Mathematica Cookbook

Last week, O'Reilly published a new book in their Cookbook series called the Mathematica Cookbook, by Sal Mangano. It's by far the best book I've come across for learning about advanced programming techniques in Mathematica. Most books on Mathematica focus on aspects like symbolic algebra, symbolic and numerical routines like integration, and plotting and graphics. Those features tend to be what students in universities are exposed to, and what academic researchers tend to be familiar with. The use of Mathematica as a programming language, with which one can build up complex functionality from interconnected modules, is much less common compared to these other basic uses, and when this functionality is deployed, it is typically done using procedural programming techniques with heavy use of Do loops.

But to truly take full advantage of Mathematica's capabilities as a programming language, one has to learn about its functional and rule-based programming constructs, and this book does a fantastic job of clearly explaining these techniques. I highly recommend to anyone interested in becoming an advanced Mathematica coder to carefully read the first five chapters:  1. Numerica, 2. Functional Programming, 3. Data Structures, 4. Patterns and Rule-Based Programming, 5. String and Text Processing. 

Drawing is Thinking

I've come across some interesting links recently that explore the notion of drawing as a meditative process and a way to enhance one's observational skills. "Drawing is Thinking" is a book by the graphic designer Milton Glaser. The book has a short introduction, followed by an interview with Glaser, and then the rest of the book is a sequence of small images covering subject matter spanning his entire career as an artist and graphic designer. He discusses the central thesis behind the book in this short video, which shows him drawing an image of Shakespeare as he talks. 

Another cool link is a pdf booklet by the artist Michael Nobbs, who also maintains a blog. It's written in a similar vein as "An Illustrated Life", gives helpful tips for keeping a daily sketchbook, and gives some useful references for followup reading.

An Illustrated Life

Cover art of "An Illustrated Life" by Danny Gregory.

About a month ago I came across an inspiring book on brainpicker's twitter feed called "An Illustrated Life: Drawing inspiration from the private sketchbooks of artists, illustrators, and designers", by Danny Gregory. It's a real gem. I'm always drawn to things like this, which give a glimpse into the creative process. An analog of this for films is the commentary one can often find on a DVD, where a director or actors discuss the kind of meta ideas that went into the creation of the film, the development of the plot or a character, etc. This book covers about fifty artists, and includes samples from their sketchbooks, and a short essay by each describing how they use a sketchbook and what it means to them.

A few things that stand out so far (I'm about 3/4 of the way through it): I like that they often share humble thoughts about their view of themselves as artists, basically things I can relate to as I try to get started keeping a regular sketchbook: things like how difficult it is to start sketching on the first page of a fresh new sketchbook, for fear of messing it up, or being timid to sketch in public and have people watch. That part reminds me of the down-to-earch discussions that Frank Ghery has with Sydney Pollack in "Sketches of Frank Ghery", in which he confesses his lack of confidence.

One of the things that drew me to the book is that I have been wanting to get back to drawing, which is something I did in high school, but dropped when I went to college. What I like about the idea of drawing is that it seems like a good exercise in meditation, and that it would nurture one's observational skills. The artist Rick Beerhorst articulates this really well: "Drawing is a sort of drinking in of the sensory world. It is also grounding because of the quiet concentration. The stillness is like meditation or study."

It's also really useful from a more practical standpoint of surveying different artistic styles and methods. One recurring style I really like is the mixing of different media, in particular ink with water color or pastels.