Resilient Community Planning

“Mathematistan” by Martin Kuppe

Resilient communities are capable of bouncing back from adverse situations. They can do this by actively influencing and preparing for economic, social and environmental change. When times are bad they can call upon the myriad of resources that make them a healthy community. A high level of social capital means that they have access to good information and communication networks in times of difficulty, and can call upon a wide range of resources.

Many of today’s illnesses are brought on by bad diet making the body’s immune system very vulnerable. One of our objectives in developing this resilient community is to stop people from getting sick in the first place, by growing and eating healthy Organic food. To that extent we have an expert designer and builder of Aquaponics Organic Food Growing System working with us on the property in Southern Brazil. The first step in our resilient community is having a surplus food supply.

Co-founder of the Wild Orchid Project owns a 10 acre organic farm in Aguas Mornas, Santa Catarina, Brazil from the highest point of land there is a clear view of Florianopolis and the Atlantic Ocean.

The main advantage of the private farm for collecting, propagating and growing orchid, is that we are not reliant on any other group for the success of the project. We currently have wild orchid. The second advantage to private land is that we can provide “Remote Wild Orchid Ownership” complete with web-cam, GPS co-ordinates to Google Earth and custom webpages to showcase the wild orchid for the proud owner/sponsor.

We hope to prove that a small property can sustain big ideas.

Richard Green

This detailed map of the landscape of mathematics was designed by Martin Kuppe as part of his recent YouTube video Mathematics: Measuring times laziness squared. As well as being humorous, the picture also illustrates the relationships between the major areas of mathematics, such as algebra, geometry, topology, and analysis. The picture is very detailed and is worth viewing at high resolution.

The video, which you can see athttp://goo.gl/3Rg8jd, is well worth twenty minutes of your time. It gives an overview of mathematics in a way that should be comprehensible to an intelligent general audience. The sense of humour in the videos reminded me of the writing of Douglas Adams. Something I found especially remarkable is that the video manages to explain the gist of what algebraic topology is in a few minutes, without getting technical. (Algebraic topology aims to understand topological structures by associating algebraic objects to them.)

The map contains various visual and verbal jokes about mathematics; some of these are explained in the video, but others are not. I liked the names of the plains: have a look for the Complex Plain, the Projective Plain and the xy-Plain. The buildings in Statistigrad look like normal distributions and histograms. The fields in the picture are actual fields, but this is a reference to the algebraic notion of a field, which roughly speaking is a structure in which one can do addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. (This is not directly related to the use of the term field in physics.)

As an algebraist, I particularly enjoyed the Califate of Al-Gebra, with the Al separated as if it were an Arabic article. This is appropriate because the English word algebra comes from the Arabic term al-jebr, meaning “reunion of broken parts”. In case you’re wondering, califate is an acceptable variant spelling of caliphate.

I was very surprised that Martin Kuppe/Zogg doesn’t have a much bigger following on social media, given the high quality of his output. You can follow him as ZoggFromBetelgeuse on YouTube, or as ZoggTheAlien on Twitter. One of his recent tweets contains links to various versions of Mathematistan, including this Eric Lefkofsky‘ picture.