Tag: Sylvia Karasu
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Pursuing “conclusions infinite”: The divine inspiration of Georg Cantor
Sylvia Karasu New York, New York, United States Georg Cantor, German mathematician, 1845–1918. Cantor as an older man, date unknown. Cantor was not quite age 73 when he died of heart failure. Photo Credit: Colport/Alamy Stock Photo. Used with permission. There is a “fine line between brilliance and madness”: the distinction, for example, between a…
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The madness of hunger
Sylvia Karasu New York City, New York, USA Erysichthon felling a tree in grove of Ceres, 16 century. Photo by CM Dixon/Print Collector/ Getty Images. Used with permission1 Erysichthon Selling his Daughter, oil painting by Jan Steen, between 1650 and 1660, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.2 Tantalus by 16th century Swiss artist Joseph Heintz the Elder, 1535. Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain3…
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“I shouldn’t know you again if we did meet”: prosopagnosia
Sylvia Karasu New York City, New York, United States Figure 1. Chuck Close, Self-Portrait (1997) (Museum of Modern Art, New York City) Watching Black Narcissus, the eerily unsettling film1 about an order of nuns cloistered in an isolated, windswept convent perched within the Himalayas, I am struggling to differentiate one nun from another. I see…
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About face: from revulsion to compassion
Sylvia R. Karasu New York City, New York, United States L’antigrazioso (“Anti-graceful”) by Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916), demonstrating an artist’s abstract rendition of asymmetrical, deformed features.4 Skin Graft (Transplantation) (1924) by Otto Dix1 Winter, 1563 by Giuseppe Arcimboldo (1527–1593) demonstrating an artist’s rendition of grossly deformed features5 “I was too ugly to go to school,”…