From Smithsonian Magazine:
Glen Whitney stands at a point on the surface of the Earth, north
latitude 40.742087, west longitude 73.988242, which is near the center
of Madison Square Park, in New York City. Behind him is the city’s
newest museum, the Museum of Mathematics, which Whitney, a former Wall
Street trader, founded and now runs as executive director. He is facing
one of New York’s landmarks, the Flatiron Building, which got its name
because its wedge- like shape reminded people of a clothes iron. Whitney
observes that from this perspective you can’t tell that the building,
following the shape of its block, is actually a right triangle—a shape
that would be useless for pressing clothes—although the models sold in
souvenir shops represent it in idealized form as an isosceles, with
equal angles at the base. People want to see things as symmetrical, he
muses. He points to the building’s narrow prow, whose outline
corresponds to the acute angle at which Broadway crosses Fifth Avenue.
“The cross street here is 23rd Street,” Whitney says, “and if you
measure the angle at the building’s point, it is close to 23 degrees,
which also happens to be approximately the angle of inclination of the
Earth’s axis of rotation.”
“That’s remarkable,” he is told.
“Not really. It’s coincidence.” He adds that, twice each year, a few
weeks on either side of the summer solstice, the setting sun shines
directly down the rows of Manhattan’s numbered streets, a phenomenon
sometimes called “Manhattanhenge.” Those particular dates don’t have any
special significance, either, except as one more example of how the
very bricks and stones of the city illustrate the principles of the
highest product of the human intellect, which is math.
Cities are particular: You would never mistake a favela in
Rio de Janeiro for downtown Los Angeles. They are shaped by their
histories and accidents of geography and climate. Thus the “east-west”
streets of Midtown Manhattan actually run northwest-southeast, to meet
the Hudson and East rivers at roughly 90 degrees, whereas in Chicago the
street grid aligns closely with true north, while medieval cities such
as London don’t have right-angled grids. But cities are also, at a deep
level, universal: the products of social, economic and physical
principles that transcend space and time. A new science—so new it
doesn’t have its own journal, or even an agreed-upon name—is exploring
these laws. We will call it “quantitative urbanism.” It’s an effort to
reduce to mathematical formulas the chaotic, exuberant, extravagant
nature of one of humanity’s oldest and most important inventions, the
city.
The systematic study of cities dates back at least to the Greek
historian Herodotus. In the early 20th century, scientific disciplines
emerged around specific aspects of urban development: zoning theory,
public health and sanitation, transit and traffic engineering. By the
1960s, the urban-planning writers Jane Jacobs and William H. Whyte used
New York as their laboratory to study the street life of neighborhoods,
the walking patterns of Midtown pedestrians, the way people gathered and
sat in open spaces. But their judgments were generally aesthetic and
intuitive (although Whyte, photographing the plaza of the Seagram
Building, derived the seat-of-the-pants formula for bench space in
public spaces: one linear foot per 30 square feet of open area). “They
had fascinating ideas,” says Luís Bettencourt, a researcher at the Santa
Fe Institute, a think tank better known for its contributions to
theoretical physics, “but where is the science? What is the empirical
basis for deciding what kind of cities we want?” Bettencourt, a
physicist, practices a discipline that shares a deep affinity with
quantitative urbanism. Both require understanding complex interactions
among large numbers of entities: the 20 million people in the New York
metropolitan area, or the countless subatomic particles in a nuclear
reaction....MUCH MORE
HT:
God Plays Dice
