This website is a means of expressing myself.
Who I am
Hard to say. To be honest, I suspect there is something odd with the verb to be. I ended up thinking that I am what I do — this way of thinking keeps me motivated to do things that make me feel well. Read about my backround in /bio.
A pressing nightmare in front of me
I spend delightful hours reading about philosophy and physics. I am fascinated by how scientific knowledge evolves. This interest pushes me along a path in the landscape of the history of physics and epistemology. Why all of this? I think because I have the same nightmare that Ludwig Boltzmann had.
I always feel a pressing nightmare that it is a puzzle that I am alive at all. Likewise the existence of the world is a puzzle, and that the world is exactly as it is. A science which could resolve these puzzles would become a genuine queen and its name would be philosophy.
—Ludwig Eduard Boltzmann
This quote comes from the Boltzmann's Philosophy Notes for Three Lectures (Fall 1903), published in Vol. 119, No. 1/2, Ludwig Boltzmann "Troubled Genius as Philosopher" (1999).
I encourage you to see how Boltzmann continues the lecture, his thoughts go toward the clarification of the question meaning.
Gaussian Curvature
An excursion through discrete differential geometry.
Recently I worked on the implementation of two-dimensional surfaces embedded in a 3D space. With the occasion, I wanted to explore the concept of intrinsic curvature, as studied by Gauss first and Riemann later. To calculate the Gaussian curvature in the vertex shader I used the definition given by Meyer et al. in Discrete Differential-Geometry Operators for Triangulated 2-Manifolds. Have a look at the code implementation in Observable.
Umbilic Torus, implemented with regl and glsl code in Observable. Red and blue colours describe negative and positive curvature values respectively. Intermediate colours, such as violet, describe curvature near zero.
Generative Art
Generative art forces me to create something deliberately useless — which is quite ambitious for me. I live art as an act of research… maybe of elegance, or surprise, or happiness. I particularly like meaningless art: it does not convey any message, it is just a way to look inside myself. Have a look at the generative artworks at page /projects.
Be Open
I evaluate at most the possibility to do something useful for others, and I take some actions in that direction. I create open-source software and I have a blog where I write about math, graphics and programming. Please enjoy.
Data Visualisation
Currently, I am into data visualisation at Nextbit. I operate in the R&D activities within private and public institutions, giving support to the visualization of patterns emerging from complex phenomena and to the creation of expressive graphic representations of big datasets.Find a selection of dataviz projects I worked on in /data-visualisation.
Get in touch
Please contact me at riccardo@riccardoscalco.it.