Midsummer madness

A midsummer night's dream

It's your first Gordon conference. You've milled around at Logan Airport with hundreds of other scientists and scrambled onto the big green buses. You've made the compulsory stop at the New Hampshire State Liquor store and watched scientists you've idolized buy two fifths of Jack Daniels that they plan to finish by Thursday. night. You've checked in at the school that looks like a minimum secur...

Midsummer Combinatorial Workshop 2012

Madness

here are clouds in the painting, of course. Almost any one of us would have included those clouds, thick with electricity and rainwater. And there is the wheat field, smudged out like an empty palm, orange beneath the storm-stricken sun. Surely, many of us would have insisted on the wheat as well. Through the middle of the wheat, a rutted road slices to the horizon and disappears beneath the cl...

Names and References in Midsummer Night’s Dream

Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream is about true love and felicitous marriage as essentials of both natural and social order. With three interwoven plots, Shakespeare’s names and references reflect three types of sources, each with associative possibilities relevant to the basic themes. The main plot is about Athenian nobles whose names draw symbolic meaning from Greek mythology. It focuses ...

A Midsummer Night's Dream (with flying robots)

Seven flying robot “fairies” joined human actors in the Texas A&M production of William Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The production was a collaboration between the departments of Computer Science and Engineering, Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Theater Arts. The collaboration was motivated by two assertions. First, that the performing arts have principles for creating belie...