Summary of November, 2003

The major themes of November, 2003 were semiotics, Kuhnian paradigms, architecture, and Elin Oxenhielm’s paper on Hilbert’s 16th problem.

I read Umberto Eco’s Travels in Hyperreality (actually a Swedish collection of his essays which with a few exceptions matches the former). See the following posts:

• The Importance of Archetypes in Improvisation (of November 15)
• What is the Medium? (of November 15)
• Ideas Summon Other Ideas (of November 16)
• Sports as Dramaturgy Incubators (of November 16)

Then I began reading Thomas S. Kuhn’s outstanding The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, trying to find things that could benefit my thinking on software design and constrained universes of expression. See these posts:

• Paradigms and Scientific Revolutions (of November 21)
• Paradigms and Software Projects (of November 21)
• Paradigms and Constrained Universes of Expression (of November 22)
• The Essential Tension (of November 24)
• The Image of the Scientist and the Programmer (of November 25)
• Paradigms as Maps (of November 27)
• Flashes of Intuition and Scientific Revolutions (of November 28)

My attention turned, for some reason, to the ideas of architects. First, I learned about Charles Jencks’ interesting Garden of Cosmic Speculation, then I began listening to BBC Radio interviews with architects:

• John Tusa interviews Renzo Piano (of November 22)
• John Tusa interviews Renzo Piano (cont.) (of November 23)
• Daniel Liebeskind (misspelled; of November 24)
• Daniel Libeskind’s Proms Lecture (of November 24)

At the end of the month Elin Oxenhielm’s alleged solution of the second part of Hilbert’s 16th problem caught my attention, which due to a resulting tenfold increase in traffic made me feel obliged to continue reporting the developments. See these posts:

• Hilbert’s 16th Problem (of November 27)
• Elin Oxenhielm Interviewed (of November 28)
• Professor Grigori Rozenblioum on Elin Oxenhielm’s Paper (of November 28)