About Dattatreya

How wonderful to hear from you. And what a nice coincidence because yesterday I went to see the MC Escher exhibition in London, seeing all the familiar images and finding them at first disappointing and then deeply fascinating. Disappointing because they were no different from the reproductions. Deeply fascinating because up close you could see the finest details of his craftsmanship then zoom out to see how his “big picture ideas” (the ones we all know and take for granted) only work because every thing scales from the smallest dot to the largest line. Marvelling at your images I could also get a sense of the horrendous intellectual challenges to get the images to be created, while admiring the beauty of the final results. The wonderful feature image, the NPR woman, really drew me in. But I have to confess that although that specific combination of geometry and form was compelling, I found, say, Tom Cruise to be off-putting rather than compelling. But art isn’t intended to produce boring agreement; it was fascinating to explore why I disliked the Cruise (and many other NPRs) while always being drawn back to your feature image. One of the Eschers is his 3 ellipses, his insistence that the 3 increasingly sphere-like objects are not spheres. Going into your Spirographic Guilloché Mandels I was attracted by the orange ball which is the lead image, only to find that they weren’t all spherical. I had to look up Guilloché to understand what you were doing. Again, stepping from the details out to the whole was fascinating. I took an instant dislike to the Mondrians, especially the “incomplete” ones … till I realised that I was an idiot and that these, too, were deeply fascinating. Indeed, I found myself admiring the Mondrians, because they reflected your personal choice of every detail. The perfection of the 100% algorithmic art (even though there is a lot of meta-design choice and a ton of arduous coding to make them work) can be a bit wearisome. So, a great journey of exploration to start my day, and a chance to continue exploring the thoughts prompted by Escher. Maybe it’s not every day Dattatreya and Escher are compared and contrasted. At 75 I continue to enjoy work. Getting paid for my science software, getting paid for consultancies for megacorps, then giving my time and energy to those startups who ask for my help. I saw the Escher because I had to spend a day in the lab with 2 guys with zero lab experience but an interesting product idea. I could then get the Underground to the Thames embankment and enjoy a short stroll by the Thames before going into the exhibition. I’m also now known around the world as a coffee scientist who, from a small home laboratory and a laptop, continually challenge the stupidities of the big, well-funded coffee labs that produce worthless blah science … because their funder’s fortune depends on them selling woo rather than real science. I helped a brilliant coffee scholar shake up the coffee world recently when she showed that the “acidity” that the experts pretends to taste is an illusion. The coffee acids they all talk about are literally tasteless at normal pHs for drinking coffee. I’m shortly coming out with Part 2 of my Aroma Project where, for the first time in coffee science, I can measure the amount of aroma in ground beans or in a cup of coffee produced from those beans. It’s astonishing that those with $million budgets have never found a way to ask and answer simple questions about aroma, when aroma is such a fundamental part of a good coffee. I did it for $5000, much of which was due to my own errors as I stumbled towards a simpler way of doing it. Meeting you all those years ago was a delight for many reasons. Here was a guy who was totally at home with the maths of (and knew personally) Black/Scholes, has a high-powered holdings/management business and then combines maths/computer skills with beautiful art … and is a deeply civilised individual. It was one of those rare encounters which reinforce the fact that the world is a wonderful place, spoiled by merely a handful of jerks. I just read your Big Give letter. I see that you set yourself on a path that appreciated giving (the sponsorship that allowed you to move from Bangalore), learning (your determination to get a 4.0 in a topic you found to be valuable) and hard work (when you at first failed to grasp Queuing Theory!). These are simple and universal truths, yet too few people adopt them. In multiple ways I’m not in your league, but I try my best, in my own way, to live up to those core principles. Hmmm… a bit more exploring. Why do I NOT like the Random Lines while so liking the Mondrians? I couldn’t put my finger on it, but it turns out to be that old classic – that “constraints” in art can be a positive. With the Mondrians you are forced to work with the underlying symmetry, so your choices are limited. With the Random Lines I get a sense of “Here’s one” and “Here’s another” that reduces, for me, the impact. That’s the wrong way to put it, but sort of captures what I mean. But, again, not all viewers are expected to like everything equally and I’m sure there are some who prefer the liberty of Random Lines while hating the symmetry of the Mondrians. Fascinating! Thank you for sharing all this amazing work. There will be relatively few people who will understand the intellectual challenges of producing them; my own multiple failures with simple Celtic knots is a good reminder of how challenging your creations are. Today will be something like 35 °C here, an unimaginably high temperature for the UK. Dire “red warnings” are in place. But this is cool compared to the truly scary temperatures and awful air quality in many parts of India. It’s heartbreaking that it was utterly predictable that many parts of the world would end up with scary temperatures and yet the combination of intertia and denialism has meant that the lives of millions will be made deeply worse.