Solid Void?

On the recommendation of a colleague, Blythe and I attended an art exhibit this saturday. It was at the Madlener House, an Gold Coast mansion, which hosts installations of the Graham Foundation. Here is a link
Cecil BalmondWe went because the exhibit was overtly mathy, and thus more interesting to us than your average art show. Balmond is an engineer and an architect whose art is heavily influenced by math, especially fractals. We walked around the Madlener house, eager to understand the mathematics he was using. It was a very pretty exhibit, with nice variety of shape and scale. Balmond likes iterative maps, and tries to use fractals in his designs. I say tries because in the exhibit, things are labeled fractals which plainly are not. I wonder if this is a conscious choice. My beef here is not that I think it is wrong for an artist to take license with mathematical ideas. I just wish the language of the exhibit went "inspired by fractals" instead of " is a fractal". Maybe I am being overly pedantic.

I have the same beef in most math-related literature. I know it is hip to faun over DFW these days, but I found he was often sloppy in Everything and more: A compact history of infinity , inspite of his sophisticated puns. Much worse than DFW, I am now reading Fooled by Randomness, by the arrogant Nassim Taleb. Taleb is eager to point out common logical errors made in economics, based on personal prejudice. On the very next page he reveals his own prejudices with his sweeping generalizations about academics and traders.

As a young educator, I struggle with what level of correctness I should require from my students, i.e. is ok to mostly understand something? Our trip this weekend makes me thing that the answer should be - almost, when preceeding understanding, is just another word for not.