Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. I wake up every day just feeling incredibly lucky for what I have - and to have a special day devoted to celebrating that idea... how very cool. So here are two new and unique ambigram designs to celebrate this wonderful day. The...
Posts related to: Art
Beirut, Nairobi, Paris
After I had posted my "Paris, City of Love" design on FB, my friend Pilar Quezzaire posted on my wall the following question: What about Beirut and Nairobi, Punya? Can you make one for them as well? In another posting she linked to the...
Paris City of Love
Paris has been on my mind for the last 24 hours (as it has been for many others around the world). I have been lucky to have had the opportunity to spend some time in the city - and Paris is one of my favorite places in the world. Paris, anyway you look at it (a new...
Friday the 13th
A design for Friday the 13th (shamelessly building on an original idea from Nikita Prokhorov) Enjoy.
Happy Diwali
Happy Diwali! Reflect on it 🙂
Design at Apple (a his-story)
Fast Company has compiled an oral-history of design at Apple. It did so through interviews with many of the key players in Apple's history. It is a his-story because, though there are some women who show up... the main narrative is about guys, Steve Jobs, Jonathan...
WHY: The most important question of all
Why do anything at all? This blog post is a collection of videos and images that I have collected over time that speak to the pointlessness of trying to find an answer to this question and how one question, even if answered, leads to many more. This is the kind of...
Ambigrams & Math: In one embeddable ebook
Over the past two years Gaurav Bhatnagar and I have written five columns for the Math education journal At Right Angles on the topics of mathematics and visual wordplay, specifically Ambigrams. In this five articles we have explored everything from symmetry to...
MSU Fight Song: MAET style
The summer of 2015, there were 133 students and instructors in the hybrid and overseas components of the MAET program. These people were spread out across three locations: East Lansing, MI (with 2 cohorts, Yr1 and 2 of MAET); Chicago, IL (with 2 cohorts of the...
Synthesis: A creative cognitive tool (2 articles)
Over the past couple of years my research team (the Deep-Play Research group) and I have been writing an on-going series of articles about rethinking technology and creativity for the 21st century. Published in the journal TechTrends, these articles have been great...
Creativity, Technology & Teacher Education
Danah Henriksen and I recently edited a special issue of the Journal of Technology and Teacher Education (Volume 23, Number 3, July 2015) devoted to Creativity, Technology and Teacher Education. This special issue is organized thematically around eight articles...
Creative teachers study cited by neaToday
Danah Henriksen and I recently published a paper in TCRecord titled:We teach who we are: Creativity in the lives and practices of accomplished teachers. More details of the paper and link to download it can be found on this page: Creativity & Teaching, new article...
Interview in Educational Technology Journal
I was recently interviewed by the journal Educational Technology: The magazine for managers of change in education as a part of their series Q & A with Ed Tech Leaders. The interviews are conducted by contributing editors, Susan M. Fulgham and Michael F....
Mathematical paradoxes & ambigrams: New article
I have always loved paradoxes so it is with great pleasure that the fourth article in our series on Art and Math (co-authored with my friend Gaurav Bhatnagar and published by At Right Angles) focuses on paradoxes and visual wordplay. It was great fun coming up with a...
Poetry, Daisies And Cobras: A Class With Manjul Bhargava
An amazing presentation by Manjul Bhargava (Fields medal winner in Mathematics) to school children in India. See how he effortlessly combines poetry, nature, music and mathematics. Watch an excerpt on YouTube below or the complete video here....
Deep-Play on Michigan Radio Stateside with Cynthia Canty
I am a huge fan of Stateside with Cynthia Canty, a radio show on Michigan Radio. So imagine my excitement when I was interviewed by her about my ongoing exhibition (Deep-Play: Creativity in Math & Art through Visual Wordplay) at the MSU Museum. The interview was...
Deep-Play: Creativity in Math & Art through Visual Wordplay
I have been creating ambigrams for years now... and I feel extremely lucky that what started as a personal interest and passion has led to some wonderful experiences and learning. These include a series of articles on the mathematics behind these visual designs and...
My ambigram design in Brain Games TV show
I am a huge fan of the show Brain Games on the National Geographic channel. Brain Games focuses on the workings of the brain and the reasons we do what we do. The show is quite creative about how they explain ideas, using a range of techniques games, visual illusions...
Embodied Thinking: New article
Photo: Punya Mishra; Santiago, Chile, 2014 Rethinking Technology & Creativity in the 21st Century is a series of articles we have been writing for Tech Trends. The latest article in the series has just ben published. This article focuses on Embodied Thinking as a...
Inside-Out: Happy 2015
Every winter break (for the past six years) our family creates a video to welcome the new year. This is no ordinary video. It requires days of discussion, planning, construction, shooting, and editing. Our videos never feature us (expect maybe a still-shot of the...
International Coffee Day (new ambigram)
Yesterday was International Coffee Day. In celebration (one day late but hey... ) here is a new ambigram for coffee. Enjoy.
The blame (& praise) game continues
I have shared earlier a design for a reflection ambigram for the two words "praise" and "blame" - where one word becomes another when reflected in a mirror. In fact the design has been printed in 3D. As it turns out this was a design that I had made many years ago -...
Robert Frost writes a paper
First it was Lewis Carroll and Jabberwocky and now it is Robert Frost and his poem Stopping by the woods on a snowy evening that receives the EPET treatment. Here is poem #2 in our series of famous poems rewritten from a graduate school perspective. Thanks to Diana...
Ambigrams animated: 3 new designs
I love creating ambigrams, words written in such a manner that they can be read from multiple perspective - rotated, reflected and so on. These designs are much easier to "grasp" when printed on paper since you can actually turn the paper around, hold it against a...
Jabberwocky goes to graduate school
The 5th floor of Erickson Hall is a fun place to be. Typically a bunch of graduate students hang out there, working on their readings, talking shop and in general having a good time. For some reason, last week, I promised Josh Rosenberg that I would write a poem for...
International Literacy Day, new ambigram
In celebration of International Literacy Day, here is a new ambigram design - it reads, "Literacy" one way and "Reading" the other! Enjoy. See below for an attempt to use CSS to use to make the rotation automatic when you move your cursor over the image. Check it out....
Happy Teacher’s Day (new ambigrams)
September 5 is Teacher's Day in India. It is celebrated on the birthdate of Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Indian philosopher and statesman who was also the first Vice-President and the second President of India. He famously said, "teachers should be the best minds in the...
Soham starts college, new ambigram,
We dropped off my eldest at the University of Michigan today. He begins the next stage of his life. We couldn't be more excited. Here is a new ambigram design to mark this occasion. Soham whichever way you look at it, with UMich colors! Mouseover the image to rotate...
Art is a lie… that tells the truth
Picasso famously said, "Art is a lie that tells the truth." This design below is my attempt to represent this quote - at least the first part of the quote. Of course, as most things go, it is not clear whether Picasso ever actually said these specific words. But...
Why math ed sucks (not just in India)
My friend Hartosh Bal (author of A Certain Ambiguity, a mathematical novel) has a piece in Caravan Magazine titled "Why Fields medalists are unlikely to emerge from the Indian educational system." He mentions the fact that of the three winners of the Field's medal...