Alan Schoen Mathematician, 2004

December 11, 1924 to July 26, 2023

Alan Schoen Mathematician Physicist. Alan was kind enough to allow me to photograph him, his models, prints, and house for this piece. Wikipedia. Alan’s website.
 
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Alan on February 22, 2023 – Taken by and courtesy of Reiko SchoenAlan on February 22, 2023 - Taken by and courtesy of Reiko Schoen

Reiko’s Image

Reiko Schoen took this image. Reiko was kind enough to give a digital copy of it to me and allow me to post it on this page of my site. It was taken almost 20 years after I did Alan’s portrait. Alan and Reiko decided to donate their print of Alan’s portrait to SIU’s Morris Library. It now hangs in a room largely devoted to Alan that also includes a large 1 X 1 X 1 meter sculpture of his famous gyroid minimal surface.

Technical Look at Alan’s portrait

The image was finished on January 24, 2004. It is 6,144 pixels wide by 9,216 pixels high. There are eight layers of image grids on top of the background image. Each is created with photomosaic software from images Alan allowed me to take of himself and his work. All layers have the same number of pixels. The product of the square of the first column times the second and third column values equals the total number of pixels in the image. It’s just a way of finding an image size which allows a range of subimage sizes to be arrayed in grids of equal sizes so that all share the same overall pixel dimensions.

For example, 256 X 256 X 24 X 36 = 56,623,104 pixels.

  • Square in Pixels by Pixels
  • 768
  • 512
  • 384
  • 256
  • 192
  • 128
  • 96
  • 64
  • Grid Width
  • 8
  • 12
  • 16
  • 24
  • 32
  • 48
  • 64
  • 96
  • Grid Height
  • 12
  • 18
  • 24
  • 36
  • 48
  • 72
  • 96
  • 144