as a foundation of creativity, information organisation and art
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 […]
“Von der Kunst zur Wissenschaft und zurück : Farbenlehre und Ästhetik bei Wilhelm Ostwald (1853 – 1932) – From art to science and backward: theory of color and aesthetics by Wilhelm Ostwald (1853 – 1932)” is the title of a new doctoral thesis in German language by Albrecht Pohlmann, 1910, University of Halle. It describes […]
Ostwald’s theory of forms has been the topic of a recent entry in the blog of Joost Rekveld. In the writings of the film maker Joost Rekveld articles can be found with titles like “Symmetry and Harmonics” or “Transformations of Colour”.
Based on Auguste Comte, Ostwald developed within his philosophy of nature a “pyramid of science†in which a “science of order†(he called it also “Mathetik”) was the basis. Ostwald ordered the sciences within a pyramid. When working on a new topic, e.g. the color theory, he combined the new topic with every layer of […]
The colloid chemist Ernst Alfred Hauser wrote about Ostwald in 1951: … his greatest contribution to science and education was not his discovery of how to form oxides of nitrogen by passing a mixture of air and ammonia over a platinum catalyst (a discovery for which he received the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1909), […]
Wilhelm Ostwald’s color theory Ostwald’s Color Primer – Snip through a double-cone Expressed in our modern technical language, we can say that Ostwald attempted to construct a perceptual colour-system using non-empirical methods. In place of Munsell’s three parameters, he selected an alternative group of variables: namely, colour-content, white-content and black-content. […] We can thus formulate […]
Ostwald on Education by W. W. Sawyer Friedrich Wilhelm Ostwald was one of the most colourful characters of his time […] A brilliant scientist and an inspiring teacher, he was a man of wide sympathies and varied interests. He campaigned vigorously and courageously for a number of causes; for example, one of his books, published […]
Niles R. Holt: “Wilhelm Ostwald’s ‘The Bridge’” (via Ralph Dumain: “The Autodidact Project”) One of the lesser‑known projects of the German physical chemist Wilhelm Ostwald, a 1909 Nobel laureate and one of the last major scientific figures to oppose atomism, was the creation of an association for the ‘organization’ of science. … Among the plethora […]
Jan J. Koenderink: Colour, old age, and accepted truth What Jan Koenderink wrote below, is also true for me! 😎 Now and then I become so much interested in a person’s work that I really want to know more. I then read all I can dig up – the science, the reactions of contemporaries, and […]
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 […]