About

I’ve been a fan of the De Stijl movement from the moment I was introduced, Mondrian in particular. I’m not sure if it is the Mathematical simplicity or the fact that something so free of clutter can be undeniably art. While I love the images, the straightforward no holds barred reductionist approach to art is even more fascinating to me. I don’t think I ever would have thought to reduce painting to a collection of basic primitives like that, but now that I know the plan I don’t think I can do anything but join in. Mondrian and his contemporaries reduced their work to a limited set of geometric primitives. My goal is to find a new set of primitives from modern mathematics like non-linear differential equations, chaos theory and fractal geometry, as well as digging into systems from physics like relativity and quantum mechanics.

That search has turned into this site: writing and building around the primitives that keep showing up when you look closely at nature and computation. Fractal geometry and iterated function systems are a recurring thread — escape-time renders, IFS attractors, and an interactive fractal designer here let you push the same reductionist idea Mondrian worked by hand into a space where the primitives are equations instead of lines and rectangles. Orbital mechanics is another: the restricted three-body problem, Lagrange points, and the orbit solver and 3D Lagrange-point visualizations on this site come out of the same question Mondrian was asking, just aimed at gravity instead of canvas — what is the smallest set of rules that produces the shape you see. Computational physics rounds it out, particularly quantum-mechanical visualization — turning wavefunctions and probability densities into images you can actually look at rather than just equations you solve. Generative art ties the three together: using code as the reductionist tool, letting simple rules run long enough to produce something that earns the word art.