Oyonale - 3D art and graphic experiments
The book of beginningsA touch of ZenAbout this image

The reading room
The reading room


This picture was rendered with POV 3.02 (Ryochi Suzuki's isosurface version). The walls are made up of flat boxes with a 3-D random noise added on top of them. The naked and bald women were built with Poser. The round windows were made according to a mathematical pattern function called Isadora's Grid, named after English mathematician Charles Babbage's second daughter Isadora, whose elder sister Ada is now famous for the development of what is considered as the first programming language ever. Isadora Babbage was fascinated by mathematics applied to art, and her work has been rediscovered quite recently (Cf. Isadora's Spaces, 1987, Wainman & Closter. Edited by L. Warren Gotschalk, with and introduction by Benoit Mandelbroot). She never married and spent most of her life travelling, collecting equations like other people collect stamps or butterflies. Isadora used mental arithmetic to do the calculations, and was so talented in this that Barnum and Bailey's had her under contract for the two years she stayed in the United States, in 1890-1891. However, the public, and most of her contemporaries, failed to see that her greatest ability resided not in the computation itself, but in the way she could visualise beforehand any kind of mathematical function that came to her prodigious mind. Of course, this was neither spectacular nor entertaining, and the style of pictures she produced was not exactly fashionable at a time where flowered patterns and stucco angels were all the rage. She never found a publisher for her 1500-page long Compendium of Mathematical Arts. Some roughly edited chapters eventually found their way in UK and US boy's papers (Fun and Fiction, The Boy's Herald) where they kept company to the then emergent science fiction literature. In 1892, she was invited by the members of the Royal Society of Mathematics to deliver a lecture about her father, whom hundredth birthday they were celebrating. She accepted, but demanded in exchange to have a short communication about her own work printed in the RSM's journal, something to which they finally condescended, since printing Babbage's work, even from an unknown and eccentric female Babbage, could still be considered as an honour. In spite of its very limited circulation, the paper, with its dozens of bizarrely drawn and tormented shapes she called her Grids, developed its own cult following, and, at the turn of the twentieth century, Isadora entertained in her small London flat a growing flow of admirers, poets, painters, musicians and suffragettes, who claimed her as one of her own. In 1904, at 72, she was invited by Marie Curie, the recent Nobel Prize, to talk at the Académie des Sciences in Paris. Isadora Babbage never arrived at the conference. She was hit by a streetcar while crossing the Boulevard Saint-Germain, and died on the spot. She is buried in the Père-Lachaise Cemetery. Her gravestone, a very simple one, has her name and one of her Grids on it. You can find it two rows East from Jim Morrison's. The picture shows some of the Grids described in the 1892 paper. From top to down and from left to right, you can see the Madman's Eye, the Wise Wave, the Mesmerizer, the