Somewhat sinister holiday cards

 I decided to add to my collection of darker yuletide folklore cards, to go with the Yule Cat and made:

linocut Krampus card by Ele Willoughby, 2021

 

The relief print on each card shows Krampus, the scary horned counterpart to Santa of Alpine folklore, complete with birch rods, and naughty child in a basket.  The origins of this character are debated but there are traditional parades called the Krampuslauf or Krampus run, where young men dressed as Krampus and attempt to scare the audience with their antics in many Alpine towns, and  Krampus is featured on holiday greeting cards called Krampuskarten (which often read "Gruss von Krampus" or "Greetings from Krampus"). Krampus is usually hairy, horned, has cloven feet, a lolling long tongue and fangs. The bundle of birch branches or ruten links back to pagan times.

linocut Mari Lwyd card by Ele Willoughby, 2021

This lino block printed card shows Mari Lwyd, a traditional Welsh hobby horse in a field. As part of a wassailing tradition from South Wales, a hobby horse made of a horse skull on a pole, decorated with buttons and ribbons, with sack cloth shrouding the poll and porter is carried through the local area at Christmas time. The men performing with Mari Lwyd at dusk and into the night would request entrance to houses through song, and if admitted must be given food and drink. 

The name Mari Lwyd (pronounced "lood") might come from Holy Mary or grey mare. The source of the tradition is debated but can be linked to various British hooded animal traditions.

linocut Joulupukki, or the Yule Goat, card by Ele Willoughby, 2021

The relief print on each card shows the Yule Goat, Joulupukki of Finland, carrying his parcels, staff with lantern, and bedecked with bells and ribbons in this nighttime scene. Each card is 4.25" by 5.75" (11 cm by 15 cm) and the envelopes are 5.12" x 7.12" (13.5cm x 18.5 cm).

Joulupukki is a Finnish Christmas figure whose name translates as Yule or Christmas Goat. Pukki comes from the Teutonic root "bock", which is a cognate of the English "buck", and means "billy-goat". There is an old tradition of men dressing as a goat at Yule in Finland. These nuuttipukki were evil spirits who would go from house to house demanding gifts and leftovers from the Yule feast. But over time the concept of nuutipukki merged with the idea of Santa Claus and became the benevolent Joulupukki who gave out gifts, rather than claim them, to well-behaved children. But in some areas, nuuttipukki still make visits on Nuutinpäivä, or St. Knut's Day, January 13. 

Yule goats (Julbocken) are common in Nordic countries, as small decorative straw or wicker ornaments decorated with red ribbon or giant ones like the Gävle goat in Sweden, a frequent target of arson. Some argue they are linked to Thor, who rode in a goat-pulled chariot. But others argue it is even more ancient and links to proto-Slavic beliefs where Koliada or Yule honors the god of the fertile sun and the harvest who was represented by a white goat. So Koliada festivals always had a person dressed as a goat, often demanding offerings in the form of presents.

linocut Perchta card by Ele Willoughby, 2021

This linocut card shows Perchta or Berchta (or Bertha in English), a figure from Alpine folklore, who visits during the 12 days of Christmas. Her name may come from "the bright one" or the German word for the feast of the Epiphany and her history is linked to white robbed goddesses like Holda who oversaw spinning and weaving or the goddess Frigg and she emerged from Germanic and Celtic traditions in the Early Middle Ages. She has two forms, both shown in my print: young and beautiful and as white as snow, or an old crone with a long knife and often a beak-like nose. She sometimes has one large, possibly goose foot. Jacob Grimm (of fairy tale fame) thought this indicated she was a shapeshifter or swan maiden. She is associated with birch trees and looked over the forest and wildlife. She was said to visit homes during the 12 days of Christmas and enforce cultural taboos, such as not spinning on holidays. If young people were good (and completed duties like spinning their flax or wool) she would leave a silver coin. But if not, she would slit their bellies open and stuff them with straw or refuse! Between the beautiful and ugly forms of Perchta I include a spindle. In her beautiful form she was known as Grandmother Winter, the bringer of snow

Some legends associate her with the Wild Hunt, and claim she rides through the night sky with her Perchten. 

In contemporary alpine festivals she is accompanied by an entourage, the Perchten, either beautiful and bright Schönperchten who bring luck or ugly Schiachperchten with fangs, tusks and horse tails (resembling Krampus) who are supposed to drive out ghosts and demons. She is viewed as the one who rewards generosity and punishes bad behaviour. 

Bioluminescent Firefly Squid and some borbs

 A couple of other recent prints which actually came from the weird and wonderful AI-generated #Botober2021 art prompts for "Firefly squid" (a surprisingly normal suggestion for an actual existing animal) and "impossibly cute pudgy birds".

Firefly Squid, linocut, 8" x 8" by Ele Willoughby, 2021

This is a linocut print of the firefly squid (Watasenia scintillans), also called sparkling enope squid or hotaru-ika in Japan. These tiny squid live at depth (200 to 400 m) and they are bioluminescent and emit blue light from photophores. The print shows the squid against a white background so you can see the whole animal and then its reflection is shown against dark blue so you can see how its bioluminescence would appear underwater with fluorescent blue spots. Each print is 8" x 8" (20.3 cm x 20.3 cm) on white Japanese kozo (or mulberry) paper. When they spawn on the shores of Japan visitors come to see the blue glow and they are a boon to fishermen who collect the dying squid. 

 

Tufted titmouse linocut holiday card by Ele Willoughby, 2021

 

The Icelandic Yule Cat Jólakötturinn

So every year for several years now, a lot of artists do all the Inktober daily art prompts, and there are now a whole slough of various prompts. There are even a fairly large number of #sciart prompts. I thought I would do the "AI weirdness" neural net generated prompts by Janelle Shane called #Botober2021. I think the only way to manage daily brand new art is to keep it low key, so I'm keeping it simple, posting to Twitter (@minouette) and my Instagram stores (@the.minouette) only. Mainly there's pen and ink sketches. I am going to try and fit in a couple of linocuts. There's an upcoming prompt which made recall a mythological creature I have previously considered. I rather like all the various holidays (many pagan and ancient) which coincide roughly with Christmas time and how some of them are more spooky than festive, as we, in the northern hemisphere, approach the solstice and the longest nights. The prompt is "way too much cat" and what came to mind was the Icelandic Yule Cat, Jólakötturinn.

Linocut print Yule Cat, by Ele Willoughby, 2021

The first written accounts of Jólakötturinn, enforcer of good behaviour leading up to Christmas, date to the 19th century but the stories of the monster cat likely date to the Dark Ages. In Iceland, good children who did their chores received new clothes, but the lazier ones risked meeting the giant Yule Cat, who towered over houses. If there were no new clothes amongst their gifts the Yule Cat would eat them! The Yule Cat was intended to also inspire generosity and encourage giving clothing to the less fortunate.

I have added a couple of sets of hand printed Yule Cat cards to my shop. I think I might get some digitally printed so I can make more cards.

You can find Bjork singing a carol about Jólakötturinn here, and if you haven't already done so, do yourself a favour, and check out Luke Pearson's Hilda graphic novels or the animated Netflix series - where you'll also find the Yule Cat and other trolls and Yule lads from Icelandic folklore.

Isabella Aiona Abbott, First Lady of Limu and the Seaweeds of the Central Pacific

Isabella Aiona Abbott, linocut 9.25" x 12.5", by Ele Willoughby, 2021

Professor Isabella Aiona Abbott (1919-2010), was born Isabella Kauakea Yau Yung Aiona on June 20, 1919 in Hāna on Maui, the second youngest of eight children. Her Hawaiian name means "white rain of Hāna," referring to the rain which comes in from the ocean as a white mist; her friends called her Izzie, the nickname her father gave her. Her mother Annie Kailihou was Native Hawaiian schoolteacher and Izzie first learned to love seaweed while gathering it on the shore with her mother, who would cook traditional Hawaiian dishes. Her mother taught her the Hawaiian names for seaweed; those she didn’t know she called ōpala (rubbish). Her father Loo Yuen had emigrated to Hawai’i from China, at age 18, to work on the Kīpahulu sugar plantation. He completed his contract, repaid his recruitment expenses, and opened a general store (in direct competition with the plantation store). His store was quite successful and the plantation store closed. He was friendly and learned to speak Hawaiian fluently before learning English. He had six sons with his first wife before she died; a local matchmaker introduced him to Annie. Annie moved to Hana to marry Loo and they had a son and a daughter. Loo spoke Chinese with business friends, English with the kids and Hawaiian speak privately with his wife. Izzie confessed the kids all learned Hawaiian to follow what her parents were saying amongst themselves. The family moved from to Honolulu so she could access the best schools. She was allowed to choose a Chinese or American school, private or public. She opted to attend the Kamehameha School for Girls in Hawaii, a private school for students of Hawaiian ancestry, which nurtured her love of botany. She recalled growing beans for the girls to eat and visiting flower gardens where she learned scientific names for plants, as well as the Hawaiian names.  She learned that the scientific names for plants had meaning, and conveyed information about the plants, just like the Hawaiian names for plants did. She graduated in 1937.

 

While an undergraduate in biology at the University of Hawai’i she met her husband Don Abbott day one. They were seated next to each other thanks to the alphabetic seating chart. She earned her B.Sc.in 1941 and then her M.Sc. from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in 1942 then with her husband who studied marine invertebrates, she continued her graduate studies in algal taxonomy at the University of California Berkley.  Their passion for different areas of marine biology was always complementary. She became the first Hawaiian woman to earn a doctorate in science when she graduated at age 31 in 1950. The couple moved to Pacific Grove, California in 1950, when zoologist Don joined the Stanford faculty at their field school Hopkins Marine Station. Biology jobs were scarce, especially for women and with their anti-nepotism rules, there was no job offer for Izzie, despite having the same credentials as her husband. So she focused on raising their daughter Annie, her involvement in the community and continuing to study and cook seaweed on her own adapting recipes to use the local bull kelp (Nereocystis) in things like cake and pickles. In 1960, she became a lecturer for Stanford’s Biology department, began teaching summer courses at Hopkins and publishing scientific papers. In 1969, she won the Darbaker Prize from the Botanical Society of America. By 1972, she had shown herself to be such a productive researcher and effective teacher that she was hired as both the first person of colour to receive a full professorship at Stanford and the first woman on the biological sciences faculty, bypassing the usual preliminary steps in the tenure-track ladder. She published more than 150 research papers and is credited with the discovery of over 200 species of algae. Many species have been named in her honour including an entire red algae genus known as Abbottella, or little Abbott. In 1976, she wrote ‘The Marine Algae of California,’ considered the definitive text on the subject. She and Don were well-loved teachers, and considered “the heart” of the marine station, often housing visiting scholars, hosting colleagues and students, and feeding them Izzie’s popular seaweed-based delights. Izzie was known for allowing her gradient students freedom to choose and explore their research areas so her group studied a wide range of subjects within marine botany.

 

During this time, Abbott was diagnosed with breast cancer. Determined to survive the disease, she took the only possible cure at the time, complete mastectomy. She became a 40-year cancer survivor.

 

The Abbotts retired in 1982 and moved to Hawai’i where Izzie, hired by the University of Hawai’i developed a course in ethnobotany which lead the development of an undergraduate major in the subject. Her classes were hands-on; students were encouraged to grow plants, make baskets or bark-cloth and of course, were regularly fed limu. She wrote a small book about the edible seaweed of Hawai’i known as “limu” for the lay public, which included their scientific names, Hawaiian names, oral history of kūpuna (Hawaiian for elders) and recipes. Her culinary skills were featured in a 1987 article in Gourmet Magazine. Asked which was the most important limu, she made a case for limu kala (S. echinocarpum, on the right in my portrait. “People eat it, turtles eat it. And kala means ‘to forgive.’ It’s used in purification ceremonies like ho’oponopono (the Hawaiian reconciliation process), or if you’ve been sitting with a dead person, or if you’re going on a dangerous journey.”

 

Offered a chance to name a research vessel by NOAA (the National Oceanographic and Atmosphic Administration) she named it The Hi’ialakai, which translates as “embracing or searching the pathways of the sea”. In 1992, she published “Lā‘au Hawai‘i”, the first comprehensive Hawaiian ethnobotany textbook covering everything from canoe-building, clothing, medicine, hula, weaponry to religion. She called it “a Western scientist’s viewpoint of the Hawaiian way of doing things,” and argued it was needed so that,  “Hawaiians are not put in second- or third-class status of Native people who don’t know anything. Hawaiian culture is unbelievably sophisticated.”

 

In 1993, she won the Charles Reed Bishop Medal. In 1997, Isabella Aiona Abbott was awarded the highest award in marine botany, the National Academy of Sciences Gilbert Morgan Smith medal. In 2005 the Honpa Hongwanji Buddhist Mission named her a Living Treasure. In 2008 the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources honoured her with a lifetime achievement award from for her studies of coral reefs.

 

Isabella Aiona Abbott linocut with labelled algae species and her related publications.

 

In my print, she is surrounded by algae of the Pacific, all of which appeared in Abbott's research publications, including several species she discovered, or based on images of specimen she personally collected or whose traditional use as food she documented. From left, clockwise around to the right, these algae are:

 

Laurencia majuscula, which is a type of peppery flavoured limu used by Hawaiians as a condiment, Spatoglossum macrodontum, Feldmannia cylindica or simplex, Hincksia granulosa, Cryptopleura rosacea, Pradae weldii, Sargossum echinocarpum, an edible limu species called limu kala.

 

She died at age 91, in 2010, in her home at O’ahu.

 

 

References:

Healoha Johnston, ‘Marine Botanist Isabella Aiona Abbott and More Women to Know this Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month,’ Because of Her Story, Smithsonian.com, May 3, 2021

 

I.A. Abbott, ‘Limu: An Ethnobotanical Study of Some Hawiian Seaweeds’, National Tropical Botanical Garden, Kaua‘i, Hawai‘i, 1984.

 

Danika Bense, ‘A Celebration of Women’s History and Dr. Isabella Aiona Abbott,’ Ho’oulu, UH Maui College, March 14, 2019

 

Louise Bergeron, Isabella Abbott, world-renown Standord algae expert, dies at 91, Stanford Report, December 7, 2010

 

Isabella Abbott, Wikipedia, accessed September, 2021

 

Jennifer Crites, Pioneering professor is first lady of limu, Mālamalama, The Magazine of the University of Hawai’i, October 21, 2010.

 

Long Story Short with Leslie Wilcox, with guest Isabella Abbott, PBS Hawaii, First air date June 17, 2008

 

Isabella Aiona Abbott 1919-2010, Hawai’I Women’s Suffrage Centennial Commemoration, April 28, 2020

Karli Chudeau, Science Heroes: Dr. Isabella Aiona Abbott, The Ethogram, June 29, 2021

Shannon Wianecki, Hawai’i’s First Lady of Limu, Hana Hou: The Magazine of Hawaiian Airlines, December 2019/January 2020

 

 

Optimizer of compilers, code and parallel computing trailblazer Fran Allen

 

Frances Allen, linocut 9.25" x 12.5", by Ele Willoughby, 2021

 

This is my linocut portrait of trailblazing American computer scientist Frances Elizabeth Allen (August 4, 1932 – August 4, 2020) who made foundational contributions to optimizing compilers (which translate code written in computer languages to the machine code in ones and zeroes actually used by computers), optimizing programs and parallel computing. This work has made computers and everything they do faster and more efficient. Compiler expert Graydon Hoare told the New York Times that her work is in “every app, every website, every video game or communication system, every government or bank computer, every onboard computer in a car or aircraft.” She was the first woman to become an IBM Fellow, where she worked from 1957 to 2002 and as an emeritus fellow afterwards. She was the first woman to win the prestigious A.M. Turing Award or contributions "of lasting and major technical importance to the computer field". I made this portrait for the #mathyear prompt: Turing Award.

She grew up the eldest of six kids on a farm near Lake Champlain; her mother was a teacher and her father a farmer. She went to elementary school in a one-room schoolhouse before attending a local high school and then the New York State College for Teachers where she graduated with a degree in mathematics in 1954. She worked as a teacher, back at her old high school, before returning to study at the University of Michigan for a MSc in mathematics in 1957.
 
IBM Research was recruiting and Allen needed to pay off student loans so she took the job. They wanted  their employees to learn and use FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslation, the first and newly introduced high-level programming language).  With her teaching experience and some basic computing courses under her belt, she was assigned to teach FORTRAN while simultaneously learning it herself. She said she had to teach these unhappy scientists (who were skeptical that a high-level language could work as well as assembly code) and became enamored with FORTRAN and its possibilities for productivity and performance. As Grace Hopper argued, "It's much easier for most people to write an English statement than it is to use symbols. So I decided data processors ought to be able to write their programs in English, and the computers would translate them into machine code." Her goal became to make those compilers, the translators, more efficient. Allen had intended to return to her first love, teaching high school math, but instead stayed with IBM for 45 years. 

In 1959 Allen managed the compiler-optimization teams for Harvest and Stretch, IBM's first transitorized 100 kW supercomputer. With its 2048 kB of memory the goal was to make it 100 times faster than contemporary machines! While it was not a hit with clients (as it apparently still took 18 hours to produce a 24-hour weather forecast), it impressed the National Security Agency. Allen was then assigned to the Harvest project for code breaking (of messages from the Soviet Union intercepted by American spies) and she spent a year leading an NSA team on classified projects. Harvest was such a success, thanks to Allen's optimization of the compiler, it was used for 14 years despite the pace of technological innovation. She also worked on the Alpha computer language which could run on Stretch and could create new alphabets beyond the system-defined alphabets. She  In '62 she moved from the IBM facility in Poughkeepsie to Yorkton Heights, where she worked on further supercomputer (ACS-1) and language projects (PL/I). She collaborated with John Cocke on a series of fundamental papers about compiler optimization to improve how higher level languages are translated to machine code. The diagrams in the portrait are from their crucial 1971 paper, 'A Catalogue of Optimizing Transformations'. Their work introduced the concept of using such graph-theoretical structures to encode a program content in order to efficiently and automatically understand how its parts function together and find ways to optimize code.

She did a sabbatical at NYU in 1971 and was thence an adjunct professor there, and a sabbatical at Stanford in 1977. From 1980 to 1995 she led IBM's parallel computing team, developing tools which became broadly used in commercial compilers in personal computers, and developing software for their Blue Gene project. She became the first woman IBM Fellow in 1989. In 1995 she was named president of the IBM Academy of Technology, an internal steering group for the company. In this role she focused on mentoring and women in tech. After her retirement in 2002 she remained as an Emeritus Fellow and continued to work on programs encouraging women and girls to work in computing.

She was a fellow of the IEEE, the AAAS, the American Philosophical Society, the Association for Computing Machinery and the Computer History Museum. She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. In 1997 she won the IEEE Computer Society Charles Babbage Award and was inducted in the Women in Technology Hall of Fame. She won the IEEE Computer Society Computer Pioneer Award in 2004. She won the Association for Women in Computing Augusta Ada Lovelace Award in 2002 and the ABIE Award for Technical Leadership from the Anita Borg Institute in 2004. In 2006, she won the Associating of Computing Machinery A.M. Turing Award,  for contributions "of lasting and major technical importance to the computer field" in recognition of her work with supercomputers.  She was the first woman to win the prestigious award in its 40 year history.

When she wasn't working she enjoyed other challenges and adventures, as an avid runner, mountain climber and participant in expeditions to the to the Artic and on the Chinese/Tibet border. 

In 2022, the IEEE will present the IEEE Frances E. Allen Medal for the first time for innovative work in computing leading to lasting impact on other fields of engineering, technology, or science.

References

Frances Allen, wikipedia, accessed September, 2021

Allen, Frances E.; Cocke, John (1971). Rustin, Randall (ed.). A Catalogue of Optimizing Transformations. Design and Optimization of Compilers. Thomas J. Watson IBM Research Center. Prentice Hall. 

Kim Lyons, Computer scientist Frances Allen, known for her work on compiling, dies at 88, The Verge,
Aug 9, 2020

Frances Allen, Allen on  joining IBM and teaching FORTRAN, Turing Awardee Clips on the A.M. Turing Award YouTube channel, posted 22 Jun 2020 

Frances Allen, Women in Technology Hall of Fame, accessed September, 2021

Ben James, Frances Allen Optimised Your Code Without You Even Knowing, Hackaday.com, August 25, 2020

Frances "Fran" Allen, A Pioneer in the World of Computing, IBM Research, accessed September, 2021.

IEEE Staff, Computer Scientist Who Made Foundational Contributions to Computing Has IEEE Medal Named in Her Honor, June 26, 2020.

Bees, and Spheres, Minerals and Becoming Crabs

There's so much science art being shared on Twitter this month for #SciArtSeptember. I have scheduled works for daily prompts for the whole month. I have also just finished working my way through the entire list of prompts for #mathyear - as well as  continuing ongoing bee-themed projects.

There was no summer camp for the last weeks of August and beginning of September before school, so I was pretty busy parenting, but here are some new works from the end of August and September so far.

The Leafcutter Bees, linocut and leaf prints by Ele Willoughby, 2021

 

I made a series of monoprints about leafcutter bees, and whimsically, in collaboration with leafcutter bees! These small, but multifarious native bees are important pollinators, who make nests for their babies using small telltale half-moon pieces they cut from leaves and petals. This work features two large linocuts of two leaf cutter bees: Megachile relativa and Megachile brevis. These linocuts are made on collaged Japanese washi papers and cellophane to capture the colours in their bodies and wings. Each print has its own array of leaf and petal prints from leaves and petals used by leaf cutter bees from my garden. The plants used include raspberries, roses (leaves and petals), lily of the valley, lilac, lemon balm, ash, thicket creeper, round-leaved Crane's bill and more. Each print is 17" tall by 12.5" wide (43.2 cm by 31.8 cm). 

Sphere Packing, linocut with collaged washi by Ele Willoughby, 2021

 

I have an ongoing thread of my #mathyear art on Twitter, and I was looking ahead at future prompts. I added a several portraits and other prints about math to fill out the remaining prompts, including this new item in my shop: a block print shows the two piles with the two possible close packing of equal spheres, each below a diagram of the plan view of the layout: Face-centered cubic (fcc) and hexagonal close packed (hcp). Each pile of spheres on water-colour paper with a deckle edge has its own unique assortment of collaged gorgeous Japanese washi papers. Each version of this print is unique.

The problem of how efficiently you can pack spheres into a volume has a long history in mathematics. It was Carl Friedrich Gauss who found the highest average density that can be achieved by lattice packing and the Kepler conjecture (as in Johannes Kepler) states that this is the highest density that can be achieved by any arrangement of spheres, either regular or irregular. When the famous mathematician David Hilbert set his 23 Problems of important unsolved problems in math in 1900, it included the question of what is the densest sphere packing. The question is generally considered solved since T.C. Hales proved the Kepler conjecture in 1998.

Though this may seem an abstract theoretical geometry problem there are real-life applications. It turns out, for instance, that many crystals with structures based on close-packed identical spheres of the fcc or hcp variety. 

 

Malachite, linocut, 8" x 8", by Ele Willoughby, 2021

There's also the annual social media battle of the minerals going on with #MINCUP2021. I always intended to make a series of mineral prints but never got passed making Quartz. I have managed to tie several of the minerals to existing prints and been tweeting those along with my votes, but I have managed to make one new pertinent print so far: Malachite. I have been using "cool physics and/or art applications" to determine my vote so malachite, often carved to make beautiful items, and a paint pigment since antiquity was obviously one to support. 

Jennifer Zee (ginkgozee on instagram and here on Etsy) has been working on an amazing series of mineral relief prints (including malachite and many others recently) and it reminded me I really wanted to have a whole colleciton. You should check out her work!

 

Porcelain crab, linocut by Ele Willoughby, 2021

For the #SciArtSeptember prompt evolving, I knew I had to talk about how things keep evolving into crabs! This is a hand-printed lino block print in black and red ink on white Japanese kozo (or mulberry) paper of a porcelain crab, Neopetrolisthes maculatus. Each print is 8” by 8” and printed by hand. Porcelain crabs are decapod crustaceans in the family Porcellanidae, which resemble true crabs but are in fact closer related to squat lobsters. They have flattened bodies as an adaptation for living in rock crevices. They first appeared in the Tithonian age of the Late Jurassic epoch, 145-152 million years ago. There are one of at least 5 groups of decapod crustaceans which have evolved to be more crab-shaped in a process known as carsinisation.

Purple Martins and Purple Martin House

 

 

 

Purple Martins, 9.25" x 12.5", linocut by Ele Willoughby 2021

Inspired by some commissions I have been making a series of prints, while working on longer term projects lately. Here's one about purple martins!

The male birds are a glossy blue-black and the female birds are brown with a blue patch on their heads. They are acrobatic birds, and the largest North American birds in the swallow family. They are are considered synanthropic; they have developped a relationship with humans after living near people for centuries. In Eastern North America nest almost exclusively in birdhouses, like the one shown. They are dependant on human-provided nesting sites. Their relationship with people predates colonial times; Indigenous peoples, including Cherokee, Chickasaw and Choctaw people, hung gourds to attrack the insectivorous nesting purple martins, who in turn controlled insect populations. In western North America, they still nest in holes made by woodpecks and other natural cavities. The roost together in huge numbers in late summer. These linocuts are printed by hand on Japanese kozo, or mulberry, washi paper. The male is in blue and black, the female in shades of brown with blue on the head and the house is in purple. Each sheet is 12.5" tall by 9.25" wide (31.7 cm by 23.5 cm).

Mathematician Karen Uhlenbeck, Bubbles and Bubbling

Karen Keskulla Uhlenbeck, linocut detail, 9.25" x 12.5", variable edition on Japanese kozo paper with chine collé with suminagashi marbling, by Ele Willoughby, 2021

My latest #sciart (or, maybe #mathart) portrait is of mathematician Karen Uhlenbeck. Though a lot of her work is pertinent to physics, this was still a challenge to work out how to tell the story of her mathematics. A founder of modern geometric analysis, she won the 2019 Abel Prize for "her pioneering achievements in geometric partial differential equations, gauge theory, and integrable systems, and for the fundamental impact of her work on analysis, geometry and mathematical physics." Partial differential equations are pretty central to doing physics, and a sort of mathematics I really enjoy, but apart from that, I know what all the words mean in that previous sentence, but things like gauge theory and analysis aren't part of the math I've studied or used in my own research. As we move forward in time, depicting contemporary (or near contemporary) mathematics is increasingly challenging because it's beyond my ken.

I looked up several of her important papers, seeking geometrical diagrams as a way to tell the story of her research pictorially. Though she describes herself as a visual, geometric (and messy!) thinker, I didn't find anything but a lot of algebra (which I would have had to work hard to follow, let alone use to speak to a wide audience, or painstakingly carve in reverse!) But I found an "in" for depicting minimal surfaces and her methods for removing singularities, through Fields Medalist Sir Simon Donaldson's review of her work, including a schematic of "bubbling" and also some of the great science/math communication and articles about her and her work, which were published when she won the Abel Prize.

Born in Clevland to an engineer father Arnold Keskulla and teacher and artist mother Carolyn Windeler Keskulla, her family moved to New Jersey when she was a child. She spent her childhood enjoying nature, playing football and secretly reading science texts, imagining a job where she could avoid people. She started a degree in physics but switched to math at the University of Michigan. In the wake of the Soviet Union's launch of Sputnik the US Congress passed the National Defense Education Act, to encourage more participation in STEM including encouraging women and minorities in those fields. The university added an honours math course in response, which showed her there was more to math than she ever knew and it changed her life. “The structure, elegance and beauty of mathematics struck me immediately, and I lost my heart to it,” she wrote. She switched majors. She chose the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University, for graduate school, avoiding applying to more prestigious schools where she feared the competitive male math culture wouldn't suit her. She married biophysicist Olke C. Uhlenbeck, the son of European intellectuals; his father is well-known physicist George Uhlenbeck. She was quite influenced by her new in-laws. Her parents valued ideas but put an emphasis on earning an income, but her in-laws valued intellectual things and encouraged her pursuit of mathematics. Her husband moved to Harvard and she opted to switch to graduate school at Brandeis University, where she earned her PhD in 1968 with advisor Richard Palais. Palais was exploring the space between analysis (a generalization of calculus) and topology (the study of shapes) and Uhlenbeck enjoyed this in-between world. With Smale, Palais had made advances in the study of harmonic maps, which came out of the calculus of variations and the search for shapes in equilibrium with physical measurements. Uhlenbeck's research built on this.

She found temporary jobs at MIT and Berkeley but was hampered by the classic "two-body problem" for academic spouses (where an couple cannot find two professorships in the same place) and anti-nepotism rules - though she later noted that the institutions which claimed they were precluded from hiring both her and her husband, even in different departments, did not officially have any such anti-nepotism rules on the books. Schools like MIT, Stanford and Princeton which courted her husband, simply declined to hire a woman in math. Her husband generously declined to work at institutions where she could not.

Eventually they both got faculty positions at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 1971. But she could not stand life in Urbana, where she was often dismissed as an "academic wife" rather than a professor in her own right. She lacked professional support, did not enjoy teaching, felt undervalued and struggled to find the right research topic for her. But, while there, she met post-doc Jonathan Sacks and they began working whether certain problems converge to harmonic maps; eventually they discovered a sort of "awkward point" or singularity called a bubble where systems cannot converge on a harmonic map. The mathematical concept of a minimal surface minimizes area (or surface tension or energy) the way a soap bubble does in the natural world. They showed there were a finite number of these singularities and that when you rescale a map near them you have "bubbling" as in the diagram in my print. This trick of rescaling was one of her and Sacks' most important contributions.

 She moved to the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1976, separating from her husband. In 1983, she moved to the University of Chicago, where there were other women math professors and peers who took her seriously. She received a Sloan Fellowship and finally knew she could support herself and her research. She learned the value of a professional support network and realized that isolating herself was hurting her and her career. Her work with Sacks was foundational to the development of the new mathematical field of geometrical analysis. This bubbling phenomenon was found in many different sorts of mathematical physics. She took her intuition and techniques honed working on minimal surfaces and began ground-breaking work in gauge theory and the nature of exotic n-spaces, a means of connecting observations at different places that comes up in the quantum mechanical world of fundamental forces, building on the work of mathematical physicists like Weyl, Yang and Mills. With C.H. Taubes, she analyzed Yang-Mills equations in four dimensions; she proved her removable singularities theorem, showing that bubbling cannot occur around isolated points, so if a finite-energy solution exists to the Yang-Mills equations near a point, the solution will extend smoothly to the point. Simon Donaldson's extension of this research won him the prestigious Fields Medal for mathematics in 1986. Uhlenberck won a MacArthur Prize Fellowship or "genius grant" (1983-1988) which made her feel, "obliged to become more ambitious.”

She married mathematician Robert F. Williams, then in 1988, moved to the University of Austin as the Sid W. Richardson Foundation Regents Chairholder and won the Noether Lecture award from the Association for Women in Mathematics. In 1990, she was only the second woman in math to give the plenary lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Kyoto, after none other than mathematical giant Emmy Noether. She founded the Park City Mathematics institute and with Chuu-Lian Terng she co-founded the IAS Women and Mathematics (WAM) program to recruit and retain more women in math, encouraging collaboration and mentorship at all stages of their careers, a complete turn-around from the isolation she sought at the beginning of her career and her avoidance of her fellow women in math because “It was self-evident that you wouldn't get ahead in mathematics if you hung around with women.” Together, they've created a network of nearly 1500 women mathematicians. She realized that one needs role models - not examples of perfection, but people who make errors but pick themselves back up. When asked if she had a role model, she cited beloved chef and TV presenter Julia Child! "She had these fantastic television programs, and she was a real person. She could pick the turkey up off the floor and serve it," Uhlenbeck said. She founded the Distinguished Women in Mathematics Lecture Series at the University of Texas at Austin. Uhlenbeck won the National Medal of Science in 2001 and the 2007 Steele Prize for a Seminal Contribution to Mathematical Research from the American Mathematical Society. Granted yearly by the King of Norway, rather like a math equivalent to the Nobel, the Abel Prize includes a $700,000 award, and recognizes a mathematician’s entire career. Uhlenbeck became the first (and so far only) woman to win the Abel Prize in 2019.  She donated half the funds to organizations encouraging underrepresented (that is, traditionally excluded) minorities in mathematics. She further donated to environmental organizations and the National Academy of Science. She is now an emeritus professor at Austin, as well as a visiting associate at the Institute for Advanced Study and senior research scholar at Princeton University.

Like so many of my subjects, I've found she also loves art and began drawing more than a decade ago, mostly landscapes. She notes, “I discovered the fascinating fact that the problem of scale occurs both in mathematics and in drawing.” In drawing you want to capture the full forest as well as the details of individual plants, just as you want to capture all scales in math. “The hardest part with both is fitting the two scales together. You need the right tools.” Uhlenbeck has provided the world of mathematics and physics with so many of just the right tools.

References

Donaldson, S.. “Karen Uhlenbeck and the Calculus of Variations.” Notices of the American Mathematical Society 66 (2019): 1. DOI:10.1090/noti1806

Sioban Roberts, "In Bubbles, Karen Uhlenbeck Sees a Mathematical Universe," The New York Times, April 8, 2019

Karen Uhlenbeck, Wikipedia, accessed July 2021.

Rachel Crowell, "Karen Uhlenbeck Becomes First Woman To Win Abel Prize For Mathematics," Forbes, March 20, 2019

Dale DeBakcsy, How Mathematical Lone Wolf Karen Uhlenbeck Found Her Pack, Women You Should Know, November 29, 2017.

Karen Uhlenbeck, Karen Uhlenbeck on Being the First Woman to Receive the Abel Prize, remarks made at reception at the Institute for Advanced Study on March 19, 2019.

Karen Uhlenbeck, Coming to grips with success: a profile of Karen Uhlenbeck, Celebratio Mathematica, 1996

Jessica Atlee, Crossing Fields: Karen Uhlenbeck’s pioneering work marries math with physics, Symmetry Magazine, August 15, 2019.

Erica Karreich, Karen Uhlenbeck, Uniter of Geometry and Analysis, Wins Abel Prize, Quanta Magazine, March 19, 2019

Marianne Freiberger, The Abel Prize 2019, Plus magazine, University of Cambridge, March 19, 2019.

Lyell's Amphibious Being

 

Lyell's Amphibious Being, linocut, 10" x 8" by Ele Willoughby

So here's my latest Imaginary Friend of Science: Lyell's Amphibious Being. Dressed like geologist Charles Lyell himself, with sample bag, geological hammer, pick axe and magnifying glass, in front of the geological cross-section from the end papers of Lyell's 'Principles of Geology' and a couple of fossils from terrestrial and marine life (fern and nautiloid respectively). It's a two block linocut on Japanese kozo (or mulberry) paper, 10" x 8" and available here. Read more about the Amphibious Beast in the Imaginary Friend of Geology.

Wiwaxia Hat

 

Wiwaxia, a scaly spiny invertebrate were common inhabitants of the Cambrian & early Ordovician seas. No one is quite sure if they were scaly worms or mollusks, but I was quite sure if you scaled up (no pun intended!) their 5 cm long bodies they would make quite a fabulous hat. One of the fun things about contemplating ancient fossil is that colour is rarely preserved so no one can disprove my (admittedly quite unlikely) idea that the scales has multifarious patterns. So this piece is really wearable multimedia textile art. It works sculpture or hat.

When I make art to tell stories about science I am often literal and direct to communicate clearly. If I make art for or about me, it’s much more metaphorical. Though depicting an extinct animal might easily be #SciArt, this is more about my feelings of experiencing lockdown. I can’t quite explain why I felt like “f— it, I’m making a wiwaxia hat” is how I felt, but it was. This was work I could actually do while wrangling my child for remote school, when very few other things were possible. Each scale and spine is block printed and hand sewn.

 

Carving, while working at the same table as a busy 7 year old was tricky. I felt like I said, "Don't shake the table" incessantly. Printing while supervising school would not work at all. But, I could cut and sew by hand,  hand-printed scales and spines I prepared the previous evening (after my son's bedtime).

Compare this work with my print on the same subject:

Wiwaxia linocut by Ele Willoughby, 11" x 14" on translucent washi with bark inclusions and collaged assorted washi scales and spines.

Thanks to my husband Roger Hallett for the photos!
 

 

Imaginary Friends of Geology

Charles Lyell, by Alexander Craig in 1840 when Lyell was 43 years old.

I’m always on the lookout for new “imaginary friends of science” and periodically I ask for suggestions. My series is made of the charismatic metaphors and thought experiments through the history of science. “Imaginary friend” is a bit tongue-in-cheek but my series includes Schrödinger’s cat, Maxwell’s Demon, Laplace’s Demon, Descartes’ Demon, Russell’s Teapot, Occam’s Razor, the Spherical Cow and Hilbert’s Grand Hotel. My series is skewed towards physics (with some math and philosophy) because that’s my background. I ask for suggestions and biologists just look quizzical but I suspect other fields do this too. It's not an obvious thing to research since this is not really a recognized category of metaphor/thought-experiment, and I coined the term "imaginary friend of science" but you sort of know one when you meet them. Tell me your favourites!

Recently I got a suggestion from geology for my ‘imaginary friends of science’ series (hat tip to Greg Priest). This imaginary friend is a bit obscure but fits perfectly. Early geologist Charles Lyell (1797-1875), in his famous ‘Principles of Geology’ wrote that to avoid some sources of prejudice in understanding geology would require an Amphibious Being, who could, say, compare processes happening today on land and those happening today below water with what we see in the geological record. Likewise the Amphibious Being would be better able to identify fossils, being familiar with life on land and in the sea. He wrote,

It should, therefore, be remembered, that the task imposed on those who study the earth's history requires no ordinary share of discretion; for we are precluded from collating the corresponding parts of the system of things as it exists now, and as it existed at former periods. If we were inhabitants of another element—if the great ocean were our domain, instead of the narrow limits of the land, our difficulties would be considerably lessened; while, on the other hand, there can be little doubt, although the reader may, perhaps, smile at the bare suggestion of such an idea, that an amphibious being, who should possess our faculties, would still more easily arrive at sound theoretical opinions in geology, since he might behold, on the one hand, the decomposition of rocks in the atmosphere, or the transportation of matter by running water; and, on the other, examine the deposition of sediment in the sea, and the imbedding of animal and vegetable remains in new strata. He might ascertain, by direct observation, the action of a mountain torrent, as well as of a marine current; might compare the products of volcanoes poured out upon the land with those ejected beneath the waters; and might mark, on the one hand, the growth of the forest, and, on the other, that of the coral reef. 

-Charles Lyell, 'Principles of Geology' 9th ed. 1853

James Hutton during fieldwork, by John Kay

He actually goes on to further propose other biases could be avoided only if one could live also in the subterranean world, and hence, a further imaginary friend, "some "dusky melancholy sprite," like Umbriel, who could "flit on sooty pinions to the central earth," but who was never permitted to "sully the fair face of light," and emerge into the regions of water and of air" but such a sprite would have biases due to his lack of access to life on land or in the sea! Here I'm just going to consider the Amphibious Being. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Geologist - Carl Spitzweg, circa 1860

While far less well-known than say, Maxwell's Demon or Schroedinger's Cat, the Amphibious Being absolutely performs the same purpose. He's a figment of Lyell's imagination who serves to elucidate and explore a problem in science. The Amphibious Being highlights the possibility that our conclusions about the origins of rocks or fossils  are biased since we only live on land, the same way Maxwell's Demon explores the mysterious nature of the Second Law of Thermodynamics or Schroedinger's Cat exposes the strangeness of the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics and what that would mean if we saw it in the every day world of large things like well, cats, rather than the subatomic scale. So I plan to add the Amphibious Being to my collection.

Rise of Mr. de Saussure to the summit of Mont Blanc, aquarellée engraving of Christian of Mechel (1737- 1817).

Professor Owen, by Frederick Watty in Cartoon Portraits and Biographical Sketches of Men of the Day (1873)

My question is, what would such an Amphibious Being look like? I made my Demons (Maxwell's, Laplace's and Descartes') ressemble those who introduced them with some additional features like horns. There are a lot of images of Lyell at various ages. He is always wearing a suit, with a magnifying glass or monocle on a chain around his neck.  There are sadly no images of him in the field. I tried to find some images of early geologists or Victorian geologists in particular. It's easy to find depictions of James Hutton (1726-1797) in the field, but not Lyell. Even searching for Victorian geologists in general proved hard. The vast majority of paintings or later photographs show middle class men in suits at home. There are some hilariously heroic posed images of geologists with hammers looking like Classical heroes. I was pleased so see images of Mary Anning, Alice Wilson and other trail-blazing women in geology come up in my search. The Rise of Mr. de Saussure to the summit of Mont Blanc, an aquarellée engraving of Christian of Mechel (1737- 1817), shows that geologists of Lyell's time did in fact where suits in the field, and some of the simple tools they employed: walking sticks, rakes, shovels and packs of supplies. There are also a number of photographs of somewhat scruffier Gold Rush geologists in California or the Yukon. Along with simple tools, geological hammers, magnifying glasses, and collecting bags are common. I wondered also about Victorian caricatures? I have seen cariactures of various well-known historical scientists (even if scientists seem to rarely be the sort of recognizable public figure to appear in cartoons today). So I looked up cariatures of Charles Lyell and was not disappointed.

'Awful Changes' - Caricature of Charles Lyell as Prof. Ichthyosaurus, by geologist Henry De la Beche (1796 -1855) on the pages of Francis Trevelyan Buckland (Son of William B.). "Curiosities of Natural History".

 

David Bressan points out in the History of Geology blog, how some of Charles Lyell's off-base ideas were skewered by contemporaries. He denied that extiction was possible which lead him to an idea of cyclic time. He wrote:

 
"Then might those genera of animals return, of which the memorials are preserved in the ancient rocks of our continents. The huge iguanodon might reappear in the woods, and the ichthyosaur in the sea, while the pterodactyl might flit again through the umbrageous groves of tree ferns." 

The very year Lyell first published 'Principles of Geology,' geologist Henry de la Beche ridiculing the thought that dinosaurs might return published a famous cariature of Lyell as a future post-climate change 'Professor Ichthyosaurus' lecturing his reptilian students about "some of the lower order of animals; the teeth are very insignificant, the power of the jaws trifling," namely, the no longer dominant mammals.

Ichthyosaurus caricature published in 1885 in the Punch magazine. The discovery of ichthyosaurus fossils lead to interest in reportings of sea monsters, including for Charles Lyell who wanted to support his idea that animals did not become extict, only rare. He wisely did not include this idea in his geology textbook. (via History of Geology)

The Professor Ichthyosaurus, though an actual, contemporary and amusing cariature of Lyell as a being, which in the cartoon at least, appears amphibious, isn't quite what I want. The itchyosaurus was a marine reptile, not an amphibian. The lecture setting does not suggest fieldwork, nor any greater insight into geology because of its amphibious nature. 

Henry de la Beche, incidentally, famously painted the first paleoart scene, Duria Antiquior, based largely on his friend Mary Anning's findings and he sold lithographic prints of his painting to raise funds to help support her. I thought of him as more modern and kind, in his loyalty and friendship with Mary Anning, a paleontologist who was largely excluded due to her sex, class and religion. But in researching this my opinion of him fell. While he understood slavery was an abomination, since his own income depended on an enheirtance of a sugar plantation in Jamaica worked by enslaved people, he (guiltily) opposed abolition in favour of in favour of gradual change. 'This is wrong but let's not be too hasty' is not an ethical stance.

Duria Antiquior – A more Ancient Dorset is a watercolour painted in 1830 by the geologist Henry De la Beche

And what about the all-important "amphibious" part of my Amphibious Being? My first thought was salmanders. I love the look of gill-stalks and perhaps they suggested Lyell's substantial sideburns. I find the axolotl looks quite anthropomorphic as it is (as reflected in Julio Cortazar's short story, Axolotl).  The axolotl is of course limited in range to Mexico, and though other salamanders go through a larval stage with gill-stalks, this didn't feel quite right or in any way an allusion to Lyell. My next thought was to look at Victorian cariatures of anthropomorphic frogs, which (for reasons I don't entirely understand) was very much a thing. Frog men cariatures and Christmas cards and other illustrations, sometimes to satirize society are pretty common, so I thought that was just the thing.

I am now sketching a Victorian frog-man geologist for my next Imaginary Friends of Science print!