May 11
"Math and Art in Modern Japan"
Steve Ridgely graduated from Carleton in 1996 with a special major in Japanese. He received his PhD from Yale in 2005. He is currently associate professor of modern Japanese literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Japanese creative artists have engaged with developments associated with the mathematical subfield of topology since at least the 1950s, across media ranging from music to literature and architecture to critical theory. Steve's current research project is on Japanese topological imagination, or the ways in which modern Japanese writers and artists such as Inagaki Taruho in literature, Yuasa Jōji in music, Asada Akira in theory, and Aoki Jun in architecture, utilize concepts from theoretical mathematics as an organizing principle in their creative work.