Welcome to our annual webcard. How it can be that each year we find ourselves busier than the year before? "Where does the time go?" Got off to a late start on this card - had a great, cool, exciting, amazing, b-YOO-tee-full design in mind (yeah, right) - then, Earth quaked.

The figure above is created from precisely 100,000 points, to which a random letter has been assigned from the list

      "P", "E", "A", "C", "E", "O", "N", "E", "A", "R", "T", "H"

The points/letters represent the one hundred thousand souls lost in the tsunami disaster; the six colors, their home continents. Many of our students are from Asia, particularly India, and surely have been tragically touched by the disaster. One of the first news accounts I heard, from that Swedish 7-year-old boy who got pulled under water, and in the process lost his siblings and parents, and then was found wandering around without a family ...Ben is 8...well, in honor of that Swedish family, I use (a variant of) the (Swedish) Koch snowflake as the basic image. The Koch snowflake is a fractal, with non-integral dimension; it is the attractor for a certain dynamical system readily implemented in Mathematica, having infinite boundary length. So the points, moving about somewhat at random, nevertheless somewhat magically coalesce to the snowflake.

                Also conveying thoughts of infinity this season:

                To see a world in a grain of sand
                And a heaven in a wild flower,
                Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
                And eternity in an hour.

                William Blake, from Auguries of innocence

Finally, from T.S. Eliot:

                We shall not cease from exploration
               And the end of all our exploring
               Will be to arrive where we started
               And know the place for the first time.
               Through the unknown, unremembered gate
               When the last of earth left to discover
               Is that which was the beginning;
               At the source of the longest river
               The voice of the hidden waterfall
               And the children in the apple-tree
               Not known, because not looked for
               But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
               Between two waves of the sea.

Interesting NYTimes article for the curious. And another.

The graphics are copyleft Kreminski, 2004. Press reload, and the graphics (above and below) should load much more quickly.