Note: The image above is an original design - showing "AI" embedded in the word "WEIRD" Generative AI is weird... as I had written in my previous blog post, identifying some key characteristics I had described in a recent Keynote presentation. In the process of...
A few weeks back, Sean Leahy – friend, tech aficionado, futurist, and the co-host of the Learning Futures Podcast – reached out to me via email with an intriguing proposal. He was playing with the concept of harnessing generative AI to craft Halloween stories. The aim...
In a previous post I explored some of the visual capabilities of ChatGPT. This is a continuation of those experiments, where ChatGPT helped me identify the date and time of a solar eclipse based on a photo I took decades ago, as a graduate student at the University of...
Lovers of mathematics relish challenges, enjoying the manipulation of numbers and geometrical figures, seeking and creating patterns. Their fascination sometimes extends into language and other seemingly unrelated domains. An intriguing example of visual wordplay,...
I had written earlier about a contest organized by Dark ‘n’ Light (an e-zine) around the theme of "IT TAKES TWO" and had shared some of my experiments, exploring this theme, using Generative AI. You can see my experiments at: It takes two: A scientific romp using AI...
ChatGPT does not cease to surprise. As I had described in my previous post (Plugin' into superpowers), I have been playing with some of the plugins that are now available to use with ChatGPT4, In this post I describe my experience in playing with a plugin titled Video...
FYI, this is a somewhat pointless blog post around a somewhat funny coincidence that popped into my life the other day. I was reading a recent article in the NYTimes with the provocative title: Microsoft Says New A.I. Shows Signs of Human Reasoning, clearly a topic of...
Many years ago I got interested in writing poetry about mathematics (all archived on my Math-Poetry page). Just to be clear, I am not a good poet (far from it) and I am even less of a mathematician—but it was a fun exercise to engage in. That said, a couple of my...
Since 2008 our family has been creating short videos to celebrate the end of one year and the beginning of another. Our videos are always typographical in nature with some kind of an AHA! moment or optical illusion built in. This year’s video is no different. Check it...
The fictions we create (& how they create us) This is a story about a multi-year quest and its resolution (thought not necessarily in the way I was expecting). It is also a story about stories: stories in books and stories that we make up. And how these stories,...
This is a story of serendipity. Of how an out-of-the-blue email request, about an article I had written over two decades ago, led me to rediscovering authors, books and ideas that I had first encountered back in my high-school days in India and have been deeply...
2020 has been a heck of a year... and maybe in hindsight (hindsight, of course, being 2020) it will all make sense. But, I think we can all agree that it is time to let it go. A lot has changed this past year but one tradition we wanted to keep alive was the short...
We have been creating short videos to welcome the new year since 2008. This year was no exception. These videos, created on a shoe-string budget, are usually typographical in nature with some kind of an optical illusion or AHA! moment built in. Check out our latest...
Fibonacci’s PoemDecember 10, 2019 (!)OneWordIt startsSlow but sureExpanding out numerically, adding moreMarching forward, doing the math, not asking why Knowing the ratio of words, in this line and previous, will equal Phi!A number, elegant, emergent, magical; found...
A new design for my favorite holiday of the year. See animated version below. Enjoy Previous designs can be found here and here.
A few weeks ago I started doodling words in 3 dimensions, for no particular reason, and before I knew it I had a bunch of interesting designs. Here is a sample: A bit of goofing around with Keynote and some royalty free music from Kevin McLeod, and I had a little...
The journey of design is complicated, filled with conundrums —some expected, others not so much. There are many possible strategies to address them as we iterate our way to the finish line. The School Design Game seeks to explore some of these complexities...
Since 2008 we have been creating short videos to welcome in the New Year. These videos, created on a shoe-string budget, are usually typographical in nature with some kind of an optical illusion or aha! moment built in. Check out our latest creation to welcome 2019...
I have written previously about the MSUrbanSTEM project and what it has meant to me. Over the past couple of years we have also published about this line of work (most prominently in a special issue of The Journal of Computers in Mathematics and Science Teaching)....
The Gary K. Herberger Young Scholars Academy (HYSA) is a school designed for highly gifted students in grades 7-12 affiliated with the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College and Arizona State University. Last Friday I had the pleasure and honor of working with all the...
Photo & and design © Punya Mishra.The photo of bubbles was taken with cell phone camera (equipped with a macro lens). Fractals are mathematical/geometrical structures that exhibit self-similarity at increasingly small (or large) scales. Fractals were...
Figure 1: Eye-llusion Over the past few months I have been somewhat obsessed with visual illusions, ambiguous images, impossible figures and other such fun stuff. This led to the design of a brand new optical illusion, combining an ambiguous image with an...
A design for the word "illusions" inspired by a design by Scott Kim. I have been obsessed with optical illusions for for a long time. This interest has played out in many ways: from the hundreds of ambigrams I have created to the new year’s videos we create as a...
Pie upon reflection is nothing but 3.14!A new version of a design I had created a year ago.Original idea stolen from the Interwebs Since it is Pi(e) day, I thought it would be fun to share another design I had created a while ago in response to one of the...
Over the years our family has developed a mini-tradition of creating short videos to celebrate the new year. These videos are short, always typographical, and usually incorporate some kind of a visual illusion. Our craft has improved over the years, something that can...
The MSUrbanSTEM project was one of the best projects I have ever been part of. We worked with 124 Chicago Public School STEM educators over three years, in an effort to develop their teaching and leadership in the STEM areas. We have written about this...
I have always been intrigued by the idea of how truly random our lives really are. Seemingly minor events can trigger effects, rippling through our lives, effects becoming causes, leading to profound changes and transformations. Ray Bradbury's short...
This past April, I delivered the annual E. Paul Torrance Lecture at the University of Georgia. Being invited to give this talk was a huge honor, for two main reasons. First, because of Paul Torrance, the person for whom this lecture is named. Dr. Torrance, known...
3.14 looked in a mirror and guess what he saw? Happy Pi(e) day.
In honor of the movie "Hidden Figures" here is a new figure-ground ambigram. Enjoy.