Alphabet for Geniuses
There are two versions of the Alphabet for Geniuses:
The following notes refer to the old version of the Alphabet. They're a little bit longer than the notes that are revealed when the shutter goes up in the interactive version.
Explanatory Notes
- atom
- basic particle of matter
- Botticelli
- Italian painter (1444?-1510) of the Florentine school; painted famous version of Birth of Venus
- calculus
- in this case, differential calculus; the 'solution' to the expression on the board is the logarithm (base e) of x, plus a constant c
- DNA
- deoxyribonucleic acid
- equus quaggo
- zebra
- Freud
- Sigmund (1856-1939), founder of psychoanalysis
- gravity
- force that sucks apples to Earth, and vice versa
- homo neanderthalis
- primitive man
- impressionism
- (signed Monet) 19th century art movement that began in Paris
- Jiriki
- central character of Book of Pages
- Klein bottle
- after Felix Klein (1849-1925); a one-sided topographical surface which has no useful inside or outside
- lemon
- even geniuses need a grounding in the real world, OK?
- monetarism
- the business of things pertaining to a nation's coinage.
- neurosurgery
- ...kids today need some kind of career to which to aspire, don't you think?
- onomatopoeia
- a cuckoo (after Gould); words which sound like the thing they describe
- plutocracy
- government by the rich
- quantum physics
- (a Feynman diagram) quantum electrodynamics
- relativity
- the clock in the train is an allusion to the model often used to illustrate Einstein's theory of relativity
- Stradivarius
- any one of the violins made in the workshop of Antonio Stradivari (1644-1737)
- Titus Andronicus
- by William Shakespeare
- Ulysses
- Greek mythological mariner (Roman Odysseus) . . . or James Joyce's unorthodox novel of the same name
- vintage
- an exceptionally fine wine from the crop of a good year
- Wagner
- composer (1813-1883) of the operatic Ring Cycle
- xenophobia
- fear of foreigners
- y=square root of (one minus x-squared)
- the equation for the unit circle (a circle with a radius of 1)
I'm told that
y = either root of (x-squared minus one)
is funnier because that's a unit circle in the complex plane, ha ha . . . but only to mathematicians
- zen
- (that's a cartoon of a "finger pointing directly at reality")