Tag Archive for 'combinatorics'

Conference proceedings "Information and Space" published

Five years after the “Analogous Spaces” conference its proceedings has been published with the title “Information and Space: Analogies and Metaphors” in a special issue of the journal “Library Trends” (Volume 61, Number 2, Fall 2012) Proceedings are available partially as Open Access via IDEALS. The paper of the blog owner “Wilhelm Ostwald’s Combinatorics as […]

Combinatorics and art in chemistry

Chemist and Nobel laureate Roald Hoffmann published an article on “combinatorical chemistry” with the title “Not a Library” in the journal Angewandte Chemie (International edition), 40(18), 3337-3340 (2001), which also mentioned Ramon Llull, Leibniz and the “Library of Babel” from Borges. The article is available at the personal website of Roald Hoffmann who contains some […]

Combinatorics and the Library of Babel by Borges

Just published: The Unimaginable Mathematics of Borges’ Library of Babel by William Goldbloom Bloch (Oxford University Press 2008). The Library of Babel has a lot to do with combinatorics. Jorge Luis Borges‘ essay was influenced by another one by the German Kurd Lasswitz, the father of modern “science fiction”: Die Universalbibliothek (The universal library). See […]

Tool for Creative Combinatorics

Here is the trial, made quick&dirty, using a tool to compile a word cloud from the text of this weblog! Easy and funny! 😎

Creative combinatorics through this weblog

Creative combinatorics is the subject of this blog as well as this blog is a way to explore this subject through creative combinatorics. So feel free to browse through using the categories or tags on the right or use the contents page which gives a short systematic overview.

Combinatorics and creativity

Root-Bernstein described the connection between art and the sciences in the view towards creativity in his abstract: Many people view arts and sciences as being different because sciences yield objective answers to problems whereas arts produce subjective experiences I argue that art and science are on a continuum in which artists work with possible worlds […]

Scientific creativity as a combinatorial process

Still today the connection between creativity and combinatorics is the topic of research. One example is the work of Dean Keith Simonton: Presentation with the title Scientific creativity as a combinatorial process: The chance baseline. (“Milieus of Creativity” symposium at Villa Bosch Studio, Heidelberg, 2006. Paper with the title “Scientific creativity as constrained stochastic behavior: […]

Creative Combinatorics in Ostwald’s philosophy

Already in 1910 Ostwald mentioned in his philosophy of nature (“Natural Philosophy”, 1910) the importance of combinatorics for his philosophy and for creativity: There is a science, the Theory of Combinations, which gives the rules by which, in given elements or characteristics, the kind and number of the possible groups can be found. The theory […]

Combinatoris and the philosophy of nature

After describing how concepts or terms could be combined, Ostwald noted in a book about the philosophy of nature: “The laws of combinatorics even allow it to decompose an area of research formally and exhaustively in its branches and fields of research by initially locating empirically the elements of the domain and then by exhaustively […]

Color and combinatorics