Lee And yet I know that life is simple: hard, but simple; that it is not complicated and hard, but very simple, and very, very hard. (from Paul Goodman's poem "A Man from Georgia", in one of its several versions)
Lee The difference between "a logic" and "a formal logic"; and the difference between "a proof" and "a formal proof". (Black tie and tails?)
Lee added a paper, a photo.
Lee The difference between "a logic" and "a formal logic"; and the difference between "a proof" and "a formal proof". (Black tie and tails?)
Faculty Member, Mathematics & Computer Science
About
Poems by Lee Rudolph have been published in the New Yorker, the Mathematical Intelligencer, the American Journal of Physics, and other magazines and anthologies, and have been collected in three books of poetry.
Rudolph is an author or co-author of expository articles (on knots, orthogonal transformations, and Turtle Geometry) in the American Scientist, the American Mathematical Monthly, and the American Journal of Physics.
Rudolph has published widely in mathematical research journals including Topology, Journal fuer die reine und angewandte Mathematik, Inventiones Mathematicae, Journal of Knot Theory and its Ramifications, and many others. He contributed the chapter "Knot Theory of Complex Curves" to the Handbook of Knot Theory (W. Menasco and M. Thistelthwaite, eds.; Elsevier, 2004).
In 2004, Rudolph was fully supported by a National Science Foundation Interdisciplinary Grant in the Mathematical Sciences as a research professor in the Department of Psychology at Clark University. Thereafter, starting in 2005, he has written and published a series of papers applying topology to psychology, and is presently editing (with his Clark colleague Jaan Valsiner) a book on mathematical models for research in cultural dynamics.
Also starting in 2005, Rudolph began a lively continuing collaboration with his Clark colleague Li Han, applying topology to various problems in robotics; their joint work (some undertaken with undergraduate co-authors) has been presented at such conferences as Robotics: Science and Systems (2006, 2008, and 2009), Workshop on Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics, and the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, and published in the International Journal of Robotics Research. This work, originally purely devoted to kinematics, is now beginning to merge very naturally with Rudolph's interest in topological psychology, particularly the psychology of emotion.
Rudolph's interest in emotion also extends to an interest in how, precisely, lyric poets achieve their emotional effects. The lucky chance of having his 8-line lyric "Little Prayer in November" read aloud by Garrison Keillor the day before (US) Thanksgiving 2006, on Keillor's nationally broadcast Poets' Almanac radio program, gave him the opportunity to collect a small but interesting sample of responses from blogs around the country; that data, supplemented by (equally sparse...) data from a pilot survey administered to three small groups by Rudolph and Emily Abbey, confirmed to Rudolph's satisfaction that cognitive processes are the least part of lyric poetry's affective effect. In short, different people can (and do) "get the story wrong" (in a wide variety of ways), while still (very reliably) "getting the feeling right". So: what is the mechanism?
