Monthly Archives: November 2018

Identification of key films and personalities in the history of Cinema from a Western perspective

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Livio Bioglio

A movie’s success is usually measured by how much money it makes and how many awards it receives. However, this metric is flawed on several levels, not least because it doesn’t account for the long lasting culture impact a movie might have. Yet how does one measure that? One approach that has just been published in Applied Network Science takes a closer look at which movies and characters have visibly influenced other movies, thus attempting to determine key films and figures in cinematic history.

Black holes in virtual reality

Virtual Reality

Jordy Davelaar

Black holes are some of the most extreme objects in the universe. They can be more massive than a billion suns. Matter in their surrounding gets trapped and accelerated to almost the speed of light, where it ends up behind the point-of-no-return: the event horizon. In Computational Astrophysics and Cosmology, Jordy Davelaar and team explore the theory behind these beasts by computing the plasma flows and radiation around them to understand how we observe them with telescopes, with the help of virtual reality.

Unveiling the invisible – mathematical methods for restoring and interpreting illuminated manuscripts

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Luca Calatroni, Marie D'Autume, Rob Hocking, Stella Panayotova, Simone Parisotto, Paola Ricciardi & Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb

When an old painting shows signs of decay, most people’s instinct would be to restore it, so as to bring it closer to how it originally looked like. However, some paintings – especially illuminated manuscripts – are too delicate to physically be restored. Surprisingly, mathematics may be able to help in this case: as a new article published in Heritage Science shows, mathematics can be used to not only digitally restore a painting, but also re-establish original versions of overpainted paintings, and even animate artworks.

Using science to enhance our understanding of the Ruby Slippers from the 1939 classic film, The Wizard of Oz

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Janet G. Douglas

The Ruby Slippers, worn by Judy Garland in the 1939 movie The Wizard of OZ, are an iconic piece of cinematic history and popular culture. Since 1979, one pair of these slippers has been in possession of the Smithsonian Institute, but merely possessing such a piece is not enough: informed conservation strategies are necessary so that many generations to come will be able to enjoy these slippers. But what are Dorothy’s slippers made of? A detailed material analysis published in Heritage Science tries to answer this question.