The Unexpected Gradient: Music to Art via Math | Timothy Davis | TEDxTAMUSalon

Math is beautiful, so they say, but it can be hard for the untrained eye to appreciate. Code is beautiful, too (good code, at least!), but it's even harder for the non-expert to see. Davis presents his work on collecting and visualizing matrices, which then took an expected turn when he was asked to create artwork from music using the same techniques. His artwork reveals the stunning visual beauty found in matrices, music, and math: seemingly unrelated topics that collide to produce amazing beauty.
Timothy A. Davis is the recipient of the 2018 Sigma Xi Walston Chubb Award for Innovation. The award honors and promotes creativity in science and engineering.
Davis, PhD, is a professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at Texas A&M University, and a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and IEEE. He serves as an associate editor for the SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing, the ACM Transactions on Mathematical Software, and the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing.
In the artistic realm, Davis creates algorithmic artwork that translates music into visual art via Fourier transforms, graph algorithms, and force-directed graph visualization. He created the theme artwork for the 2013 London Electronic Arts Festival that appeared on billboards all over London. His most recent artistic workis a rendition of Donald Knuth’s Fantasia Apocalyptica, shown below. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at www.ted.com/tedx