A Klein bottle, an object with no volume, being weighed for shipping.
I recently received a Klein bottle as a gift from my life-long friend Rich, who shares the same quirky interests in math and science that I do. We find the same fascination and amusement in mathematical puzzles and their visual incarnations by artists like M C Escher, Buckminster Fuller, and Scott Kim, along with mathematicians John Conway, Roger Penrose, and Benoit Mandelbrot. So it was with tremendous pleasure that I received this gift. I soon discovered that it held not only the novelty of being a mathematical object, but it had been created by a scientist/artist that had inspired me in an earlier time in my life.
A hiking group finds its way across Grinnell Glacier in 1970.
Most people now acknowledge that the climate has changed, even if they don’t agree on the reasons for it. Some of us are old enough to have seen the change firsthand.
As a teenager in 1970, I went on a hike with my family in Glacier National Park, a six-mile and 2000 foot climb to Grinnell Glacier. It was a thrilling experience to be hiking in the mountains, and then to actually walk out onto a real glacier! Both mountains and glaciers were things I had read about, but never personally experienced.
It was a ranger-led hike, and I learned a lot from the ranger’s descriptions of the geology, the plant and animal life, and the nature of glaciers, for which this park was named. I remember him telling us that the glaciers were shrinking. Nobody knew why, but it was possible that in a century they would all be gone. The park would still be called “Glacier”, but for the characteristic and beautiful glacier-cut valleys, not for the presence of glaciers themselves.
I have since had the opportunity to visit a few other glaciers including Sperry Glacier, also in Glacier Park, and the Athabasca Glacier, part of the Columbia Ice Fields of Banff National Park in Alberta Canada. Of course, whenever I have made these excursions, I have taken pictures, which have remained sequestered away in old photo albums or shoeboxes.
We discover the Binning mural in the upper floor of a drug store.
Poldi was not done with her “hidden treasures of Vancouver” list. The next one would take some sleuthing to locate. It was another architectural feature, this time a large mural crafted from Italian glass tiles that had been commissioned in the 1950s for the Imperial Bank of Canada to adorn the vast banking teller hall of their new building. The bank has long since moved out of the building and the magnificent space currently is being used by a drug store. Poldi knew the name of the drug store (“Shoppers Drug Mart”) but not its location, and this was a chain of stores that had many outlets.
Our inquiries at the hotel concierge desk were met with quizzical looks. No one seemed to know about the Binnings mosaic mural. B. C. Binning was a highly regarded artist in his day, but is not as well known now. But they could help locate the right store by making calls to each, and asking if their store had a mural in it. This didn’t really work. Everyone who answered seemed unaware of any mural.
So we decided to embark on our version of the traveling salesman problem. We would visit the nearby Shoppers Drug Mart stores (there were three or four within walking distance) and look for ourselves.
An art deco overhead lighting fixture featuring shipping and ocean themes.
I am not the only one who enjoys encountering unique examples of architecture. I was accompanied in my quest to find the Harvard Biology Building with its intriguing doors, sculpted façades, and anatomically exact statues of rhinoceroses, by my (newly married) wife Poldi. That was the culmination of a scavenger hunt to locate a novel architectural feature that had been captured in an old photograph my grandfather had taken, soon after the building had been inaugurated. We really enjoyed the experience.
Recently, Poldi, while planning a trip that would take us through Vancouver British Columbia, learned of another unique building, built at about the same time. Our destination was Banff, but we had a day before our train’s departure, to explore this famous port city of western Canada. She encountered references to the “Marine Building”, an art deco monument completed in 1930. At the time, it was the tallest building in the city (22 stories), and it was intended to be a grand statement of the value of Vancouver, especially its importance as a major seaport. They thought of it as their version of the mighty Chrysler building in New York City, completed earlier that same year.
Fred and Fereshteh at the welcome and marriage reception (winter 1997-98)
After a long and productive career, my friend and colleague Fred Nourbakhsh is retiring.
I’ve known Fred a long time. I hired him at Management Graphics in 1991 at a time when this small company was growing because it had invented an unexpectedly popular device that was having a major impact in the computer graphics field, including how Hollywood made movies.
I was impressed when I interviewed him because it was clear that he had done his homework. He somehow knew a lot about the company—its size, its products, revenues, history. MGI was a privately held company, so how had Fred learned all this when corporate reports were only sent to shareholders? This was a time long before you could go to the “About” page on a company website; there was no website—there was no web. However he did it, this depth of research is a strong skill in Fred, and it has served him well.
