Tempus Fujitsu - Photo Nº 1

Tempus Fujitsu considers it her sacred duty to stand outside the city wearing a gold coat, mostly silent, mostly stationary – standing here, welcoming newcomers to Paris. As a new person arrives from the dusty outskirts, Tempus Fujitsu pauses, bends, and with an elaborate flourish of her hat and hand welcomes this newcomer into the city. She’s a success at this. She’s been doing it for a while. And others have caught on, decided that they want to do this too. So a few hundred yards beyond her, even further into the outskirts of Paris, there’s another robot, Mr. Godspeed-Mompers. He welcomes newcomers to the city the same way, wears the same gold coat, flashes them with an elaborate flourish as well. Over time, a transfinite number of robots has emerged to welcome newcomers like you into the city, each robot taking position beyond the previous robot. And now, by the time you get to Tempus Fujitsu, you’ve had enough already, you’re tired of being welcomed to the city, you ignore all these robots. And it’s easy to ignore them all, because the city has grown a lot since the time Tempus Fujitsu first took up her mostly stationary post outside the city entrance. The city is growing, restaurants and civic centers have grown around her. Statues have gone up, there are street fairs to be had, there’s seafood and sultry things for sale on the sidewalks of Paris in summer. And on walking through an open-air weekend market, you realize how far you’ve come from the smells of crabs and sea-spume from your childhood. True, and there are stalls selling fennel, African dates, and these wonderful flat Saturn peaches, and you taste Paris on a no-fooling sticky summer’s day, your hands and face smeared like a little kid’s with unwashed peach flesh, peach juice. And a French street corner is the smell of seafood in the sunlight, rotting in the skies unclouded blue & covered in wisteria blossoms.... And Tempus Fujitsu is all but forgotten, where she still wears her gold coat, still flourishes her hat from time to time, all-but-forgotten and mostly unseen among the arches and pavilions of Paris, so large now that it has overgrown the suburbs and surrounding countryside and has become something of a spaceport of its former self. Welcome to the new next-generation Paris, as illustrated in this, the new next-generation L’Illustration magazine!

 

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Here is the text used in the montage; it comes from "Mathematical Foundations of Scientific Visualization, Computer Graphics, and Massive Data Exploration (Mathematics and Visualization)"

 

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58 A. Mascarenhas and J. Snoeyink Fig. 10. The functions f and g are represented by their dotted and solid level curves. The Jacobi curve is drawn in bold solid lines. The birth-death points and the critical points of the two functions are marked by white and shaded dots, respectivelyobtained by adding time as an extra dimension to the domain and letting g represent time. For a regular value t \Xi R, consider the level set g-1(t) and the restriction of f to this level set ft : g-1(t) \Lambda R. The Jacobi curve of f and g is the closure of the set of critical points of the functions ft , for all t \Xi R. The closure operation adds the critical points of f restricted to level sets at critical values, as well as the critical points of g, which form singularities in these level sets. We use Fig. 10 from [23] to illustrate the definition by showing the Jacobi curve of two smooth functions on a piece of the two-dimensional plane. To understand this picture, imagine f as a conelike mountain indicated by dotted level curves, and the solid level curves of g gliding over that mountain. On the left, we see a circle beginning at a minimum of g and expanding outwards on a slope. As this circle expands a maximum of the restriction of f moves up and a minimum moves down from the starting point.Consider a 1-parameter family of Morse functions on the 3-sphere, f : S3 *R \Lambda R , and introduce an auxiliary function g : S3 * R \Lambda R defined by g(x, t) = t. A level set has the form g-1(t) = S3 * t, and the restriction of f to this level set is ft : S3 * t \Lambda R. The Jacobi curve of f and g may consist of several components, and in the assumed generic case each is a closed 1-manifold. Identify the birth-death points where the level sets of f and g and the Jacobi curve have a common normal direction. To understand these points, imagine a level set in the form of a (twodimensional) sphere deforming, sprouting a bud, as we go forward in time. The bud has two critical points, one a maximum and the other a 2-saddle. At the time when the bud just starts sprouting there is a point on the sphere, a birth point, where both these critical points are born. Run this in reverse order to understand a death point. Decompose the Jacobi curve into segments by cutting it at the birth-death points. The index of the critical point tracing a segment is the same everywhere along the segment. The indices within two segments that meet at a birth-death point differ by one:

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