After a very full weekend, I am back in the studio and at work on math. I have reviewed the initial information about Imaginary and Complex Numbers and am encountering, with the help of Schaum's Red Book, the expression of complex numbers as vectors, and their relation to trigonometry and the unit circle. This last material is all new to me, so it will take a modest bit of time to get over the shock factor of seeing imaginary numbers spinning around the unit circle where rational and irrational once ruled.

As I reach the end of basic trigonometry (finally!) I will now award the rating of "Best of my Trigonometry Books" to the Schaum's Outlines text. It may lack character or atmosphere, and its type is tiny and hard to see, but it delivers the math, with enough explanation for me to understand, and oodles of exercises to work through. The BritBook comes in second. Of my three, the worst was Barron's with its obnoxious Ruritanian characters, whose fate I now consign to the dust of my bookshelf. I now intend to dutifully apply myself to the imaginary number problems in the Schaum's text. Yeah, I really know how to have fun.

It's a masterpiece of human creativity, to me, that anyone ever thought up such a thing. Evidently it's been around for quite a long time. The history of i and imaginary numbers is documented in the book AN IMAGINARY TALE by Paul Nahin, which I hope to read in the near future when I have enough mathematical knowledge to get through Nahin's examples.

Naturally I am tempted to apply all sorts of metaphysics and fiction to i and its imaginary and complex numbers. Is there another universe where i and its fellows are the real numbers and our real numbers are imaginary? Is i magical? Does a complex number participate in two universes? Perhaps i is the bright shadow of the imaginal world of the Neoplatonists, a world made not out of prosaic material reality but the stuff of myth, dreams, and visions. Well, I should stop right now, before I embarrass myself by saying something truly gauche. I must remember that whatever I imagine or invent about mathematics and science, whatever puns or humor or metaphors or wordplay or wry observations… whatever it is, has been said before, by someone, somewhere. If I am humble enough, my ego can become a lowercase i which even when multiplied by itself is still a negative quantity.

Balticon and cicada update

Balticon, the science fiction convention I attended over Memorial Day weekend, was more successful than I had expected. I sold five out of the seven pieces I had on display, and a number of prints as well. My "regular clients" continue to buy my art, even when it is in a style they are not used to. I did not sell the "Cometary Nucleus" picture which I referred to in my previous entry, but I did sell this one, "A Passage Through Warped Space." Acrylic on illustration board, 11 inches by 14 inches.

I also met with many of my Friendly Scientists and Friendly Mathematicians at Balticon, and though I didn't have time to sit down and work through any math with them, I gave them progress reports about what I have been doing.

The cicadas are winding down, though they still are making a lot of noise. Their orgy is ending, and their little winged bodies litter the ground beneath their trees. By the end of this month they will all have perished, leaving their eggs waiting to hatch in the twigs above. When they hatch, the larvae will drop to the earth and burrow underground again, to sip sap from roots and grow in their hidden depths for the next long cycle. What do you say to the neatly folded remains of a cicada who has fulfilled his or her earthly duty? Farewell, one of the myriad, and may some of your genetic material persist and survive to emerge again in seventeen years, the prime of your next generation's life.

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