Eric Weinstein: Hello, you found the portal.
I'm your host Eric Weinstein, and I'm here in Manhattan with artists, London Tsai.
A person I've been looking to meet for quite some time and I just met him
yesterday for the first time.
London.
Welcome.
Thank you.
So, I have been eyeing your artwork for years on the internet.
I've used it in talks and you're one of the most important people that we've had
come on the portal, even though very few people know who you are or what you've
been up to, can you say a little bit about, your background as a mathematical
artist?
London Tsai: Oh, my background.
so my background as an artist, well i studied mathematics in undergrad and maybe
I should start over.
So actually I went, I went to college.
Eric Weinstein: And you admit you went to college?
I went to,
London Tsai: yeah, I did.
And I wanted to actually study French literature and international relations.
And, my freshman year I took the standard courses.
and, I really delved into a 20th century French literature.
And, It
Eric Weinstein: was Duke.
London Tsai: This was a Tufts,
Eric Weinstein: Tufts.
London Tsai: So at Tufts I took all these kind of liberal arts classes, humanities
classes, and I was actually disappointed.
I had all these ideas about like what, what I wanted to accomplish in literature
and what I would learn.
And I would ultimately find some sort of meaning, you know, some understanding of
the world we live in.
And instead I was frustrated and I didn't seem to be able to get answers.
To the questions I had.
And to my surprise, I was enjoying calculus much more than any of the classes
I took
Eric Weinstein: dear sir.
London Tsai: So what happened was that, in my sophomore year, I, declared, my math
nature.
Eric Weinstein: Okay, so you came out of the closet,
London Tsai: came out of closet.
Yeah.
Eric Weinstein: Declared yourself as a, pro mathematician.
Yes.
And.
Then,
London Tsai: and then I, well, of course, I, I, I grew up in a artistic household
and I, I always thought I would, I would, do some sort of artwork.
But, once I discovered mathematics, I found that,
Eric Weinstein: that
London Tsai: it was.
Is more artistic than anything that I'd ever seen before.
It's more creative, is more ingenious, is more
Eric Weinstein: abstract with no author.
London Tsai: Nope.
No author.
Yeah, and it's just, it's just there and it's, and you could, you could study it
and it was infinitely deep.
You could.
You could pick up any part and you could just keep going.
And everything just fit together so nicely and it just wanted to see more and
understand more.
And all the other mathematical writing that were, that was on the, the
blackboards, like from the, Graduate classes and things like that.
I wanted to understand what they were about, and they must be representatives of
some sort of world that I didn't have access to at the time.
Eric Weinstein: So I'm looking into your eyes.
I've seen something that looks like a religious convert, or maybe like Ray
Charles the first time he tried heroin or something.
Did you, you got the bug?
London Tsai: Absolutely.
Yeah, absolutely.
I, I mean, it's the only thing I thought about for about six years.
I just,
Eric Weinstein: you're obsessed.
London Tsai: I just dived into it.
In fact, I don't think I had like, like kind of this really strong mathematical
ability.
I was just fascinated by it.
And, and for me, it didn't come as naturally as it did for my brother.
and, I really had to struggle.
I really had to, I felt it was, it was a real challenge to my self worth.
I felt like if I couldn't do this, if I couldn't understand mathematics that that.
Life was just not worth living.
Whoa.
It was pretty, it was like that.
I just decided I would prove to myself that I could do it and to, to the
exclusion of almost everything
Eric Weinstein: else.
So this is, this is, I mean, I'm joking around a little bit about heroin, but.
It does behave like that once you find out that there is a hidden world and that the,
this hidden world is strangely meaningful and that it's clearly too beautiful to be
constructed by any human mind.
I'm like the most beautiful human minds can barely understand this world, but it's
more like they're dusting off, I guess in my understanding, I think about like the
ruins of Petra and imagine that Petro were buried in sand and you were just whisking
away sand and uncovering ruins.
Right?
Be pretty convinced that you weren't offering the ruins of Petra.
You would know that you didn't build this thing, but you, yeah.
You know, it's just such a privilege to be able to, to touch something this beautiful
that it's apparently an authored by anything known to be human.
London Tsai: I mean, that's kind of my feeling
Eric Weinstein: of reverence and transcendence.
London Tsai: Yeah.
Like, like there's this kind of.
Eternal stillness in this world.
You know, you, I recently, I've just picked up the my old math texts and
the ideas there are just as fresh as they were, you know, 30 years ago when I was
studying them.
And they still have that pure beauty about them.
Eric Weinstein: Well, let, let me let you in a little bit on why I'm having you on
this program.
it's not just because I'm so devoted to your work.
It's also because my belief is that we have the most beautiful symphonies in the
world.
locked inside of our journals and our, our, our math libraries, let's say, as
text.
And you know, you can ask, well, if you have a, a symphony of Brahms.
Is it a symphony if it only resides in the sheet music and has never performed?
That's a very disturbing question because the instructions for its performance are
present, and it may be that a tiny number of people can actually read a sheet of
sheet music and say, Oh my God, that's gorgeous, because they can hear it in
their head, but the rest of us actually need the thing to be performed, and yet
there is no orchestra.
Or analog of an orchestra that performs works of great mathematical or physical
beauty.
London Tsai: Yeah, that's true.
I mean,
part of my interest in mathematics initially was that I could take
mathematics and the beautiful images that I saw.
In my mind during math class and bring them out as artistic things.
Eric Weinstein: Well, so this is where I start to also get a little bit pissed off
with you, which is, no, I'm not kidding.
Yeah.
I'm angry about the fact that we have these papers and books.
That formed the sheet music that's never performed.
And then I find out that you exist and that you have been performing and
recording effectively these masterworks.
And then what do you do with like the vinyl, you put it under bubble wrap in
some loft in Soho in Manhattan, and it doesn't come out for years or decades at a
time.
So effectively you're sitting on some of the only known.
Recordings, if you will, of some of the great masterworks of the mathematical
universe.
WTF, what are you doing, man?
London Tsai: I, well I think, I think what's happened is that I'm always kind of
interested in the next idea or the next,
the next theorem or the next project.
And all these things that are made by me just sorta, you know, after I'm done with
it, it's not.
It doesn't seem that important anymore.
Eric Weinstein: I think that's great for the artists, but whoever's doing your PR
and marketing, I'm firing them and taking over
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As somebody who studied mathematics, I had the same feeling.
I wasn't necessarily made to do mathematics.
That wasn't how my brain, I did it, didn't find the symbolic layer very easy, but I,
I was exposed to things of such beauty in depth that I, I couldn't find any other
analog on planet earth.
Once you understand how rich the mathematical universe actually is, you
can't believe.
That it was, it was somehow just created out of logical necessity.
And there's a tiny portion of it that is actually visualized bubble by our visual
cortex.
And.
What's odd is that when we talk about things as being visual in mathematics,
we're often talking about things that we can't actually see.
When we have an intuition that comes from one, two, and three dimensions, and then
we have to take that intuition where we can actually visualize something.
We construct a model of it, and we have a series of tricks by which we use our minds
to visualize things that we can't actually see.
I mean, I don't even know what to call this process.
I'm not sure if it has a description.
London Tsai: Yeah, I know what you mean.
It's, it's definitely an intuition that you have and it's some kind of vague
mental image.
And I, what I have to do is I have to somehow, in my artwork, I have to take
this vague mental image.
And try to make it concrete and it's, it's not always,
Eric Weinstein: well, this is the thing.
Now, keep in mind, there are going to be people who are listening to this as audio,
and then we will later release it as video.
And I don't know how much of it will be seeable.
On the channel, but one of the things it's very interesting to me is that what
happens in our minds when we really start to open the portal to the deepest secrets
that the universe has to offer is that we use this mixture and the mixture is some
amount of the world that we can construct as models so that we can actually directly
visualize it as if we could use our eyes to make a claim model of, let's say, an
algebraic variety.
What happened.
And then there's this extra intuition that we have to build in from texts and from
symbology to remind ourselves that usually we're not able to see the full totality of
whatever it is we're discussing.
And your art very often has a geometric picture together with prose that is kind
of fading in and out of perceptibility together with a bunch of mathematical
symbols that are describing what.
What has been constructed, and I thought that what's very interesting is that that
actually mirrors what a mathematicians model.
Is of one of these higher structures that can't be seen directly, but it's basically
intuition from a low dimensional thing that can be visualized together with prose
and mathematical symbols that actually rigorously describe the object.
And so that in some sense it is a faithful recreation.
by combining, you know, gorgeous form together with text and prose.
and, and symbology.
In order to recreate the mathematical state that we mean by saying, well, that's
very, that mathematics is very visual.
So for example, behind you right now, there's an amazing, painting that I've
seen, for years.
I think I've actually used in a talk at Columbia as the, cover art.
For the first slide of what I assume is Heinz Hoff's famous vibration from the
early 1930s.
And so it's this series of interlocking partial Torrye, each of which is filled up
by circles.
And it's a very impressionistic, but also somewhat rigorous, description of this
object that on the Joe Rogan program, I said maybe the most important object in
the universe because.
When we talk about physics being ultimately a theory of waves, we want to
know, well, what are those waves waves in?
What is the analog of the ocean for an ocean wave inside of physics?
So those waves are waves in bundles, and the bundles come into basic.
Types for most most purposes.
One is called a principle bundle, which is what you have behind you, and you've been
so good as to put a depiction of another kind of bundle, which is sort of even
closer to the wave concept of vector bundle, which is what is behind me now.
I think it's very strange that we have all of these programs, let's say on public
television or you know, Brian Green talking about the elegant universe, all,
all of these things.
And yet when I ask people, well, do you know.
You're interested in wave particle duality.
Do you know what the waves are waves in?
Nobody seems to know about bundles.
London Tsai: It's surprising.
Eric Weinstein: Well, it's disturbing.
And the idea is that there are very few people depicting bundles artistically and.
Essentially the only person doing it is hiding their artwork away so that nobody
even knows it's there.
well, no, I mean like this.
This is an important link, I guess is what I'm trying to say is, is that you are.
Somehow breaking the secrecy.
It's like, you know, Prometheus's gave fire to man.
Okay, well you are now bringing bundles to the masses, and I think it's, it's
fantastic.
because it allows people to skip the symbolic step, which is usually what, what
leaves them out of participating, at least as observers, of the amazing.
Museum of mathematical finds.
can you talk a little bit about what caused you to do these two works?
The principle bundled behind you, which what w we, what do we call this hop
vibration behind
London Tsai: you?
Yeah, Carla hot vibration
Eric Weinstein: and behind me
London Tsai: a, I called it a purple vector bundle.
Eric Weinstein: Purple vector, but all right, so we've got a principle bundle,
which is the hop vibration and purple vector bundle.
Talk to me about what you were thinking when you created them.
London Tsai: Well, like, so I had the fortune in undergrad to be the first
advisee of an entrepreneur.
Geometer.
She was an assistant professor at the time.
Her name is ticky door, and she's actually quite known in algebraic geometry.
And she had this kind of deep kind of quiet.
Confidence about her.
And I would go to her office hours religiously and it was sit there and annoy
her with my questions from undergrad math.
But she was always working with, with a little pencil sharpen all the way to the
eraser almost.
And she would be always writing the word that led FBN a fiber bundle.
And so I was a freshman and I was thinking.
To myself, what the heck is that fiber bundle?
No one's ever told me about that.
And so my kind of one of, one of the goals.
In studying math was to figure out just what it was that she was thinking about
these, what were these fiber bundles that she was constantly writing about.
And so in my mind, I always had this idea that I needed to understand that.
And so that was kind of probably the, the germ of my interest in, in bundles.
And in later on in grad school, I encountered them.
And then later on when I started painting, I just.
I dunno.
We were talking about intuition earlier, and I just feel like there's some sort of
seed in us when we see lots of mathematical things or anything in the
world for that matter.
There's something that tells us, well, this, there's some content here and that.
This is worthy of our attention and somehow these bundles, vector bundles,
fiber bundles, principle, fiber bundles were just objects that to me were worthy
of sinking a lot of time and thought and making artwork of, so I don't really know
what it was that.
Drew me to them except that I was drawn to them.
And
Eric Weinstein: have you ever read CN yang of yang mills theory fame, talking about
his discovery of the importance of fiber bundles?
I think I have.
Yeah.
London Tsai: It's a short essay, right?
Eric Weinstein: He's written a few, I think.
but he talks about, and I wish I had the exact quote here, Einstein.
Was questing for a structure to unify physics and in Yang's estimation, the
fiber bundle was the answer.
To Einstein's quest.
Now, of course, this cropped up in something called Kaluza Klein theory.
Einstein used, what we would now call, you know, the tangent bundle and cotangent
bundle of space time.
So he would, he would, Hey, let's just throw some jargon out there.
So a fiber bundle is sort of like the X, Y plane growing up and going off to graduate
school.
And the analog of the X axis would be called the base space and the Y axis in
all its translates, those vertical lines would be called the fibers and the X Y
plane would be called the total space.
And in that story.
The X axis gets replaced by space time and the Y axis gets replaced by various things
like a 16 dimensional, vector bundle to give the particles there, 16 dimensions
worth of personalities.
There are these things called spinners that are attached to something that you
can visualize as the Philippine wind glance, a wineglass dance.
the, Sometimes you call this the, the, the, the principle bundle, that governs,
all of particle theory.
The SU three cross cross you one bundle over space time and where each of those
weird, for example, as a, what we'd call a collection of soup symmetries, that form
what mathematicians term a group.
Same thing with and.
You won is just a fancy name for the circle.
So behind you, what you see is a simplified version of.
The principle bundle that we might use for, for doing physics research.
But this one lives on top of a two dimensional sphere, like the surface of
the earth.
And it adds an extra circle for every point in space and time.
And those are the lines, as I understand it, that are in these partial Torrye that
are nested behind you.
So you're.
It's, it's pretty tough going, but you're almost able to visualize the structure on
which electromagnetism, which is how you and I are looking at each other through
photonic exchange.
And the way in which, you know, the, the magnetic, like if, if these, microphones
have magnetic membranes, that are turning our, pressure waves into electrical
impulses, all of that is described in some sense by patterns attached to the circles.
On that painting upgraded to make it a story of space and time rather than just a
story of circles over a two dimensional surface of the globe.
London Tsai: Yeah.
Eric Weinstein: So it'd be pretty crazy if it wasn't like one of the coolest looking
objects in the unit.
It is pretty cool.
Right.
London Tsai: I mean, the interesting thing about . About painting it or making it
visual is that you actually have to cut away parts to reveal what's
Eric Weinstein: the actual structure because it's too densely,
London Tsai: densely packed.
So I'm only picking, you know, a select few of these core.
I am only showing like.
Parts of them, so I can say I can attribute deal.
It's what's what's underneath because they're all nested.
Eric Weinstein: And the odd thing is, is that before I knew about your work, I
think, and before I knew about it, I don't know if you've encountered drawer Barna
ton who came up with a picture of this, which he termed planet hop, which I used
to, yeah, I think
London Tsai: you pointed me
to
Eric Weinstein: now, I did a version of this in.
a, a Python release, by a group called Enthought, and I got them to help me out.
I had to use the transparency of some of the visual structures to allow me to see
through, so I didn't have the occlusion phenomena.
You don't have that luxury with paint.
Right.
it is very tough to see, but the fact that it can be seen.
And I think this is the really interesting thing, means that a giant chunk of physics
and mathematics is almost within reach of the person who can't trust her or his
ability to negotiate the world of mathematical symbols.
And you know, this is a huge problem that a lot of . People think that they're bad
at music in the West because our music is so dependent on notation.
However, in lots of cultures, notation isn't what carries music.
It's just personal instruction.
And a lot of those people who are bad at symbols would be good at music if it were
in any other culture that wasn't symbolically so dependent.
And I view this as being, well, what if I was in a culture in which mathematics
wasn't transmitted as much?
Symbolically.
Fair.
Unfair.
London Tsai: It's an interesting approach.
I'm not wholly sure, but, yeah, I can, maybe I can buy that because of, well, one
of the things that drew me to math was, was the, actually the actually symbols.
Actually,
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I want to talk about this mathematical art movement that has never been named.
Okay?
All right, and I'm going to try to figure out what name to give it later, but
Tell me if any of the following have impacted you.
John Archibald Wheeler, who was Fireman's teacher.
Yup.
very famous physicist.
He seemed to have an incredible passion for doing the kinds of things you're doing
on blackboards to give these masterful lectures.
Have you ever encountered his Blackboard?
I haven't.
Okay.
let me try another one.
Roger Penrose, who wrote the road to reality is, of course a relatively famous,
person drew the first copy of the hop vibration that I'd ever seen as strikingly
like your own, if you've seen that.
London Tsai: I have, I, I have that book to reality and I have some, some of his
more recent books as well.
But, I think the first picture of Hackberry shouldn't I ever saw was, bill
Thurston's in his, three dimensional geometry topology.
Eric Weinstein: Oh, are these, were these the Princeton lecture notes that were
never released as a book or do they eventually become
London Tsai: a book?
Eventually became book.
Okay.
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
This is the thing is that mathematicians would trade these these mimeograph notes
that weren't quite right.
Books, but we would all look at them and we felt like we were looking into secret
tomes that only some people could have.
London Tsai: That's right.
I think later it became a book, and that's when I, when I first saw it.
Eric Weinstein: So bill Thurston, of course, was a famous within mathematics as
being a fields medalist who contributed to Grecia Perlman's program for solving the
punk or a conjecture in dimension three proving that.
Any sphere that was sufficiently simple from its algebraic properties had to
actually be the three dimensional version of the sphere.
Did you know bill Thurston at all?
London Tsai: I didn't, I knew people who knew him.
Eric Weinstein: I knew him a little bit.
he came through Harvard when I was a graduate student there, and one of, one of
the odd comments he made, he said, you want to know what keeps this field great?
And I said.
Tell me.
He said in any other field, if a fields medalist came through, that's like a Nobel
prize winner at the top of the field, it would be a big deal.
And he said, here I am sitting with a bunch of you guys at some salad bar after
my talk because we're just not that pretentious.
And I thought, huh, that's interesting cause he recognized that he would be a big
shot and he really valued the fact that nothing was being made over his presence
beyond the mathematics.
London Tsai: That's so great.
Yeah.
In fact, I was reading his book.
On my honeymoon.
I brought it along into, yeah,
we were just, we were in Honolulu and we had this, a nice place and a beautiful
Lanai.
And here I was . Reading first then, and that's when I thought,
Eric Weinstein: well, you, you had surrounded by beauty.
London Tsai: Yes, I was.
what is it that you think you're supposed to be doing?
I mean, you have this ability to understand mathematics and you have the
ability to look into your own mind and see, well, how is it registering?
And then you have the ability to externalize it.
That's a relatively.
Unusual skillset.
I mean, there's a, I shouldn't continue mentioning the remaining names.
Like fomenko is this crazy mathematical artist.
I like the fact that, Best.
Sheba Grossman is doing some beautiful mathematical sculpture guy named Nico
Myers, and in a, I guess Temecula, is doing hop vibration sculpture right now.
Wow.
Okay.
You all, in part because, you know, we're now talking about this on these large
programs, and rather than people.
Just turning off and saying, well, I don't know what that was because it's visual.
People are getting super intrigued and just going out and trying to learn the
math for themselves, including artists, right?
So I think that what there needs to be is, this is a movement.
I mentioned an artist named Luke Jerram, who did these beautiful glass.
Sculpture of, pathogens and viruses and like melt.
He does malaria and HIV, and it's just absolutely stunningly beautiful.
who, who are, I mean, obviously MC MC Escher is probably the biggest
mathematical artist of the mall, right?
why aren't there more people working in this movement?
Why isn't the movement named, why aren't you guys collected?
Why aren't there exhibitions of this stuff?
Why, why, why, why, why?
I don't really know.
it could be that,
it could be that the people who feel that they can actually do this stuff don't
really have.
And, maybe it's just the mathematics is too attractive to them.
You know?
It's like you'd rather do math and then make paintings about math or Nick
representations of it.
You know?
It's so much more beautiful to spend your time.
Like the analogy I have is a of a Mountaineer.
You know, you'd rather be out climbing your mountains than ever.
Eric Weinstein: Alright.
London Tsai: Okay.
Eric Weinstein: Tell me, you don't feel cut off from people who you can't show
this to.
Like you've gone someplace on a, on a Trek as a Mountaineer, which is so
spectacularly gorgeous.
You can't even believe that it exists.
Yeah.
And you have somebody you love who's not.
Knowledgeable and you know, you're trying to figure out, well, can I charter a
helicopter?
Can I get this person to get into really good physical shape and make the long
Trek?
Is there any way I can bring back a picture that can communicate?
I guess I feel cut off from everyone on the planet who hasn't seen that this stuff
exists and is real, don't you?
London Tsai: I do.
I, I mean, as an artist.
As a contemporary artist, I'm often told not to, not to mention the math behind my
work.
Eric Weinstein: I told you that.
London Tsai: I mean, in general, people just say they're not interested in the
math.
They're not.
Okay.
Eric Weinstein: All right.
Maybe you're not supposed to mention it, but I'm certainly,
London Tsai: it's, I think people when they see some.
That there is mathematics behind it.
I think it scares them off and most people have bad memories of their mathematical
upbringing or education that they, they have this reflex to just turn away from
it.
Eric Weinstein: What's like the bad ex boyfriend problem?
Is that if you meet somebody who's had a bad relationship, they're always going to
live through some of that trauma in every subsequent relationship.
And I think that we have to recognize, you know, we, we talk about, I attra genic
harm, as the harm done by physicians to patients.
And we have to talk about math Magenic harm.
Where there is this like destruction of the love and appreciation for the beauty
of math that is mediated by math teachers and mathematicians and math professors.
Like somehow we're keeping the beauty for ourselves, and a large number of people
have no idea.
They've just been like, I don't know.
They've had their knuckles wrapped with a ruler and they're now in some damage state
and.
I guess when you look at this stuff, some percentage of people who say, I don't get
it.
It's not that interesting, leaves me cold.
Some other percentage of people are going to look at it and say, I've got to figure
out what that was about.
I didn't know that that was there.
London Tsai: Yup.
Eric Weinstein: Are you connected with any of these people?
I mentioned.
you mean the people that
Eric Weinstein: harden, ah, Bathsheba Grossman?
London Tsai: Oh, no, I'm not.
No, I know.
I know how they are.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I think, I think you and Andrew had the Klan bottles during that interview.
Oh, Andrew?
Yeah.
He got a tricky,
Eric Weinstein: sorry.
Are you yang supporter?
Yeah.
Well, so he's got these math hats.
I would love coming yang.
London Tsai: I think I should get my hands on one.
Yeah.
Eric Weinstein: Well, What do you,
London Tsai: so,
Eric Weinstein: to some extent, this is actually not the first generation of
mathematical or physical art in your family.
Am I right that your father somehow was, was mining this vein as well?
London Tsai: Yeah, so my father, Trained as an engineer and worked as a mechanical
engineer for for 10 years, quite successfully in New York city.
And the whole time he wanted to be an artist and that he was painting at the art
students league and he made all of these paintings, figurative and an abstract and
so on.
Then he won a prize for painting and then the stipulation for the prize was that he
had to quit.
His engineering career and devote himself to art.
And upon quitting, he found he couldn't paint anymore.
Eric Weinstein: Wow.
London Tsai: And he kind of did some soul searching, traveled around the world, and
that's when he realized that there was something that he could do with this
engineering background.
Somehow he could bring engineering and science.
Into his artwork, and that's when he started developing his cybernetic
sculptures and, and he never turned back through.
You always make these kinds of scientific engineering,
Eric Weinstein: yeah.
First time you're at your studio.
Yeah.
They're gorgeous.
I mean, I love your stuff and I love, I didn't know that I was going to love his,
he had these gorgeous standing waves, and then by the use of clever use of
stroboscopic light, he's able to freeze them and show this like very subtle
motion.
That would otherwise be lost.
And you know, I think that the wave equation, which is a, you know, a
particular class of equations, well known in mathematics is one of the most
beautiful things, I've ever seen.
and to be able to visualize waves is precious to me.
astounding that I wasn't aware of his work.
London Tsai: Yeah.
I think the lesson from my father, he never thought of himself as, as a
scientist or as a technological artist.
And he thought of itself just as an artist.
And I think what he was trying to say with that was that technology and science,
they're, they're not really like.
Cool or that you could just say, Oh, that's a technological artist, that these
are just things that as artists that are part of our culture and part of our
society, that we have a right to use them just as as much as.
In a professional scientists do.
And I think in that way, I think of myself as an artist, not as a mathematic artist,
but as an artist.
And it turns out that having seen mathematics and haven't been exposed to
mathematics, it just, it's just the part of.
Humanity that I've incorporated in myself and the artwork that I make has those
features because it's kind of my life experience.
So I'm not sure that we, you can, we can turn this movement as mathematical art,
but I think we're just artists who are kind of expanding our.
Our understanding to those realms that are difficult for most people to reach.
And I think, but that's part of what it means to be human.
You know,
Eric Weinstein: we don't call, I mean, just to steal me on your point, we don't
call a Salvador Dali a mathematical artist, and yet, you know, if he puts
Jesus on a four dimensional polytopes, in the case of a Tesseract or hyper cube, we
just accept that he's mining some amount of mathematics.
Right.
As an inspiration for his art.
you know, the, the development of the use of linear perspective wasn't viewed as
mathematical art.
A lot of, like op art.
I mean, if you think about Vassar rally, I think that a lot of those patterned,
structures that he depicted that appear to be showing curvature, by using various
optical tricks, we don't call that.
Mathematical art necessarily.
However you are going beyond that, and so I don't know whether it's exactly fair.
To avoid the label.
I mean, I'll, I'll try to come up with a better one.
But, you know, I, I often look at my own soul, for lack of a better world and word,
and I realized that I may not be able to believe in angels or a religious origin
stories.
But I still have a place in my consciousness or my heart or whatever you
want to call it, that wants to be connected with something larger than the
human experience.
I don't want to just die on a random rock and having it all.
you know, as Shakespeare, said signifying nothing.
And one of the things that I actually take.
Spiritual solace from is that at a minimum, there is this world of structures
that would have passed by completely unknown, like the hop vibration, which was
only found in the 1930s so we have people who are alive who are older than the
knowledge that the hop vibration exists.
And the.
These things are like angels.
We know that they're there.
It's not speculative, and we know that we didn't create them and we know that they
seem to be transcendent, and I would just assume, fill my life with transcendent
structures that are beyond any kind of human authorship and not call the art here
to me.
Is your decision to depict this in the way in which you chose to depict it, but the
source that you're mining has nothing to do with our humanity.
London Tsai: I see, right.
Yeah.
Eric Weinstein: I mean, like in essence, the thing that you have behind you right
now is to me, a modern picture of an angel where I can't believe in angels, but I can
believe in principle fiber bundles generating the world of electromagnetic
activity, which then grew up and not only became Maxwell's equations became every
kind of force other than gravity.
London Tsai: I mean, yeah, maybe math is not,
it's not a product of humanity, but I feel that the kind of the struggle to
understand math and to create these mathematical texts, I mean, that in itself
is us.
That has a very human aspect to it, and that's one of the properties I'm trying to
express in my art is just trying to express that even maybe even though math
is not a human thing, it's a somehow much deeper, it's a universal thing, but that
it's practice is human and that I want to show the humanness.
Bye.
Eric Weinstein: That's what you're doing.
Yeah.
Me humanize the angel, right?
London Tsai: Yeah.
I want to bring that out, that it's very important that the, the the, the hand of
the artist be present, kind of like expressing the difficulty that as a human
being, I have to try to understand
Eric Weinstein: the struggle that the, you know, I look at all of the texts that's
going.
In and around the color or in the charcoal drawings, and I struggled to read it.
It's hard to read it because it's not presented to be read in a, in a typical
fashion.
And I love the fact that it is slightly irregular and it shows, in some sense, a
perfect structure that cannot be depicted perfectly.
Right.
Yeah.
Do you ever feel like freaked out being in direct touch with these other worldly
structures?
London Tsai: I feel inadequate.
Yeah.
That, no matter how much time I spend with them, there's, I can really never quite
grasp it in its totality.
It's somehow beyond.
My reach.
And of course, you know, then sometimes I blame, Oh, well, maybe that's my ability.
I'm just not, I just don't have,
Eric Weinstein: no, I think we have to back away from how creepy it is that these
things are even there to be found.
you know, I typically give the example of exceptional league groups or exotic seven
spheres, which are structures.
People can look up if they, if they dare.
as.
Things that both make me feel not alone and make me feel vaguely terrified.
You know?
It's like what if a cigar shaped object to started hovering over the earth and it
didn't do anything like malignant, but we knew it wasn't from us and we don't, we
didn't know what it was.
Didn't show any signs of life other than the fact that it was there.
London Tsai: When I was a child, I used to have dreams like that, nightmares like
that, and this was long before I knew anything about math.
I would dream about these huge surfaces and I was so tiny, like the size of the
ant, and they would be so smooth, infinitely smooth, even though I had an
idea of what implementing smooth men, but they were so smooth and they're a
terrifying, and maybe that's kind of like.
My very first kind of mathematical experience just.
Just these things that appeared in my dream.
Eric Weinstein: Now, one of the weird things that we're doing on this podcast is
we're picking on people who don't necessarily know that we're coming and
promoting what they do.
And we call this reverse sponsorship.
And the hope is, is that if we have a successful business and we can pick on it,
that.
As we generate interest in that business from our audience, that maybe some of
those businesses will come and sponsor the portal, and keep us on the air when we go
into very difficult topics.
I'm not going to.
Ever asked that of you, but I, I would, I do want to say that in some sense, this
episode is part of something akin to reverse sponsorship.
W I think that the biggest problem, and you tell me if this rings true or not, is
that a lot of us do work that never gets curated by a second person.
That in general, I used to think curation was a parasitic behavior.
If you couldn't create, you could point at things that were great.
And I later realized with my own stuff that until somebody else said, Hey, this
person is saying something that you don't actually get hurt or processed because you
can't actually curate yourself.
Somebody else has to be the pointer and saying, Hey, people pay attention.
And I think it's way past time that.
This be done for you?
I don't, most mathematicians don't have large audiences.
This is not a field EME.
Physics has a few tiny number of physicists who have large audiences, but I
really believe that it's essential, for a curation process to happen with this kind
of work so that people can see more of what is out there.
Are you.
are you open for business?
Will you sell your work?
Are you, I mean, I F I found you on the internet.
London Tsai: Yeah, sure.
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
London Tsai: Yeah.
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
So hopefully, supporters of the program, can look for London, and his storefront on
the internet somewhere.
What about exhibiting with other artists and showing this kind of new wave of,
whatever we want to call it, other than mathematical art,
London Tsai: right.
Oh, I'm open to that.
Eric Weinstein: Oh, yeah, absolutely.
So you would do it, you'd do like a group show.
London Tsai: Yeah, of course.
Eric Weinstein: Are you up for like suggestions?
I've been horrible to you.
I've told you a bunch of things that I've never seen depicted and asks you to look
in on it.
Is that a, is that an overbearing question?
London Tsai: No, that's a good, that's a great, well, I did, I did a series of
talks when I lived in Seattle and, the, so yeah, so I went to the university of
Washington where I knew a couple of mathematicians and.
It was a series of works I called demonstrations, and it was kind of
inspired by da Vinci's, kind of scientific drawings, the muskrats Yoni.
And, so I invited you dub mathematicians to, supply me with theorems of theirs and
they, which attempt to, Come up with my own interpretation.
And so that was a cool, that was a fun project.
Yeah.
I got to know a few mathematicians at the UDub and, but yeah, that sort of
collaboration was something I was very interested in, but 10 years ago, and,
Eric Weinstein: what are you thinking about now.
London Tsai: What am I thinking about now?
I'm always open to new ideas.
And your list of topics is a printout I carry with me every day, so I'm always
looking at it on the subway.
Yeah.
So a TSN day, a tier thinker.
And he had a singer in the mix here.
Yes.
I tried to wrap my head around that.
I think you had some something.
I'm a care bear Corvair.
Eric Weinstein: Kervarian very, yes,
London Tsai: yes.
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
That's gorgeous stuff.
Yeah.
And, so I, yeah, I look at it and I have my, I have my mathematician friends and I
have a whole library of math textbooks that I tried to
Consult.
Eric Weinstein: So maybe if I'm correct, the vector bundle painting that is behind
me is masking a another work that's underneath it.
Maybe we could take the top painting off and take a look at what you have there.
Okay, sure.
That's good.
Don't sell this to anyone until you've let me bid
London Tsai: for it.
If you look at these little fibers, they sort of look like my dad's.
Eric Weinstein: I, I.
S I saw that.
Yeah.
London Tsai: It's gorgeous.
He's least kind of in the back of my mind.
Of course.
Part of my inheritance.
Yeah.
Eric Weinstein: We were ready to start.
Okay.
All right, so London, yeah.
You've just unveiled this other structure and I'm looking at it.
And it's on its side from what I normally expect so that we can get it into the
shot.
But, what it looks to me like is that you've taken the light cone on, which,
Particles with no rest mass or waves with no rest mass propagate inside of the
special theory of relativity.
And then you've sort of showed this, I don't know, algebraic, how do you say it?
Algebraic degeneration.
so it looks like I'm looking at some mass shells.
Yep.
And, this diagram that should be familiar from Einstein's, a famous anise marvelous
list of 1905, when he figured out special relativity, has been sort of augmented
with this extra structure of, of, of mass shells and hyperboloid.
And what can you say about what motivated you here.
well, so I painted a painting of, some of my favorite things from calculus three,
quadric surfaces.
And, I showed it to Loring too.
And, he said, well, that's very interesting, but, can you tell me how
they're
Eric Weinstein: related?
London Tsai: And so that was a direct challenge from Loring.
And so I thought about, well, if I have various certain parameters, this was what
happened.
But as I went from one of these types of surfaces to the other time, from the a
hyperboloid of two sheets to hyperbolic once sheet, I had to go through the cone.
And so I showed that relation and that that was.
Basically the idea behind that piece.
do you find, sort of any comparable source of rich imagery from any other area other
than let's say mathematics and physics?
I would say nature.
Eric Weinstein: are you as fascinated by
London Tsai: it?
I'm not, maybe I'm not as fascinated by it, but you know, if I'm walking on the
beach and I pick up some shelves,
Eric Weinstein: no, no, no, no.
It's unbelievably gorgeous.
But I have to admit that nature, weirdly though, it completely inspires me and I
think no less than it inspires other people.
I'm.
Weirdly, slightly less inspired by physical nature than I am by what we might
call mathematic.
I
London Tsai: have to say I'm the same, although I am, I'm a scuba diver.
I'm a downhill skier.
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
And does skiing is pretty close to differential geometry?
Yes, it is.
London Tsai: Yeah.
I'm kind of sitting thinking about the curvature,
Eric Weinstein: right.
London Tsai: Terena and yeah.
Eric Weinstein: What are you fascinated by in scuba diving?
London Tsai: Scuba diving when I go.
when I go down, I just see the, the strange secrets years residing on the
ocean floor, or, you know, on the coral reefs and the shapes of them.
And in
Eric Weinstein: particular ones you're obsessed with.
I can't say I'm obsessed about it and I just find them interesting.
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
But maybe cuddle fish,
London Tsai: cut off fish.
Eric Weinstein: I mean, the skin of the cuddle fish is a nearly mathematical
phenomena.
If you've ever watched them propagate these waves through the chromatophores on
the skin, when they're mesmerizing their prey before they strike.
the patterns, it's sort of like times square with some giant.
Right, a neon sign that's, you know, moving through these pulses of light.
And I guess
London Tsai: I've never seen that diving.
Okay.
But,
Eric Weinstein: yeah.
and in music, what do you find yourself most inspired by?
I like, well, when I work in my studio, I'm often listening to, to jazz, usually
miles Davis or Dave Brubeck or.
You know.
Eric Weinstein: Dave Brubeck obviously famous for experimenting with funny time
signatures, which is somewhat mathematic.
Yeah.
London Tsai: I also listened to a lot of classical music.
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
So favorite composer.
London Tsai: Oh gosh.
Mozart.
Rachmaninoff.
Eric Weinstein: Really, I never trust a mathematician who doesn't say Bach first.
Oh, back this
London Tsai: chair.
Eric Weinstein: Okay.
Well, no, maybe.
Maybe the idea is your jam when it comes to the,
London Tsai: I do love Brandenburg concerto.
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.
London Tsai: Yeah.
I rock to that.
Eric Weinstein: And, are you at all familiar with any of these attempts to,
push math and reverence for math out to the general public, that are.
Somewhat off of the direct depiction.
I don't know if you've ever seen my friend Edward Frankel's, a short film, love and
math.
Then he wrote a book.
Oh
London Tsai: no, I don't think I've seen that, but
Eric Weinstein: it's slightly erotic art film.
London Tsai: Really?
Okay.
Eric Weinstein: No.
Yeah.
and I guess, you know, one of the things that I'm very frustrated by is that it's
just so difficult to communicate it.
a counterexample to this would be, have you ever been to the Exploratorium in San
Francisco?
London Tsai: Yeah.
Long time ago.
Then a couple of decades ago.
Eric Weinstein: So Frank Oppenheimer, who is Robert Oppenheimer's brother, created
this totally anomalous science museum that was much more effective so far as I could
tell and conveying the wonder of science, in a way that people actually got some
kind of a take home.
Like it was viscerally engaging.
And yet I didn't see that kind of science museum duplicated anywhere else.
Yeah.
Does that, might that be a paradigm where someone somewhere could do something truly
unique with the visual depiction of geometry and topology, let's say, and
completely crack this open?
I mean like to take the Promethian analogy, all it really takes is one of us
to steal fire effectively.
London Tsai: Yeah.
That might work.
have you been to the Google math museum and, Madison square park.
I've been to the math museum.
Yeah.
Is Google sponsoring?
It
London Tsai: is sponsored by Google.
I didn't, maybe I'm wrong.
Eric Weinstein: I didn't think it was
London Tsai: okay.
I didn't know I, I just assumed it way.
Eric Weinstein: I thought it was somewhat inspiring, but, but like a lot of this
stuff is, is sort of strangely slightly off.
There's this beautiful limestone wall in Stony Brook.
Mass, Stony Brook, long Island that has some of the most beautiful formulas in all
of mathematics and some pictures.
but it, to me, even that has like, errors and flaws and it doesn't fully evoke what
it is that it was trying to depict.
I feel like we failed.
Well.
London Tsai: Yeah, I feel that too.
I mean, that's partially why I, I, I don't think of my art as mathematical art
because I don't want it to be associated with those kind of like, Oh, bring math to
the people and that kind of thing.
It has to be somehow something,
I mean, look, the wonder of, of math that we experienced that that is not.
I don't, I don't feel that when I go and look at these kind of displays of
mathematical art.
Oh, how interesting.
How these things fit together, right.
And then you're just like, okay, let me just, you know, play with this a little
bit and then move on to this other exhibit.
And here, now
Eric Weinstein: you have, what did you feel when you, when you look at Azure?
I didn't, well my, my initial reaction when people were, Oh, you're a math major,
you should love Escher.
I think, Oh, that's great.
Eric Weinstein: You know, I've used the art and the math is somehow strangely
separate, and it was a great way of getting a certain amount of math out into
the world.
Yeah.
But I did, and I found him quite artistic.
I just didn't feel that the.
Art and the math were always kind of hand in glove.
London Tsai: Yeah.
Like, well, first of all, like symmetry groups of the plane.
I mean, that's, that's cool.
But still there's, it's, it doesn't capture the real depth of math.
Yeah.
There's, there's so much more to math than just kind of pretty patterns or
symmetrical patterns.
Eric Weinstein: Are you obsessed
London Tsai: with physics?
not as much as a.
As I wished to be.
Yeah.
Eric Weinstein: I think one of the great mysteries for me has been why is it the
physical universe is such an amazing client of the best mathematics, right?
Like you could have done this with substandard mathematics, maybe just a
little bit of calculus and cement linear algebra.
But it just goes way above and beyond and actually uses our best stuff or most
beautiful stuff.
I've always thought that was quite odd that it didn't have to be the way the
biological world does not seem to use mathematics in that.
At a truly profound level.
There's some cute stuff with like Fibonacci sequences, but I would say that
the biological world mostly turned up, its knows that the mathematical offerings that
that were possible.
London Tsai: Very right.
I guess I see physics and math is so like
Eric Weinstein: intertwined.
There's this expression, the map is not the territory.
And I think that the weird thing about physics is that physics may be the one
place in the real world.
In which the map that is the math that describes it may actually be the territory
that is, it would not astound me if life really was about vector bundles, principle
bundles, and wave equations that take place upon.
Yeah.
So, we're going to try to figure out how to get you as part of an exhibition so
people can come and see your work.
and they can find you on the internet.
You have a, a site.
London Tsai: Yeah.
so my site is just London's hai.com.
Eric Weinstein: It's T S AI.
Yup.
Okay.
And first name improbably is London.
London Tsai: L.
O.
N.
D.
O.
N.
Eric Weinstein: yeah.
And other than that, we're going to continue plugging your work, pointing
people to your Instagram, page and trying to drum up some interest of the, we'll
make more of this gorgeous stuff for all of us.
London Tsai: Well, thank you very much, Eric
Eric Weinstein: London.
It's been a pleasure having you.
You've been through the portal with London Sai, look for him on Instagram, on
Twitter, and most, most importantly at his website, and consider making a bid to keep
me from buying this art.
I think you'll find that it's just gorgeous stuff.
Look for us at the portal on Apple, on Spotify, on Stitcher, or wherever you
listen to podcasts.
Please subscribe and go over to YouTube.
And see if you can't subscribe to us there and click the bell icon to make sure that
you're notified when our next episode drops.
Hopefully, if you've listened to this on audio, you will go over there and watch it
on video.
So you've had a little bit of a taste of the great stuff that London has been
doing.
London, thanks very much.
Take care.
Alright, everybody be well.
Yeah.