Amanda Vincent’s name has become part of something larger (so to speak), it is included in the name for a new species of seahorse, Hippocampus amandavincentae.
Elana Shepert’s August 11 (?), 2026 article for Vancouver is Awesome charms almost as much as the seahorses do,
Seahorses. These petite ocean dwellers are the stuff of dreams. They look like aquatic, mythical mini horses. And, to top it off, males are the ones who give birth.
Recently, a University of British Columbia [UBC] professor who has dedicated her life to the study and preservation of the unique fish had one named after her — but it isn’t found in Canadian waters.
Amanda Vincent says she’s honoured that the new species has her name, but hopes more can be done to bring the animal she loves from the brink of extinction.
“A third of seahorse species are threatened with extinction. And another third are data deficient, meaning we don’t even know enough to calculate their status,” she tells Vancouver Is Awesome.
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Do we have seahorses in Metro Vancouver waters?
The short answer is: it’s complicated. All “true seahorses,” as Vincent puts it, are designated by the Ancient Greek word hippocampus, and none of these are found in the Pacific Northwest. You may have recognized the word “hippocampus” as the seahorse-shaped part of the human brain. It’s named after these seafarers.
But members of the overarching “seahorse family” are located in Metro Vancouver waters (science is complicated). This group is called Syngnathidae and includes other fascinating creatures such as pipefish and seadragons, in addition to seahorses.
The Vancouver Aquarium often has exhibits with seadragons, but otherwise you won’t find those locally. To spot those mind-bendingly cool aquatic fish, you’ll have to visit the Land Down Under. …
Attention B.C. divers: You can spot pipefish here, which is the closest thing to a seahorse locally. The most-common species is the bay pipefish, slender beauties with curious faces found from California up to Alaska. They are roughly 40 centimetres long and camouflage with their habitats.
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But Canada does have one “true” seahorse, located in Nova Scotia: the lined seahorse (Hippocampus erectus).
A new species named after a Vancouver professor
Vincent was recently honoured with a new seahorse species in the Indian Ocean, Hippocampus amandavincentae, named after her.
The new species is a real beauty, says Vincent, often silvery-white through to golden, and may even change colours to match its habitat, “as many species do.” Its range stretches from the Western Indian Ocean to East Africa, up to the Red Sea and down to Western India.
“And it’s a very elegant-looking seahorse, I’m proud to say,” she says happily, but adds they only have a few specimens so far.
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Studying Hippocampus: How seahorses save the world
Vincent says she chose to study seahorses because they’re so unique.
“In seahorses, only the male gets pregnant [emphasis mine]…. So I started studying them way back when I was doing my PhD, because I was so interested in male pregnancy and what that meant for the evolution of sex differences in general. And then I fell in love with these crazy fishes, which are just different from almost anything else,” she explains.
The whimsical creatures also help stir up conversations around conservation.
“If we talk about the fact that bottom trawls drag up everything in their path when they’re fishing, people are like, ‘Well, OK.’ But when I say, ‘Well, there’s seahorses in the bottom of those nets’ … people get a lot more interested,” she says.
Seahorses transformed global export regulations for marine life, and now 185 countries have agreed on export regulations for them. In the wake of this movement, scientists and advocates secured similar regulations for sharks, rays, angelfish and other species, Vincent explains.
An international team of scientists has named a seahorse species from the Indian Ocean, Hippocampus amandavincentae, in honour of Prof. Amanda Vincent, director and co-founder of UBC’s Project Seahorse, for pioneering seahorse science and advancing marine conservation.
This magical seahorse was found by researchers among heaps of fish bycatch at Tuticorin harbour in southern India. This elegant-looking fish measures about 16 cm long and has a short snout, five spines forming an elevated crown on top of its head, and more spines running along its body and tail. Scientists had encountered this iconic fish for more than a century without realizing it was a distinct species. They now believe its range extends across the Indian Ocean, from Mozambique to the Red Sea to India.
Now it finally has a name of its own, Hippocampus amandavincentae, one that is rooted in conservation. The study describing it was published in the leading taxonomy journal Zootaxa.
The naming is the latest recognition of Prof. Vincent’s work in seahorse and marine conservation. Prof. Amanda Vincent was the first biologist to study seahorses underwater, the first to document the extensive trade in these fishes, and the first to initiate a seahorse conservation projec
t–Project Seahorse– [sic] which has put seahorses on the global conservation agenda. In 2021, she became the first marine biologist to receive the Indianapolis Prize, the world’s leading animal conservation award.
“We have named this seahorse, Hippocampus amandavincentae, for Amanda Vincent, whose work established seahorse conservation as a field,” said co-author Graham Short, Focal Point for Taxonomy and Evolution in the global expert group for conservation of seahorses and their relatives.
“This honour makes my heart glow. It’s amazing that such a wonderful creature was hiding in plain sight. I surveyed the array of fishes dragged up by trawlers in Tuticorin, India, where this new species was first found, and missed it completely. Now I have yet another special reason to push hard at ending bottom trawl fishing,” said Prof. Vincent.
“The timing is especially meaningful as it coincides with celebrating 30 years of Project Seahorse achievements. I’m deeply grateful to my friends and colleagues for this kindness,” she added.
By looking closely at their snouts and spines, studying their DNA, and revisiting specimens preserved in museums, the researchers were able to resolve this supposed species into three distinct species: Hippocampus amandavincentae,Hippocampus histrix and Hippocampus jayakari.
“Many museum specimens and online biodiversity records of spiny seahorses in the Indian Ocean have been assigned to Hippocampus histrix for decades. Our findings now reveal that these records actually represent multiple species, with practical consequences for global conservation decision-making and policy implementation” said senior author Rajeev Raghavan, an assistant professor at Kerala University of Fisheries and Ocean Studies.
“Accurate species identification is a crucial first step towards understanding distribution, population status, and developing effective conservation strategies,” said lead author Shalu Kannan. “This discovery reveals the hidden biodiversity of the Indian Ocean and highlights the importance of documenting and protecting its unique species and the ecosystems they depend on,” she added.
The findings are particularly important because seahorses are globally recognized flagship species threatened by unsustainable fishing, exploitation for traditional medicine and the aquarium trade, and habitat loss. All seahorse species are listed under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora Appendix II, meaning their international trade is regulated to ensure it does not threaten their survival. In India, they receive the highest level of protection under the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972.
“Knowing that Hippocampus amandavincentae exists as a separate species, recognizing what makes it unique and understanding where it lives is obviously critical for its conservation. Our team at Project Seahorse will do everything we can to support healthy populations of this and other seahorses,” Vincent concluded.
This is a joint effort, which flirts on the edge of art/science, between two groups according to the Iconic Fishes About page,
About Inspired by #IconicFishes
Inspired by Iconic Fishes is a global art movement inviting people of all ages, from anywhere in the world, to explore, create, craft, share, or tell stories that celebrate the wonders of our iconic fishes: seahorses, pipefishes, seadragons, and their quirky cousins like trumpetfish, cornetfish/flutemouth and bellowsfish. In doing so, we hope to spark curiosity, inspire creativity, and encourage action to keep them and their habitats healthy.
Meet the conservation leaders behind Inspired by #IconicFishes
Project Seahorse
Project Seahorse is a leader in marine conservation, making discoveries & collaborating globally to take effective action for seahorses and their seas.
Project Seahorse works to protect seahorses, for their own sakes and to support ocean conservation more broadly, generating cutting-edge research and using it to prompt and guide highly effective conservation interventions.
Directed by Professor Amanda Vincent, a global expert in marine conservation, Project Seahorse has won many international awards and honours for scholarship and for front line conservation, emphasizing our distinctive blend of skills, experience, and credentials.
Project Seahorse works in collaboration with researchers, governments, conservation groups, and local communities worldwide. Project Seahorse is hosted at The University of British Columbia, Canada, and the Zoological Society of London, UK.
IUCN SSC Seahorse, Pipefish and Seadragon Specialist Group
Project Seahorse hosts and leads the global Seahorse, Pipefish and Seadragon Specialist Group (SPS SG) for the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Species Survival Commission (SSC). Our SPS SG is tasked with – and dedicated to – the conservation of seahorses, pipefishes, pipehorses and seadragons — as well as near relatives such as trumpetfishes, cornetfishes/flutemouths, and bellowsfishes/snipefishes.
The SPS SG leads on assessing, planning and acting for these iconic fishes. We provide independent technical and scientific advice to governments and other groups to improve the conservation status of these species. We assess their threats of extinction, undertake research that can make a difference, plan for management and policy change that will benefit the species, and act to ensure survival of their wild populations… all while networking with a host of agencies and organizations. A key element in our work is communicating to improve support for these wonderful animals.
Calling on artists, makers, and dreamersto join a global arts movement that celebrates the wondrous lives of truly #iconicfishes: seahorses, pipefish, seadragons, and their quirky cousins like ghost pipefish, trumpetfish, cornetfish, and bellowsfish.
Because to know them is to treasure them.
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Why this matters?
In treasuring iconic fishes, we champion the health of our oceans By celebrating these remarkable species, we ignite curiosity and rally action to protect the ecosystems they call home. Their beauty inspires a creative movement that shines a light on marine life, its wonders, and its threats. And inspires action to keep our oceans healthy.
The unique power of art Art in all its forms moves us in ways facts cannot – it connects, inspires, and transcends barriers. Through creativity, we spark hope, passion, and meaningful action for the ocean’s future.
So, let’s dance, sing, create or craft for these iconic fishes!
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I find the seadragons particularly fascinating,
Common Seadragon Aquatic – Free photo on Pixabay (pixabay.com)
It looks ‘leafy’ to my inexpert eye; the Iconic Fishes website offers this seadragon description,
Seadragon
There are three species of seadragons, all belonging to the same family (Syngnathidae) as seahorses and pipefishes: the weedy seadragon, the leafy seadragon, and the recently discovered ruby seadragon. They are found exclusively off the southern coast of Australia.
Fun Fact
Seadragons have a long tube snout and leaf-like appendages that extend from their various nobs and ridges, resembling the flowing costumes of dancers. These delicate “leaves” not only give them a graceful, decorative appearance but also help them blend seamlessly into the seaweeds they call home. Just like other fishes in the family, they also have the ability to change colours.
“This is a thrilling discovery,” says Amanda Vincent, director of Project Seahorse. “These charismatic and mysterious animals are so highly cryptic – and, in many places, so threatened – that we often have to be very lucky to find them.”
The divers, Nédia Coutinho and Martin Roy, owners of UW Distribution, an underwater imaging company, spotted the seahorse during a routine dive.
“I was obviously not looking for a seahorse but when I saw it I could not believe my eyes,” says Coutinho. “I was so excited, even without knowing that it’s not common around Nova Scotia. I have dived on the Great Barrier Reef in Australia and in the Caribbean and this is the first time I have ever seen a seahorse.”
Seahorses are found in coastal waters around the globe, from northern Europe to the Indian Ocean and from Korea to New Zealand. They are threatened by harmful fishing practices and overfishing, with tens of millions of animals caught and traded for use in traditional Chinese medicine, aquarium display, and as curios. Loss of their habitats also poses problems.
“Seahorses face so many challenges that they desperately need new allies,” explains Vincent. “Globally, there are fewer than 15 scientists studying seahorses in the wild, which is why citizen science initiatives like iSeahorse are so important, and why divers like Nédia and Martin are so integral to their conservation.”
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Amanda Vincent and seahorses have been mentioned here before (way back in 2013). It’s nice to catch up on the latest seahorse news and on Vincent’s more recent work.
Somehow, I must have missed the earlier notices but, on the upside, the folks at the London Arts-Based Research Centre (LABRC) have extended the deadline to September 1, 2026 for anyone wanting to submit a proposal in response to the Call for Papers. Here’s more from an August 13 2026 LABRC notice (received via email),
We would like to announce that the proposal deadline for our Science and Sensibility transdisciplinary conference has now been extended to September 1. Kindly find the conference details below, or visit the conference webpage on https://labrc.co.uk/science-and-sensibility-2026/
“Art and science bear intrinsic similarities in their attempts to illuminate aspects of the human condition. Grounded in exploration, revelation, and representation, art and science work toward advancing human understanding”, Patricia Leavy, Method Meets Art.
According to Richard Dawkins, “There’s real poetry in the real world. Science is the poetry of reality”. So why are art and science sometimes considered as two separate fields, rather than two different sides of the same coin? And who says that scientists, engineers, and medical researchers take interest only in matters within the boundaries of the laboratories and hospitals? How might the perspective of art provide fresh avenues for understanding and contribute significantly to the enrichment of scientific knowledge? For poets, writers, and artists there are no such boundaries, for there is poetic wisdom in scientific knowledge, beauty in anatomy, and concepts worth celebrating in writing. And for biographers and memoirists, the medical humanities offer experiences that are worth preserving in prose. Our forthcoming conference seeks to deconstruct the common divide between two seemingly distinct disciplines of art and science, building bridges instead of boundaries, and showing the importance of creatively contemplating, cherishing, and preserving the beauty of what we learn and experience.
This conference, therefore, aims to bring together scholars, creatives, and other arts-based researchers from different disciplines working on topics related to transdisciplinarity, with a focus on the bridging of science with the arts. You may be a scientist or a medical practitioner who writes poems and stories or takes on another art (such as music, sculpture, the visual arts, etc.) or alternatively, you may be a creative inspired by science, or a practioner [sic] in a field that utilises creative approaches for scientific purposes—so the intertwining of your thoughts, ideas, and creativity are welcome, and we can’t wait to hear about your work that combines your creativity with science!
Send us your proposals by August 31st.[extended to September 1, 2026] Presenters can either share academic papers and/or creative work (poetry, prose, photography, music, painting, etc.), as we highly encourage arts-based research. We welcome proposals from scholars (of all disciplines), creatives, graduate students, practitioners and professionals.
So whether you are working on research bridging art with creativity, or you have a piece containing astronomical images, eco-poetry, aesthetic reflections on chemicals and substances, lunar photography, artistic depictions of the human body, alchemical musings, art and arithmetic, psychological fiction (or non-fiction), an ode to omicron, or any other creative pieces arising from “scientific” inspiration, please share them with us!
We welcome 15-minute presentations on topics related (but certainly not limited to) the following fields:
Fiction as a mode for knowledge
Transdisciplinarity in its various forms
Music-based practices
A/r/tography
Physics as an inspiration in literature
Chemistry and the culinary, literary or visual arts
Astrophotography
Alchemy as an art and science
Psychology and the arts
Symbolic healing
Ecopoetics
Anatomy in painting
The medical humanities
Poetry and medicine
Photography and medical technology
Ruminations based on scientific theories
Space poetry
Art therapy
Music and mathematical formulas
Viruses and philosophy
The human body
Mental illness and the arts
Quantum physics and artistic expression
Technological advancements and their impact on artistic creation
Mathematical patterns in visual arts
Neuroscience and creativity
Climate change and environmental art
Data visualization as an art form
Ethical considerations in scientific art collaborations
Evolutionary biology and literature
Augmented reality and immersive storytelling
Artificial intelligence and its role in creative processes
Bioart and biotechnology in artistic practice
Intersection of robotics and performance art
Astronomy and music composition
Psychology of color in visual arts
Medical imaging techniques and artistic interpretation
Intersection of archaeology and art history
Cognitive science and theater/performance studies
Genetics and contemporary art practices
Philosophy of science and its influence on artistic discourse
Ecological activism through artistic interventions
Anthropology and the representation of cultures in art
Social sciences and documentary photography
Nanotechnology and its implications for artistic materials
Ethnomusicology and cultural expressions of scientific knowledge
Marine biology and marine-inspired art forms
Kindly fill out the proposal form by September 1, 2026.
For further queries, please email us on conferences@labrc.co.uk, and kindly allow us at least 2-3 working days to respond.
Want more inspiration? Check out our recently released issue of our literary and arts journal, Indelible, with the special theme of “Science and Sensibility”!
[Earlyworm tickets $50 CAD available until 11:30 PM PT July 22, 2026 $60 CAD standard tickets available until 12 am PT July 30, 2926]
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About Event
For July’s Vancouver AI Community Meetup, we’re welcoming Dave Olson, community builder, storyteller, archivist, postcard-maker, poet, and long-haul keeper of strange and useful records, visiting from Okayama, Japan.
Also joining us is Dorothy Pang, a Vancouver visual artist, AI filmmaker, and creative director working across AI concepting, art direction, filmmaking, and motion capture.
Dave has spent decades making culture from the raw materials of lived experience: zines, dispatches, audio, field notes, friendship cards, Olympic-era media experiments, travel stories, spoken word, and handmade archives that refuse to behave like “content.”
His work lives somewhere between the internet and the envelope, the campfire and the database, the typed page and the half-remembered road story.
This will not be a product demo. It will be a generous, analog-hearted meditation on memory, community, tools, care, archives, and what it means to keep making human things while the machines get louder.
Come for the stories. Stay for the unfinished poem.
Dorothy Pang is a Vancouver visual artist, AI filmmaker, and creative director working across AI concepting, art direction, filmmaking, and motion capture.
Kris Krüg will tell the story of how it happened, including the accidents, relationships, experiments, mistakes and strange little sparks that carried the work forward.
Then he’ll turn the question back to the room:What should this community become next? Who needs to be part of the festival? What conversations are missing? What would make FUTUREPROOF genuinely useful, surprising, and worth showing up for?
Part origin story, part community briefing, part live design session.
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Event Details
Date: July 29, 2026
Time: 6:00 PM to 10:00 PM PDT
Venue: H.R. MacMillan Space Centre, 1100 Chestnut St, Vancouver, BC V6J 3J9
Format: Community talks, demos, conversation, and open networking
Who This Is For
People building with AI and people trying to understand what it is changing.
Creatives, technologists, researchers, organizers, founders, students, educators, and public-sector teams.
Anyone who wants a local, grounded, human room for sorting through the hype, the useful parts, and the hard questions.
Mathematics and poetry are more connected than most of us realize. A July 3, 2025 article by Ev Crunden for the University of Pennsylvania’s Omnia magazine (a shorter version dated August 19, 2025 can found here) describes the intersection between mathematics, poetry, and ancient India,
Add zero and one to get one, one and one to get two, one and two to get three, two and three to get five. Most of us know this—that each successive number is the sum of the two numbers that came before it—as the Fibonacci sequence, named after a 12th-century Italian mathematician. But as early as 200 BCE, an Indian poet and mathematician named Acharya Pingala used that sequential concept to analyze poetry, and 7th-century scholar Virahanka later described it in more detail.
In fact, the use of math on the Indian subcontinent stretches back more than 3,000 years, and curiosity about this ancient and understudied history is at the center of Priya Nambrath’s research. As a fifth-year doctoral candidate in the Department of South Asia Studies, Nambrath is studying the applied practice of mathematics during medieval and premodern times in what is now Kerala, a state in southwestern India.
It’s “a deeply grounded and long-lasting mathematical tradition,” she says, one in which people drew on local religious and metaphysical themes, as well as the rhythm and structure of Sanskrit poetry. In the process, they uncovered many ideas and approaches long before Europeans did—discoveries that go largely underrecognized: “For the most part,” Nambrath says, “even students in India are not taught this aspect of cultural and intellectual history.”
Initially, Nambrath planned to dig into the topic independently. Ultimately, however, she realized she needed more academic support, “not just in the methodologies of Indian mathematics, but also in the literary and social histories of the region,” she says. …
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“This research involved a lot of time spent in several different archives and dealing with different categories of archival material,” she explains. From December 2023 to September 2024, Nambrath visited manuscript libraries in India, where she identified a few mathematical texts that had not been previously studied or translated. Those texts provided insights into “a medieval system of pedagogy,” Nambrath says, one that incorporated local approaches to mathematics.
She also found that European colonial scholars struggled to completely understand Indian math. One stumbling block, she observed, was cultural prejudice and a sense of mathematical superiority. But Nambrath surmises they may also have been flummoxed by how different it was from anything they’d encountered, something she ran into herself. “My STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] background had encouraged me to think of mathematics as a kind of universal language, not susceptible to cultural and historical nuance like art, music, and literature,” she says. “But what I was seeing in Indian mathematical texts convinced me otherwise.”
Besides the close links with poetry, mathematical progress was sometimes driven by the precise requirements of ritual practice, and advancements in astronomy were often motivated by the needs of astrology. These efforts resulted in unique modes of mathematical expression, according to Nambrath.
One example is the kuṭṭākāra method, which Nambrath says translates to “the pulverizer,” or the idea of reducing or grinding something down. The method is actually an algorithm that helps to solve what we now call linear Diophantine equations. Those take the form ax + by = c, with x and y representing unknown quantities, and the other letters representing known quantities. Through the kuṭṭākāra method, coefficients in this type of equation are broken up into smaller numbers to make it easier to find a solution.
The kuṭṭākāra method has some similarities with modern computational algorithms, but it first appeared in a 5th-century text, the Āryabhaṭīyam, with many other Indian mathematicians building on it over the years. The text is a treatise written in Sanskrit verses, using what Nambrath describes as an obscure system of word-numerals—that is, consonants representing digits, vowels denoting place value.
“We think of sciences and the humanities as embodying some kind of essential disciplinary binary,” she says. “But here I was, encountering mathematical ideas and techniques encased in metrically precise and linguistically lush poetry.”
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Nambrath, who is aiming to graduate next year, is now deep into writing her dissertation, along with developing a module for the Penn Museum that links artifacts in their Egyptian, Babylonian, and Greek galleries with the mathematics practiced by those cultures. Museum visitors should be able to see the result this fall [2025].
And though that activity is a side project, Nambrath says it’s bringing her research full circle. “It gives me a much more holistic view of how humans across time and geography have wrestled with mathematical problems,” she says. “These approaches can be unique, but they are always logical, and it is fascinating to see how grounded they are in culture and custom.”
I found more about mathematics and poetry in an April 12, 2023 post (it’s an excerpt from Sarah Hart’s 2023 book, “Once Upon a Prime: The Wondrous Connections Between Mathematics and Literature”) published on the Literary Hub
The connections between mathematics and poetry are profound. But they begin with something very simple: the reassuring rhythm of counting. The pattern of the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 appeals to young children as much as the rhymes we sing with them (“Once I caught a fish alive”). When we move on from nursery rhymes, we satisfy our yearning for structure in the rhyme schemes and meter of more sophisticated forms of poetry, from the rhythmic pulse of iambic pentameter to the complex structure of poetic forms like the sestina and the villanelle. The mathematics behind these and other forms of poetic constraint is deep and fascinating. I’ll share it with you in this chapter.
Much more sophisticated mathematical problems have been expressed in verse, though. As I mentioned in the introduction, it was the standard format for mathematics in the Sanskrit tradition. The twelfth-century Indian mathematician and poet Bhaskara wrote all his mathematical works in verse. Here is one of the poems in a book he dedicated to his daughter Lilavati:
Out of a swarm of bees, one fifth part settled on a blossom of Kadamba, and one third on a flower of Silindhri; three times the difference of those numbers flew to the bloom of a Kutaja. One bee, which remained, hovered and flew about in the air, allured at the same moment by the pleasing fragrance of jasmine and pandanus. Tell me, charming woman, the number of bees.
What a lovely way to write about algebra!
We don’t tend to write our mathematics in verse nowadays, more’s the pity, but the aesthetic link with poetry remains: the goal of both is beauty, a beauty that makes a virtue of economy of expression. Poets and mathematicians alike have praised each other’s specialisms. “Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare,” wrote the American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay in a 1922 sonnet paying homage to Euclid’s geometry.
For the Irish mathematician William Rowan Hamilton, both mathematics and poetry can “lift the mind above the dull stir of Earth.” Einstein is reported to have said that mathematics is the poetry of logical thought. A mathematical proof, for example, if it’s any good, has a lot in common with a poem. In both cases, each word matters, there are no superfluous words, and the goal is to express an entire idea in a self-contained, usually fairly short, and fairly structured way.
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The resonances between poetry and mathematics were expressed well by the American poet Ezra Pound in The Spirit of Romance (1910): “Poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics, which gives us equations, not for abstract figures, triangles, spheres and the like, but equations for the human emotions.” Pound made another analogy between mathematics and poetry—the way that both can be open to many layers of interpretation. I would say that mathematicians have a very similar understanding of what makes the greatest mathematics: concepts that hold within them many possible interpretations—structures that can be found in different settings and so have a universality to them.
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Sarah Hart
Sarah Hart is a respected pure mathematician and a gifted expositor of mathematics. When promoted to full Professor of Mathematics at Birkbeck College (University of London) in 2013, she became the youngest STEM professor at Birkbeck and its first ever woman Mathematics Professor and one of only five women Mathematics Professors under the age of 40 in the United Kingdom. Educated at Oxford and Manchester, Dr. Hart currently holds the Gresham Professorship of Geometry, the oldest mathematics chair in the UK. The chair stretches back in an unbroken lineage to 1597. Dr. Hart is the 33rd Gresham Professor of Geometry, and the first woman ever to hold the position.
A classic story and mathematics
Years ago I was surprised to find out that “Alice in Wonderland” by Lewis Carroll held a lot of mathematical concepts. You can find more about those concepts in a December 16, 2009 article by Melanie Bayley for New Scientist, Note: A link has been removed,
What would Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland be without the Cheshire Cat, the trial, the Duchess’s baby or the Mad Hatter’s tea party? Look at the original story that the author told Alice Liddell and her two sisters one day during a boat trip near Oxford, though, and you’ll find that these famous characters and scenes are missing from the text.
As I embarked on my DPhil investigating Victorian literature, I wanted to know what inspired these later additions. The critical literature focused mainly on Freudian interpretations of the book as a wild descent into the dark world of the subconscious. There was no detailed analysis of the added scenes, but from the mass of literary papers, one stood out: in 1984 Helena Pycior of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee had linked the trial of the Knave of Hearts with a Victorian book on algebra. Given the author’s day job, it was somewhat surprising to find few other reviews of his work from a mathematical perspective. Carroll was a pseudonym: his real name was Charles Dodgson, and he was a mathematician at Christ Church College, Oxford.
The 19th century was a turbulent time for mathematics, with many new and controversial concepts, like imaginary numbers, becoming widely accepted in the mathematical community. Putting Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in this context, it becomes clear that Dodgson, a stubbornly conservative mathematician, used some of the missing scenes to satirise these radical new ideas.
Thank you to everyone who took the time to drop in and read and/or comment on this blog, especially in times that grow ever more turbulent for all of us.
It wasn’t all ‘sturm und drang’. Aside: Much to my surprise (see Wikipedia entry) ‘storm and stress’ is a term first associated with an 18th Century German literary movement.
It’s been quite a year for the quantum science community, which appears to be getting more public attention. It’s not quite at the levels experienced by AI (artificial intelligence). but it’s getting there.
This year I’ve had a lot of art/science projects featured here. It makes me wonder if perhaps art/sci is also of rising interest.
Here’s my 2025 roundup, roughly organized by topic with a (to be expected) focus on the Canadian experience. As usual, some projects straddle two or more areas of interest, so, I’ve made some arbitrary decisions. As well, I’m trying to keep this shorter than my standard end-of-year piece. For anyone interested in the ‘nano’ aspect of this blog, either ‘nanoparticle’ or ‘nanotechnology’ searches should reward you amply.
Geopolitical tensions, the US and its science, and science fraud
Who thought Canadians would be threatened with 51st state status? Relatively mild compared to what else Donald Trump and his kakistocracy have been up to domestically and internationally. By the way, my new word of 2025 was kakistocracy, from its Wikipedia entry,
Kakistocracy (/ˌkækɪˈstɒkrəsi/ KAK-ist-OK-rə-see) is government by the worst, least qualified, or most unscrupulous people.[1]: 54 [2][3]
The word was coined as early as the 17th century[4] and derives from two Greek words, kákistos (κάκιστος, ‘worst’) and krátos (κράτος, ‘rule’), together meaning ‘government by the worst people’.[5]
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Usage
The term is generally used by critics of a national government. It has been used variously in the past to describe the Russian governments of Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin,[12] the government of Egypt under Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi,[13] governments in sub-Saharan Africa,[14] the government of the Philippines under Rodrigo Duterte,[15] Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro,[16] and the governments of some presidents of the United States.[17]
The term gained popularity during the first presidency of Donald Trump, going viral in 2017 when used by then-MSNBC host Joy Reid and again following an April 2018 tweet by former CIA director John Brennan.[4][18] The term has been used by commentators at numerous news outlets,[19][20][21] political publications,[22][23] and books to describe the Trump administration.[24][25]
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As noted in a posting earlier in 2025 (see below for link), the Americans are desperate for resources, which can help explain at least some of the threats and hostile action toward us and others. The US signed a deal with Ukraine that featured critical minerals. Both Canada and Greenland offer critical minerals and greater control over the arctic passage .Nigeria and Venezuela are oil rich. As for Panama, presumably the focus is on easy Pacific/Atlantic passage.
Here’s my February 13, 2025 posting “Water, critical minerals, technology and US expansionist ambitions (Manifest Destiny).” This is a long read as I cover a lot of ground. Since writing it up and in light of the aggression towards Venezuela, in particular, I’ve come to suspect that my assumption that the US has adequate oil reserves was incorrect. *ETA January 5, 2026: ON January 3, 2026 US military forces set foot on Venezuelan soil, captured/kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro, and announced plans to take over its oil industry. Read more: January 4, 2026 article “Experts say Trump’s plan to seize and revitalize Venezuela’s oil industry faces major hurdles” by Josh Funk for Associated Press on the PBS website.*
Given the well documented issues around US science funding, as well as, concerns that foreign students and researchers may have regarding current immigration policies, the Canadian federal government appears eager to provide an alternative.
“Canada bets $1.7 billion on attracting top global research talent” was published here on December 11, 2025. The programme isn’t explicitly aimed at scientists in the US but it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that there is great interest in attracting anyone who’s tempted to leave the US.
I often see material on building ‘trust in science’ and material on the reverse ‘battling misinformation’.
This February 28, 2025 posting highlights an event about building trust in science. It also includes my comments about a medical scientific fraud, a bad apple, as it were.
Moving from ‘bad apples’ to an even more disturbing view of scientific fraud,
An August 8, 2025 posting features Canadian quantum companies in a US competition for funding and some sad news, “Canadian quantum companies chase US DARPA’s (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) $$$ and RIP Raymond Laflamme.” Chairperson for the expert panel on Quantum Potential, Raymond Laflamme died about 18 months after it was published. By the way, the Canadian companies all made it to the next stage for funding from DARPA. I should have a posting about that published in the new year.
If you are looking to join up or check out Vancouver and/or BC AI communities, search on the web for “Kris Krug” who is the moving force for these initiatives.
The Phoenix Payroll implementation remains as one of the Canadian government’s greatest foul ups.
This is a sampling of three of the citizen science items here.
“‘Extreme’ citizen science” published on January 17, 2025 was really from 2024 but the word ‘extreme’ had me hooked. Here’s what they meant, from the posting,
“Extreme citizen science is the idea that the role of a researcher becomes ever smaller. The unique and ‘extreme’ aspect is that a larger part of the research process, both fieldwork and lab work, is now handed over to high school students. We were excited to see if it would work and have now seen that it does so exceptionally well,” says project leader Anders P. Tøttrup, Associate Professor of Citizen Science at the Natural History Museum of Denmark.
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Interesting, yes? Especially in light of this next one.
A quick internet search did not turn up any new information about gene-edited pork and its entrance into the Canadian market.
Goodbye 2025 and hello 2026
At this point I’ve decided to give in and accept that thee will always be a backlog of material from the previous year (this time, 2025) bleeding into the next (this time, 2026). In my defence, there is so much material out there I am overwhelmed with riches.
Moving on …
I see that 2025 was chock-a-block with stories about artificial intelligence, just like 2024. I don’t anticipate that will change much, just as I imagine that quantum science and quantum computing stories will continue to proliferate 2026.
While I didn’t highlight them this year, there were a lot of stories about agriculture and regenerative medicine with enabling nanotechnology. It’ll be interesting to see if that continues.
One area that offers some hope with regard to energy and to the environment and I think will become more prominent in 2026 is fusion energy (nuclear energy). For anyone not familiar with fusion energy, here’s a description from the Wikipedia entry for the largest fusion energy project in the world (ITER); Note: Links have been removed,
ITER (originally an acronym for International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, and also meaning “the way” or “the path” in Latin)[1][2][3] is an international nuclear fusion research and engineering project designed to demonstrate the feasibility of fusion power.
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Fusion aims to replicate the process that takes place in stars where the intense heat at the core fuses together nuclei and produces large amounts of energy in the form of heat and light. Harnessing fusion power in terrestrial conditions would provide sufficient energy to satisfy mounting demand, and to do so in a sustainable manner that has a relatively small impact on the environment. One gram of deuterium-tritium fuel mixture in the process of nuclear fusion produces 90,000-kilowatt hours of energy, or the equivalent of 11 tonnes of coal.[30]
Nuclear fusion uses a different approach from traditional nuclear energy. Current nuclear power stations rely on nuclear fission with the nucleus of an atom being split to release energy. Nuclear fusion takes multiple nuclei and uses intense heat to fuse them together, a process that also releases energy.[31]
For anyone unfamiliar with multi-modal (or multimodal), here’s a definition for when the word is used in conjunction with AI, from the IBM “What is multimodal AI?” webpage,
Multimodal AI refers to machine learning models capable of processing and integrating information from multiple modalities or types of data. These modalities can include text, images, audio, video and other forms of sensory input.
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Moving onto the point, an October 8, 2025 invitation to the upcoming Vancouver AI meetup arrived via email (you can see the invite online, presumably for a limited time),
You’re invited to
Vancouver AI Community Meetup: 10/29
Wednesday, October 29 [2025] 6:00 PM – 10:00 PM PDT
H.R. MacMillan Space Centre Vancouver, British Columbia
Oct 29 [2025] we’re back with the monthly dose of “what if we just tried the thing nobody said would work?” Indigenous knowledge meets machine learning. Film meets fever dream. Quantum computers meets grandma’s kitchen.
For anyone curious about BC’s artificial intelligence community events, there’s this BC+AI webpage.
For the meetup, the price of an ‘Earlyworm’ ticket is $47.25 (7 left) until 11:59 pm PT on October 15, 2025. The standard ticket is $63.00.
There are three free tickets for the October 29, 2025 meetup if you are a member of the Creative Mornings Vancouver community. You can signup to Creative Mornings Vancouver (part of the world’s largest creative community) for free and get announcements from the international organization and notices from the local chapter which hosts a monthly event that is also free.
The November 7, 2025 at the Vancouver Art Gallery runs from 8:15 am to 10:15 am (breakfast is included gratis the event sponsor). The guest is Brandon Wint (from the Creative Mornings Vancouver November 2025 event page),
Brandon Wint
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For more than a decade, Brandon has been a sought-after touring performance poet, having shared his work all over Canada, and internationally at festivals and showcases in the United States, Australia, Jamaica, Latvia and Lithuania. Brandon Wint’s poems and essays have been published in The Ex Puritan, Event Magazine, Arc Poetry Magazine, and Black Writers Matter, among other places. Divine Animal (Write Bloody North, 2020) is his debut collection of poetry. In recent years, his films have screened at DOXA documentary film festival and Reelworld Film Festival and Vancouver International Film Festival Centre.
Each month we ask our speaker some probing questions to give us a deeper glimpse into their life and relationship with creativity:
At each CMVan event, the 30-second pitch segment gives audience members a chance to step on stage and spotlight upcoming local creative events happening around the city.
Check out what’s coming up this October [2025]:
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10. Vancouver+AI Community Meetup #21 : Enter their raffle to win 1 of 3 tickets (Oct 29 [2025])
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To sum up, you can buy your ticket for the Vancouver AI community meetup or you can take a chance on getting one of three free tickets by signing up to the Creative Mornings Vancouver community newsletter or signing up to attend the November 7, 2025 event (Brandon Wint) and entering the raffle. Good luck!
A May 5, 2025 news item on ScienceDaily announces a ‘poetic’ analysis of China’s river porpoises over a 1400 year time span,
Endemic to China’s Yangtze River, the Yangtze finless porpoise is known for its intelligence and charismatic appearance; it looks like it has a perpetual smile on its face. To track how this critically endangered porpoise’s habitat range has changed over time, a team of biodiversity and conservation experts compiled 724 ancient Chinese poems referencing the porpoise from historic collections across China. Publishing in the Cell Press journal Current Biology on May 5 [2025], their results show that the porpoise’s range has decreased by at least 65% over the past 1,400 years, with the majority of this decline occurring in the past century.
“We’re connecting 2,000 years of Chinese culture with biodiversity,” says author Zhigang Mei of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who grew up alongside the Yangtze River revering the porpoises; elders in his community taught that they were like spirits, predicting the weather and the fish levels, and that hurting them was bad luck. “Our work fills the gap between the super long-term information we get from fossils and DNA and the recent population surveys. It really shows how powerful it can be to combine art and biodiversity conservation.”
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Caption: A Ming Dynasty woodblock-printed illustration from “Sancai Tuhui” (in English, Compendium of the Three Powers), compiled by Wang Qi (1573–1620), which is a 49-volume book of poems on birds and animals. This poem meticulously documents the Yangtze finless porpoise through morphological details, surfacing postures, and maternal care behaviors. Credit: “Sancai Tuhui,” compiled by Wang Qi (1573–1620) License: CC BY-SA
The Yangtze is the longest river in Asia and the third longest in the world, stretching 6,300 km from the Tanggula Mountains of the Tibetan Plateau until it spills out into the East China Sea near Shanghai. Historically, people—including many prolific poets such as Qianlong, the emperor of the Qing dynasty—relied on the river and its tributaries to travel around the region. Along the way, many caught glimpses of the Yangtze finless porpoise, which is the world’s only known freshwater porpoise and used to inhabit most of the river.
“Compared to fish, Yangtze finless porpoises are pretty big, and they’re active on the surface of the water, especially before thunderstorms when they’re really chasing after fish and jumping around,” says Mei. “This amazing sight was hard for poets to ignore.”
Indeed, as the team systematically collected, filtered, and collated their way through preserved poems dating back to the year 618, the researchers found hundreds of references to the porpoises. Mei says that the fact that a freshwater mammal like the Yangtze finless porpoise appears so often in these poems reflects the deep connection between people and nature in Ancient China.
“One of the biggest challenges in this research was just the sheer number of Chinese poems out there, and the fact that every poet had such a different style,” says Mei. “We had to figure out how accurate the poets were being. Some might have been really focused on realism, describing what they saw as objectively as possible. Others might have been more imaginative, exaggerating the size or behavior of things they saw. So, once we found these poems, we had to research each poet’s life and writing style to make sure the information we were getting was reliable.”
By contextualizing the porpoise references within the rest of the poem and alongside historical records of the poet’s life events, the researchers were able to pinpoint the chronological time and geographic location of the sightings. They found that the Qing Dynasty (1636–1912 CE) had over half of the total porpoise poetry with 477 poems mentioning the Yangtze finless porpoise, followed by the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644 CE) with 177 poems, the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368 CE) with 27, the Song Dynasty with 38, and the Tang Dynasty (618–907 CE) with just 5 poems.
Next, the researchers used the information gathered from the poems to reconstruct the porpoise’s distribution over time. They found that the sharpest habitat-range decrease occurred over the past century—between the Qing dynasty and modern times. They also observed that the porpoise’s range throughout the main part of the river has decreased by 33% since the Tang Dynasty, while its range among the tributaries and lakes that the Yangtze feeds into has decreased by 91%.
The finding that the Yangtze finless porpoise’s range has declined so sharply over the past century aligns with previous research, which showed that their dwindling population can be largely attributed to human alterations to the Yangtze River—especially through hydraulic engineering projects. The porpoises likely disappeared from the Yangtze’s lakes and tributaries as a direct result of dam constructions in the 1950s that blocked off movement to and from the river’s mainstem. Two other species endemic to the Yangtze—the baiji dolphin and the Chinese paddlefish—have gone functionally extinct over the past few decades, likely due to the same habitat changes.
“Protecting nature isn’t just the responsibility of modern science; it’s also deeply connected to our culture and history,” says Mei. “Art, like poetry, can really spark an emotional connection, making people realize the harmony and respect we should have between people and nature.”
Going forward, the authors plan to dig back into the poems they’ve collected to see what they can learn about what the river looked like in the past, how big the groups of porpoises used to be, and how they might have behaved before their numbers dwindled. They hope that their work can eventually help the remaining Yangtze finless porpoise population recover and potentially inspire more scientists to gain ecological insights from poetry—as well as from other historical art forms such as novels and paintings.
“This work made me rethink the scientific value of historical literature and showed us the power of thinking across disciplines,” says Mei. “Chinese poetry, this ancient art form, can be a serious scientific tool. Using the past to understand the present, ‘decoding’ the stories behind the art: it’s not just research, it’s like having a conversation with the poets of the past.”
Sara Hashemi’s May 6, 2025 article for the Smithsonian magazine gathers together more perspectives on the work from a variety of articles, Note: Links have been removed
The work highlights the connection between culture and science. “Poems are actually ancient citizen science [emphasis mine],” says study co-author Jiajia Liu, an ecologist at Fudan University in China, to McKenzie Prillaman at Science News. “These data are not perfect. … But they do have a lot of information if you use them correctly.”
Poetry as citizen science? I like that.Hashemi’s May 6, 2025 article offers more delights.
Caption: A photo of a Yangtze finless porpoise hunting in Poyang Lake. Credit: Yu Huigong Licence: CC BY-SA
The answers to those questions are a little complicated as a November 14, 2024 news item on phys.org explains it, Note: A link has been removed,
Readers are unable to reliably differentiate AI-generated from human-written poetry and are more likely to prefer AI poems, according to new research published in Scientific Reports. This tendency to rate AI poetry positively may be due to readers mistaking the complexity of human-written verse for incoherence created by AI and an underestimation of how human-like generative AI can appear.
Researchers Brian Porter and Edouard Machery, from the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh, Cathedral of Learning, tested the ability of 1,634 participants to distinguish between AI-generated poetry and that written by a human poet.
Participants were presented with ten poems in random order: five written by ten well-known poets—including William Shakespeare, Lord Byron, Emily Dickinson, and T.S. Eliot—and five poems generated by ChatGPT3.5 in the style of these poets. Participants were more likely to guess that the AI poems had been written by a human, and the five poems considered least likely to be human-produced were all written by genuine poets.
In a second experiment, a different group of 696 participants assessed the poems for 14 characteristics such as quality, beauty, emotion, rhythm, and originality. Participants were randomly assigned to three groups where they were told the poems were written by a human, produced by AI, or given no information about the poem’s origins.
Participants who were told that the poems were AI-generated gave lower ratings across 13 characteristics compared to participants who were told the poems were human-written, regardless of whether the poems were actually AI-generated or human-written. Participants who were told nothing about authorship rated AI-generated poems more favorably than human-written ones.
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Fascinating, eh? There’s more about the implications of the research in Jon Stone’s (Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, Anglia Ruskin University) November 15, 2024 essay for The Conversation, Note; Links have been removed,
Has the bell finally tolled for Shakespeare and Byron? New research conducted by philosophers of science Brian Porter and Edouard Machery suggests that the latest AI-generated poetry is “indistinguishable from human-written poetry” and “rated more favourably”.
Ten poets, from the medieval Geoffrey Chaucer to modern writer Dorothea Lasky, were successfully impersonated by AI chatbots, with most of the 696 participants slightly preferring the imitation to the real thing.
Porter and Machery conclude that “the capabilities of generative AI models have outpaced people’s expectations of AI”. But they don’t say AI has been proven an adequate replacement for human poets [emphasis mine] – and rightly so, as such a conclusion would require a great deal more testing.
That the research participants were fooled is not particularly worrying. Porter and Machery set out to include a wide range of poem types, which meant choosing poets who mostly belong to ages past. In such cases, modern readers are likely to have a hard time looking past the obvious signs of antiquity – outdated diction, rigid formalism, and obscure cultural references. It’s not so hard to disguise yourself as someone when that person is chiefly known for the odd clothes they wear.
But what about the matter of preference? As well as overall quality, the researchers asked participants to rate poems on a range of qualitative dimensions. How was the imagery, rhythm, sound or beauty? How “inspiring”, “lyrical”, “meaningful”, “moving”, “original”, “profound”, “witty” (and so on) was it? AI won out over Shakespeare and company in nearly every category.
Does this mean human poets have been supplanted? Not really. Participants in the research overall reported “a low level of experience with poetry”. Lack of familiarity with any artform severely limits our ability to get the most out of it. All the AI has to do is sand off the more challenging elements – ambiguity, wordplay, linguistic complexity – in order to produce a version which is more palatable to those with little interest in the art.
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For now, then, poets have little reason to fret. Is it possible, though, that we aren’t too far off the point where seasoned readers of poetry are able to discover a richness and depth in AI poetry that outstrips similar efforts by humans [emphasis mine]? I think so – not least because a substantial contributor to the emotional and intellectual impact of a poem is the reader’s own imagination.
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… Every recent generation of poets has been deeply interested in adapting and absorbing new technologies, along with shifts in cultural mood. Film poets continue to explore combinations of spoken word and moving image. Flarf poetry collected and reconfigured search engine detritus. And my own research into video game poetry has uncovered rapidly growing interest in a form of poetry that is restlessly interactive, playable, slippery.
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A John Donne reference and an introduction to ‘flarf poetry’? Thank you. For the curious, Stone’s November 15, 2024 essay has more.
“Poetics of Rhythm” – that is the title of a project currently in the starting blocks at Goethe University Frankfurt. The aim of Professor Achim Geisenhanslüke, Professor for Literary Theory and Comparative Literature, is to unfold the possibilities of a poetics of rhythm, which have not yet been fully exploited by literary studies, both systematically and historically. He combines the question of the fundamental significance of rhythm for the theory and practice of poetry (= poetics) with that of concrete manifestations of this phenomenon in poetry from modernity to the present day.
At the heart of the research work is rhythm in poetry. Is rhythm in poetry not simply meter? Not at all, says Achim Geisenhanslüke. Although rhythm also describes “form in motion” [emphasis mine] in poetic speech, it is far more encompassing than the concept of meter. Especially with regard to modern poetry, the potential offered by the concept of rhythm has so far hardly been studied. In his approach, Geisenhanslüke is above all continuing the work of Henri Meschonnic (1932-2009), the French poet, linguist and literary scholar who induced an upward revaluation of the concept of rhythm as part of a critical analysis of structuralist and post-structuralist literary theories.
Achim Geisenhanslüke’s project will approach the topic in three sub-studies: The first will focus on rhythm in the poems of Friedrich Hölderlin, the second will critically examine Foucault’s theory of discourse and Meschonnic’s theory of rhythm, while the third sub-study is dedicated to rhythm as “form in motion” in modern poetry up to the present day, from Annette von Droste-Hülshoff and Charles Baudelaire to Thomas Kling.
The financial support from the German Research Foundation (DFG) allows the freedom needed to pursue all these aspects. The project will receive €750,000 in increments spread over five years, which can be distributed flexibly for teaching replacements, recruiting staff, assistants, workshops and conferences.
The funding line, which has existed since 2008, is named after Reinhart Koselleck (1923-2006), one of the most important German historians of the 20th century, who is considered a co-founder of modern social history. Reinhart Koselleck Projects are awarded to “outstanding researchers with a proven scientific track record”. The prerequisites for approval are exceptionally innovative approaches or a higher degree of risk.
In the case of Achim Geisenhanslüke’s project, the risks lie in the attempt, within a comparative approach, to take rhythm, a concept that is as central to literary studies as it is underestimated, and use it to give poetics new impetus: No risk, no gain. [emphasis mine]
It’s not often one associates any kind of danger with poetry.
The Guggenheim’s Earth Day celebrations feature artist and poet Cecilia Vicuña’s “The Quipu of Encounters” series. Here’s an example,
An Inca quipu, from the Larco Museum in Lima (Peru).Claus Ableiter nur hochgeladen aus enWiki – enWiki, hochgeladen von User Lyndsaruell [downloaded from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu] CC BY-SA 3.0 File:Inca Quipu.jpg Created: 29 October 2007 Uploaded: 28 October 2007
For anyone unfamiliar with a quipu, here’s a description from the Quipu Wikipedia entry, Note: Links have been removed,
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A quipu usually consisted of cotton or camelid fiber strings. The Inca people used quipu for collecting data and keeping records, for monitoring tax obligations, for collecting census records, for calendrical information, and for military organization.[2] The cords stored numeric and other values encoded as knots, often in a base-ten positional system. A quipu could have only a few or thousands of cords.[3] The configuration of the quipu has been “compared to string mops”.[4] Archaeological evidence has also shown the use of finely carved wood as a supplemental, and perhaps sturdier, base to which the color-coded cords could be attached.[5] A relatively small number have survived.
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Recently (and relevantly to Vicuña’s project), I came across a suggestion that quipu weren’t used for numerical storage only, from Silvia Ferrara’s March 8, 2022 article “How The Inca Used Knots To Tell Stories” for LitHub,
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Because quipu aren’t limited to numbers. A third of these knotted necklaces are narrative. It’s hard even to imagine that a story could be told using a series of colored knots that represent numbers, but it is so. Names, places, genealogies, songs—all are recited like so many zip codes, credit-card numbers, telephone numbers, yellow, green, and blue numbers. Because numbers, for the Inca, speak not only of quantity but of quality. I know, it’s not easy to grasp, but let your imagination run free a little.
The knots are 3D, so they have form, direction, relative position, color, thickness, multiple configurations. Each element carries a different meaning: far from the body, close to the body—these distances affect what quantity is recorded. A three-dimensional Sudoku. Multivalent, multi-referential, and yet at the same time precise. According to Spanish accounts from the mid-16th century, quipu were on par with the Old World’s most complex scripts. One Jesuit missionary tells of an Inca woman who brought him a quipu bearing her entire life story. In knots. Incredible.
Indeed, the details of how this could have been possible are lost to us, since we don’t have the legend that reveals the links among these elements (dimension, thickness, color, number, direction, etc.) and their precise meaning. We’re in need of a decoder, an Inca Rosetta stone to unveil the correlations. …
On April 22, Earth Day, join us online for poetry in response to the climate crisis.
“entwine / the betwixt,” writes artist and activist Cecilia Vicuña in her poem “Three Fragments of Instan.” We are interconnected in our struggle for environmental justice. Together, we seek ways to convey the reality of our current global climate emergency. The Academy of American Poets invites a community of poets to write a new collaborative poem—a choral braid of voices—presented at Poets.org on Earth Day, along with a video recording of their contributions.
Over the past six months, representatives from various arts and community organizations, along with artists, poets, writers, and musicians, participated in a series of workshops led by artist and poet Cecilia Vicuña at the Wassaic Project and the Guggenheim Museum. Conceived by Vicuña as part of her ongoing “Quipu of Encounters” series, the workshops used ritual and communion as a means to propose ways of being and acting, as individuals and within collectives, in response to the current climate crisis. Among the many themes that emerged were tools and strategies that the cultural sector might use to inspire action in others.
Explore below how our partners will be applying learnings from these workshops through public offerings with a focus on climate justice, sustainability, ecology, and Indigenous practices.
Around Town
Earth Month activities from our partners
Whitney Museum of American Art
Open Studio
Saturday, April 20
11 am
Families with kids of all ages are invited to make works of art using natural pigments found in soil and plants inspired by Whitney Biennial artist Dala Nasser.
Various branches of the Brooklyn Public Library will present programming during Earth Month, offering opportunities for folks of all ages to connect across themes of environmentalism, crafting, storytelling, and community.
Join a practicing artist for an outdoor workshop of art making, material experimentation, and play, offered in partnership with Common Ground Farm in the Hudson Valley. Designed for all ages, Saturday Studio is a family-friendly program that is most suitable for children ages five and up.
Join Our Climate and GrowNYC for a two-part series where we will come together to explore the boundless possibilities of a sustainable and equitable future for New York City through transformative policies, collective action, and joy.
Using techniques learned by the Beauty Turner Academy, a program hosted and facilitated by the National Public Housing Museum, GrowNYC’s Gardens at NYCHA program will engage various NYCHA residents in sharing their ethos for community work through Oral History as Art, highlighting environmental programming currently happening in their communities, and commemorating their stories for those seeking active and tangible change in NYCHA communities and beyond. The project will eventually result in a public film screening. GrowNYC is honored to uplift their collaborative partnership with photographer and writer J Owens, who uses words and images to explore the human experience and paint extraordinary pictures of ordinary places.
You can find out more about Earth Day here. If you scroll down there’s a worldwide map with Earth Day 2024 events marked on it. Yes, mostly featuring events in the US and Europe but other parts of the world are also represented.
