Danny  Calegari

Nancy  Keystone

Sandy Blakeslee

The insides of atoms determine whether something is sweet, smelly or smooth; the insides of seeds contain all the information necessary to make sunflowers bloom; the insides of planets determine whether they have mountains, earthquakes, magnetic fields. But insides and outsides can be both complex and confusing. A mobius strip curls around on itself so that inside and outside are the same; that 3-pound mass of gray slime inside your head both interprets the outside world—and creates it.

For our October 28th Categorically Not, Caltech mathematician Danny Calegari will talk about how intuitive ideas about inside and outside are formalized in mathematics, and how, once these ideas have been made precise, they become a jumping off point for generalizations or more sophisticated variants. Sometimes the results are surprising: circles in the plane can't be turned inside out, but spheres in 3-dimensional space can be.

Moving into the mind, science writer Sandy Blakeslee of the New York Times and her science writer son Matt (co-authors of the new book: The Body Has a Mind of Its Own) will describe the sprawling network of body maps in your brain determine how you perceive and move about in the physical and social world—providing some fresh answers to puzzles of everyday experience and the mysteries of the mind-body connection.

For a theatrical perspective, Nancy Keystone, director of the Critical Mass Performance Group, will show how actors internalize ideas and then express them through the body. Nancy has created  award-winning productions at regional theatres across the country. Her company’s latest piece, Apollo, premiered at the Kirk Douglas Theatre in 2005 (Parts 1 and 2); Part 3 will be presented as a work in progress in LA on November 11 and 12th.

Matt Blakeslee