Imaginary media: Alexander Scriabin’s Mysterium

Imaginary Devices

We propose Imaginary Devices, a set of freehand gestures that mimic the use of physical input devices. Imaginary Devices allow users to choose the input modality best suited for the task at hand, such as a steering wheel for a driving game or a joystick for a flight simulator. Exploiting the skills that users have acquired using physical input devices, they can instantly begin interacting with ...

Imaginary Worlds

Leaders today seem to be suffering from what might be called a failure of the imagination. We seem to be continually finding ourselves in situations where the leaders say something like “no one could have imagined that this would happen.” For example: Who could imagined that Hurricane Katrina would breach the levies in New Orleans; who could have imagined that an insurgency would arise from the...

Imaginary Coloring

The axiom of choice, a benign matter for the non-logician, puzzles mathematicians. Today, it manifests itself in a strange way: it takes, depending on the axiom’s variants, either two or infinity of colors to resolve a coloring problem. Just as the parallels postulate seemed obvious, the axiom of choice has often been considered true and beyond discussion. The inventor of set theory, Georg Cant...

Alexander Ogilvy

Alexander M

As a former student of Professor Ostrowski—one of his last— I am delighted to recall here the life and work of one of the great mathematicians of the 20th century. Needless to say that, in view of Ostrowski’s immense and vastly diverse mathematical legacy, this can be done only in a most summary fashion. Further literature on Ostrowski can be found in some of the references at the end of this a...