Review of "Mathematics, Art, Technology and Cinema"

"Mathematics, Art, Technology and Cinema" (ed. by Michele Emmer, Mirella Manaresi) Springer, 2003. 242 pages.
ISBN-10: 354000601X
ISBN-13: 978-3540006015

This book is out-of-print but the prices at various used-book sites are rather high (I've seen used copies range in price from $ 85 to $ 600). Hopefully, this brief review will help a buyer decide if the book is what they want.

This is a collection of popular articles on topics in the intersection of mathematics, art, technology and cinema. It can be broken down into three parts.

(Mathematics and Art)
The 1st and third articles "God is Everywhere" (by the late American sculptor Charles O. Perry) and "John Robinson's Universe Series of Symbolic Sculptures" are both on mathematical sculptures. The only pieces covered are a selection of those of Perry and those of the late British sculptor John Robinson. Artists such as Helaman Ferguson or George W. Hart are not discussed at all. The second and fourth articles, "The Geometric World of Lucio Saffaro" and "Mathematics meets Art: Escher, Reutersvard and Saffaro at Bologna 2000", are on artists whose paintings have a mathematical theme. These too are focused on the mathematically-themed work of specific artists. This part comprises about 40 pages.


(Mathematics and Technology)
The next six articles are "Making the Optiverse: A Mathematician's Guide to AVN, a Real-Time Interactive Computer Animator", "The Geometry of Sight: From Euclid's Optics to the Renaissance Perspective", "From Descriptive Geometry to CAD", "The Muses of Mathematics", "Cryptography and Digital Signature", and "The Images of Art and the Art of Images." The articles on AVN and CAD discuss technologies which are now mostly out-of-date. The optics article is timeless and nicely written but discusses topics available in many other places. The articles on cryptography and "the muses" seem tangential for the subject matter of the book. Perhaps the article "The Images of Art and the Art of Images" is the most relavant today to the book's title. It discusses, among other things, (mathematically-based) technology used in research on ancient art and architecture. This entire part comprises about 60 pages.

(Mathematics and Cinema)
Almost all of the articles in the remaining 140 pages are on a specific movie with a mathematical theme, or an interview with a writer or director connected with such a movie. Films dicussed include "Good Will Hunting" (G. Van Sant), "Moebius" (G. Mosquera), "A Beautiful Mind" (Ron Howard), "Enigma" (Michael Apted), "The Bank" (Robert Connolly), "Cube" (V. Natali), "$\pi$" (D. Aronofsky), "Stand and Deliver" (R. Menendez), and others. However, there is one mathematical article, namely the short piece by David Pravica and Heather Ries, " 'Cube': The Math Paper." This is one of the most interesting articles, however a version of it is available on the website of one of the authors (http://personal.ecu.edu/pravicad/). If you like mathematics and films, you will like this part a lot.