Surreal Self Portrait

Self Portrait of Youth

The mind's self-portrait.

Scientific psychology and neuroscience are taking increasingly precise and comprehensive pictures of the human mind, both in its physical architecture and its functional processes. Meanwhile, each human mind has an abbreviated view of itself, a self-portrait that captures how it thinks it operates, and that therefore has been remarkably influential. The mind's self-portrait has as a central fea...

Integration on Surreal Numbers

The thesis concerns the (class) structure No of Conway’s surreal numbers. The main concern is the behaviour on No of some of the classical functions of real analysis, and a definition of integral for such functions. In the main texts on No, most definitions and proofs are done by transfinite recursion and induction on the complexity of elements. In the thesis I consider a general scheme of defi...

A self-portrait of young Leonardo

One of the most famous drawings by Leonardo da Vinci is a self-portrait in red chalk, where he looks quite old. In fact, there is a sketch in one of his notebooks, partially covered by written notes, that can be a self-portrait of the artist when he was young. The use of image processing, to remove the handwritten text and improve the image, allows a comparison of the two portraits. A special e...

Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920). Self-Portrait, 1919.

Modigliani was born in Livorno, Italy, where he grew up in a Jewish ghetto. He studied art in Florence, and in 1906 he moved to Paris, where he met Pablo Picasso and other leading artists of his era. In Paris, he was influenced by fauvism, the avant-garde art movement promoting a strong, emotional, and nonrealistic use of color, and by his friend the Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi, known...