My thesis advisor, after retiring from academia, took up sculpture in a serious way (http://www.sieradskistudios.com/). His work isn't explicitly mathematical, but I can see where it reflects a lot of time spent visualizing low-dimensional topology. It's an interesting question---how can one bring that sort of inspiration into the photographic world?

Man Ray's answer seems largely to have been to construct mathematically-inspired objects and photograph them, which is fair enough but seems more about "mathematical sculpture, followed by photography". I'm not sure how to bring geometric content directly into the photographic process, but it's an interesting concept.

-NT