Robert Byrnes - Is All Geometry Sacred?
 DVD

Robert lived and worked for many years in academia (initially Mathematics and later Psychology) and also in a residential community for children with special needs. There followed a period of 'genuine labour with dirty hands' as an electrical contractor. His involvement in mathematics was renewed when he first saw and moved Paul Schatz's invertible cube. This remarkable object, which is accessible to everybody, represents an enlivened mathematics which is beautiful, and an approach towards an (as yet embryonic) ecological technology. The principle of 'Inversion' (turning inside out) can be recognised throughout the natural world. By great good fortune, one of Robert's mathematical discoveries (perhaps the mathematically least significant of them all) found commercial application as a 'mobile plaything'. This allowed him to devote himself more fully to intensive research into Inversion. Robert has written a number of articles about aspects of Inversion (unfortunately all in German) and was invited to write a book, Metamorphs, for the Tarquin series of books for model builders and mathematical enthusiasts of all ages. He has also designed and produced kits for the construction of invertible forms and is currently writing (in English) a series of booklets about Inversion.

PRESENTATION: Is All Geometry Sacred?


Robert says: 'Beauty and knowledge can be one. They can together become tactile, kinaesthetic, visual art. Movements, patterns and forms sometimes seem, to our naive experience, to be intimations of greater depths in nature and mind. Paul Schatz, in 1929, by developing a feeling for form beyond abstract knowledge of form, encountered a type of motion - rhythmic, pulsating inversion - which is additional to the previously recognised types:- translation (simple shift) and rotation. Many people recognise in the motion and forms of inversion a unity of art, science, ecology and technology, which develops new eyes for the richness of our world. Some of these motions and the forms to which they give birth will be demonstrated during this presentation.'

Pal Region 2