Tim Poston

Last updated

Tim Poston
TimPoston.jpg
Poston in 2016
Born(1945-06-19)19 June 1945
Died22 August 2017(2017-08-22) (aged 72)
Bangalore, India
NationalityBritish
Alma mater University of Hull (BSc Special Honours) [1]
University of Warwick (PhD) [2]
Known for Catastrophe theory, Topology
Scientific career
Fields Mathematics
Institutions National Institute of Advanced Studies [3]
UCLA
University of California, Santa Cruz
Battelle Institute
National University of Singapore
Academic advisors Erik Christopher Zeeman Roger Penrose
Website geometeer.com

Timothy Poston (19 June 1945 – 22 August 2017) was an English mathematician and polymath best known for his work on catastrophe theory.

Contents

His early childhood was in Moscow where his father served in the British Embassy for 18 months. When his father moved back to the UK to work for the BBC, Tim went to Datchworth primary school. Later his father ran The Near East Broadcasting Station Sharq al-Adna; his mother taught her children by PNEU until Tim went to The Junior School in Nicosia as a boarder. After the Suez débâcle, his father returned to the UK to train as a parson, and the family lived in Oxfordshire, Wiltshire and Dorset. Tim boarded at the Perse school to age 15 and then to Dauntsey's. From 1964 to 1967 he was an undergraduate at the University of Hull, obtaining a 1st Class BSc. (Special Honours) in Mathematics. In 1967-1969 he began graduate work at Hull, taking a sabbatical year as Student Union president. He then moved to the University of Warwick to take a PhD in mathematics.

His PhD thesis on " Fuzzy Geometry" was supervised by Christopher Zeeman and the PhD was awarded in 1972. This topic, otherwise known as "tolerance spaces", is similar to topology and should not be confused with fuzzy logic.

Tim specialized in geometry, graphics, algorithm design, human-computer interaction, medical imaging, patent writing and singularity theory. [4] His books on catastrophe theory and on differential geometry and relativity are still in print after a third of a century.

His academic career was carried out in a series of research centres, including Rio de Janeiro, Rochester NY, Porto, Geneva, Stuttgart, Charleston SC, Santa Cruz CA, Los Angeles CA, Pohang, Singapore, and Bangalore. His academic publications include 70 papers in journals and conference proceedings and 4 research texts.

His research areas include catastrophe theory, [5] the psychology of perception, [6] vibrations of crystals, [7] urban planning, [8] settlement patterns in archaeology, [9] 3D graphics, [10] magnetic resonance imaging, interaction with documents and with virtual 3D objects, dynamic text rendering, and brain surgery planning. [11] He has 18 patents issued, with another 12 in the pipeline.

From a very early age Tim discovered he not only liked to read science fiction, but loved writing down his own stories too. This ultimately led to the co-authoring of an SF novel The Living Labyrinth, published in 2016 by ReAnimus Press, and its sequel Rock Star in 2017.

Less well known is his role as active founding member of COUM Transmissions performance group with Genesis P-Orridge. They studied at Hull University together. Tim Poston wrote texts and advised COUM on physics and mathematics 1968–1978. Tim Poston remained "Scientific Adviser" to P-Orridge up until his death in 2017.

Books

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vladimir Arnold</span> Russian mathematician (1937–2010)

Vladimir Igorevich Arnold was a Soviet and Russian mathematician. While he is best known for the Kolmogorov–Arnold–Moser theorem regarding the stability of integrable systems, he made revolutionary and deep contributions in several areas including geometrical theory of dynamical systems theory, algebra, catastrophe theory, topology, algebraic geometry, symplectic geometry, symplectic topology, differential equations, classical mechanics, differential geometric approach to hydrodynamics, geometric analysis and singularity theory, including posing the ADE classification problem, since his first main result—the solution of Hilbert's thirteenth problem in 1957 at the age of 19. He co-founded two new branches of mathematics—KAM theory, and topological Galois theory. He is widely regarded as one of the greatest mathematicians of all time.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Convex hull</span> Smallest convex set containing a given set

In geometry, the convex hull or convex envelope or convex closure of a shape is the smallest convex set that contains it. The convex hull may be defined either as the intersection of all convex sets containing a given subset of a Euclidean space, or equivalently as the set of all convex combinations of points in the subset. For a bounded subset of the plane, the convex hull may be visualized as the shape enclosed by a rubber band stretched around the subset.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Throbbing Gristle</span> English band

Throbbing Gristle were an English music and visual arts group formed in 1975 in Kingston upon Hull by Genesis P-Orridge, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson, and Chris Carter. They are widely regarded as pioneers of industrial music. Evolving from the experimental performance art group COUM Transmissions, Throbbing Gristle made their public debut in October 1976 in the COUM exhibition Prostitution, and released their debut single "United/Zyklon B Zombie" and debut album The Second Annual Report the following year. P-Orridge's lyrics mainly revolved around mysticism, extremist political ideologies, sexuality, dark or underground aspects of society, and idiosyncratic manipulation of language.

Su Buqing, also spelled Su Buchin, was a Chinese mathematician, educator and poet. He was the founder of differential geometry in China, and served as president of Fudan University and honorary chairman of the Chinese Mathematical Society.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Genesis P-Orridge</span> English artist, musician and writer (1950–2020)

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge was an English singer-songwriter, musician, poet, performance artist, visual artist, and occultist who rose to notoriety as the founder of the COUM Transmissions artistic collective and lead vocalist of seminal industrial band Throbbing Gristle. P-Orridge was also a founding member of Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth occult group, and fronted the experimental pop rock band Psychic TV.

Noncommutative geometry (NCG) is a branch of mathematics concerned with a geometric approach to noncommutative algebras, and with the construction of spaces that are locally presented by noncommutative algebras of functions. A noncommutative algebra is an associative algebra in which the multiplication is not commutative, that is, for which does not always equal ; or more generally an algebraic structure in which one of the principal binary operations is not commutative; one also allows additional structures, e.g. topology or norm, to be possibly carried by the noncommutative algebra of functions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ian Stewart (mathematician)</span> British mathematician and a popular-science and science-fiction writer

Ian Nicholas Stewart is a British mathematician and a popular-science and science-fiction writer. He is Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at the University of Warwick, England.

In mathematics, catastrophe theory is a branch of bifurcation theory in the study of dynamical systems; it is also a particular special case of more general singularity theory in geometry.

COUM Transmissions was a music and performance art collective who operated in the United Kingdom from 1969 through to 1976. The collective was influenced by the Dada and surrealism artistic movements, the writers of the Beat Generation, and underground music. COUM were openly confrontational and subversive, challenging aspects of conventional British society. Founded in Hull, Yorkshire by Genesis P-Orridge, other prominent early members included Cosey Fanni Tutti and Spydeee Gasmantell. Part-time members included Tim Poston, "Brook" Menzies, Haydn Robb, Les Maull, Ray Harvey, John Smith, Foxtrot Echo, Fizzy Paet and John Gunni Busck. Later members included Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson and Chris Carter, who together with P-Orridge and Fanni Tutti went on to found the pioneering industrial band Throbbing Gristle in 1976.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bertram Kostant</span> American Jewish mathematician

Bertram Kostant was an American mathematician who worked in representation theory, differential geometry, and mathematical physics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Joe Harris (mathematician)</span> American mathematician

Joseph Daniel Harris is a mathematician at Harvard University working in the field of algebraic geometry. After earning an AB from Harvard College, where he took Math 55, he continued at Harvard to study for a PhD under Phillip Griffiths.

Shlomo Zvi Sternberg, is an American mathematician known for his work in geometry, particularly symplectic geometry and Lie theory.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alan Weinstein</span> American mathematician

Alan David Weinstein is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, working in the field of differential geometry, and especially in Poisson geometry.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Umbilical point</span>

In the differential geometry of surfaces in three dimensions, umbilics or umbilical points are points on a surface that are locally spherical. At such points the normal curvatures in all directions are equal, hence, both principal curvatures are equal, and every tangent vector is a principal direction. The name "umbilic" comes from the Latin umbilicus (navel).

Fuzzy mathematics is the branch of mathematics including fuzzy set theory and fuzzy logic that deals with partial inclusion of elements in a set on a spectrum, as opposed to simple binary "yes" or "no" inclusion. It started in 1965 after the publication of Lotfi Asker Zadeh's seminal work Fuzzy sets. Linguistics is an example of a field that utilizes fuzzy set theory.

In mathematics, especially in singularity theory, the splitting lemma is a useful result due to René Thom which provides a way of simplifying the local expression of a function usually applied in a neighbourhood of a degenerate critical point.

In computing, especially computational geometry, a real RAM is a mathematical model of a computer that can compute with exact real numbers instead of the binary fixed point or floating point numbers used by most actual computers. The real RAM was formulated by Michael Ian Shamos in his 1978 Ph.D. dissertation.

Ian Robertson Porteous was a Scottish mathematician at the University of Liverpool and an educator on Merseyside. He is best known for three books on geometry and modern algebra. In Liverpool he and Peter Giblin are known for their registered charity Mathematical Education on Merseyside which promotes enthusiasm for mathematics through sponsorship of an annual competition.

Mathematics is a broad subject that is commonly divided in many areas that may be defined by their objects of study, by the used methods, or by both. For example, analytic number theory is a subarea of number theory devoted to the use of methods of analysis for the study of natural numbers.

Albert Marden is an American mathematician, specializing in complex analysis and hyperbolic geometry.

References

  1. http://geometeer.com/geometeerplaces.html [ dead link ]
  2. "Mathematics Genealogy Project: Tim Poston". North Dakota State University. Retrieved 21 February 2009.
  3. "Poston-resuma".
  4. https://www.linkedin.com/in/timposton [ self-published source ]
  5. Poston, T.; Stewart, I. (1978). Catastrophe Theory and Its Applications. Pitman.
  6. Poston, Tim; Stewart, Ian (1 January 1978). "Nonlinear modeling of multistable perception". Behavioral Science. 23 (4): 318–334. doi:10.1002/bs.3830230403. ISSN   1099-1743. PMID   736877.
  7. Poston, T.; Budgor, A.B. (1975). "A geometrical approach to calculating the energy and frequency spectra of crystals". J. Comput. Phys. 47 (1): 1–28. Bibcode:1975JCoPh..19....1P. doi:10.1016/0021-9991(75)90113-8.
  8. Poston, T; Wilson, A G (24 July 2016). "Facility Size versus Distance Travelled: Urban Services and the Fold Catastrophe". Environment and Planning A. 9 (6): 681–686. doi:10.1068/a090681. S2CID   143246575.
  9. RENFREW, COLIN; POSTON, TIM (1979). Transformations. pp.  437–461. doi:10.1016/b978-0-12-586050-5.50033-6. ISBN   9780125860505.
  10. Lee, Chung-Nim; Poston, Timothy; Rosenfeld, Azriel (1991). "Representation of orthogonal regions by vertices". CVGIP: Graphical Models and Image Processing . 53 (2): 149–156. doi:10.1016/1049-9652(91)90058-r.
  11. Lim, K. M.; Wang, F.; Poston, T.; Zhang, L.; Teo, C. L.; Burdet, E. (April 2004). "Multi-scale simulation for microsurgery trainer". IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2004. Proceedings. ICRA '04. 2004. Vol. 2. pp. 1215–1220 Vol.2. CiteSeerX   10.1.1.101.8493 . doi:10.1109/robot.2004.1307990. ISBN   978-0-7803-8232-9. S2CID   15965726.
  12. Dodson, Christopher T. J.; Poston, Timothy (23 November 2009). Tensor Geometry: The Geometric Viewpoint and its Uses (Graduate Texts in Mathematics) (Hardcover). ISBN   978-3540520184.