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Event #3

For my third event of the quarter, I visited the Leonard Kleinrock Internet Heritage Site located in Boelter Hall. Although I spend a lot of time in Mathematical Sciences and Boelter Hall as a Mathematics major with a specialization in Computing, I had neither visited nor heard of the Leonard Kleinrock Internet Heritage Site. As a result, when I arrived, I was initially surprised by the impactful history that took place in 3420 Boelter Hall: the Birthplace of the Internet. Leonard Kleinrock was a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology from 1960-1962 when he developed the mathematical theory of packet networks, the technology which serves as the foundation of the Internet. In 1969, in 3420 Boelter Hall, Kelinrock's computer became the first node of the Internet. From there, Kleinrock directed the transmission of the first ever message to pass over the Internet. The computer in Kleinrock's lab can be seen here: With this in mind, I couldn't ...
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Week 9 | Space + Art

This week Professor Vesna provided insights on how Space has influenced Art. I learned that Nicolaus Copernicus, Polish astronomer and mathematician, was the first to publish a heliocentric model of the solar system in the 16th century. This was the first time the idea that sun was the center of the solar system was explained scientifically in mathematical detail. Later on, in the 17th century, the telescope was invented and marked the beginning of a new era filled with extraordinary discoveries. I also learned that the Space Race was started in 1961 by the launch of Sputnik, a satellite, by the USSR. In 1961, Yuri Gagarin, Russian astronaut, became the first human in space. Alan Shepard, American astronaut, followed about a month later. In 1962, John Glenn became the first human to circle the Earth. Ultimately, these events led to the Apollo missions, and in 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first human on the moon. In today's society, the influence space has on art can be...

Event #2

For my second event of the quarter, I visited UCLA’s Meteorite Galley located in the Geology building. I had never visited the gallery before, so I was pleasantly surprised by how much information it had to offer. The first thing that caught my eye when I entered the gallery was a 357 pound iron meteorite pictured here: While I was initially impressed by the size of this meteorite, which was found in Arizona, I soon began to ponder about the complexity behind how it was created. Luckily, information on how these meteorites are formed and classified is provided in the gallery, as seen here: I soon found out that extraterrestrial rocks come in immense sizes, for example, Itokawa: a 535x294x209 meter asteroid. In addition, in 2011, NASA's dawn spacecraft arrived at Vesta: the second largest asteroid with an average diameter of approximately 525 kilometers.  What really intrigued me while visiting the gallery was the wide variety of extraterrestri...

Week 7 | Neuroscience + Art

This week Professor Vesna provided insights on how neuroscience has influenced art. A question that intrigued me from lecture was: how did consciousness come to be? I learned that Aristotle, Ancient Greek philosopher, thought that the brain was a cooling mechanism for the body and that actual human thinking occurred in the heart. Franz Joseph Gall, a German scientist, later debunked this idea and founded phrenology: the determination of an individual's  potential by feeling bumps on the head. This ultimately led people to believe that the size of a person's head was correlated to their intellect. Gall was convinced that mental functions were localized in specific regions of the brain and that human behavior was dependent upon these functions.  While phrenology was eventually disproven, Gall's concept of localized function In the brain was proven correct by Pierre Paul Broca, a French physician. Gall was also the first to identify the gray matter of th...