Playing

I love playing the piano (and pretending I can play the trumpet), with a particular preference for classical music and jazz. Below are some recordings.

On the piano
Natu Trio with Greg Prior (bass) and Rico Oliveira (drums)
Mix project "Napoli-Rio"
Trio with Luciano Napoli (bass) and Marco Pepe (drums)
Stella by starlight
IFAC Control Orchestra

Leibniz rule

Musica est exercitium arithmeticae occultum nescientis se numerare animi.

"Ah, Garibaldi che hai fatto!": Thoughts on art and technology

Both art and technology have the ability of generating disruptive innovation, introducing new artistic movements, industrial products, methodologies, and practices that fundamentally transform the world we live in. Impressionism and electric lights are just two examples of artistic current and technological invention, respectively, that radically changed previous practices in painting and everyday life.

The choice of these two examples illustrates also another aspect of art and technology, namely their interplay. The proliferation of electric lights through Paris in the Belle Époque transformed the scenery that avant-gard painters depicted using novel techniques that were able to capture both the excitement and the anxiety of modernization. The "Bal du moulin de la Galette" by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, shown in the figure above on the left, prototypically embodies the reciprocity between art and technology.

More active attempts to explore the space where art and technology intersect gave birth to several artistic movements, ranging from dadaism—embodied in the original unbranded Italian moka pot1, shown in the figure above on the right—to the more recent digital art and generative forms of art. Among technologies that have significantly shaped our lives there is robotics, concerned with the design and operation of intelligent autonomous machines. Intelligence in robotics has been traditionally intended as algorithmic2, but increasingly more attention is now being given to creative processes originated, aided, or just involving robots.

1"E allora pure chesta è un'opera d'arte." (Neapolitan which translates to "Then this is an artwork too."), from the movie "Il mistero di Bellavista" (1985), written, directed and starring the 21st century Neapolitan philosopher, and engineer, Luciano De Crescenzo (Napoli, 1928-2019)

2Roger Penrose, "The emperor's new mind: Concerning computers, minds, and the laws of physics.", Oxford University Press, 2016

Photographing

Conferences.
"Ceci n'est pas des mathématiques": integrants, critically damped frames, non-smooth manifoldosa, determinism.

Cycling

When I was younger, I used to love cycling uphill just for the fun of then riding fast downhill drifting into a turn after the other. After risking my life too many times, I am now starting to really enjoy the fatigue of the climb for the sake of it, followed by a peaceful panoramic descent.

Here is the timelapse of a fantastic tour on the Sorrento peninsula and the Amalfi coast done in the Summer 2016.

And below are the tracking data of a couple of recent nice tours touching the highest peaks of the Parco Regionale dei Monti Lattari.

Reading

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ssome books i really enjoyed reading over the years

Despite the titles, most of them are both non-technical and a lot of fun!

  • Jorge Amado, O país do carnaval
  • Naum Vilenkin, Stories about sets
  • Roger Penrose, The emperor's new mind
  • Carlo Cipolla, Pepper, wine (and wool) as the dynamic factors of the social and economic development of the middle ages
  • Carlo Cipolla, The basic laws of human stupidity
  • Umberto Galimberti, I miti del nostro tempo
  • Murray Bookchin, Toward an ecological society
  • Godfrey Harold Hardy, A mathematician's apology
  • Richard Feynman, QED
  • Richard Feynman, Six easy pieces
  • Richard Feynman, Six not-so-easy pieces
  • Richard Feynman, literally anything from The Feynman lectures on physics
  • Richard Feynman, Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman!
  • Richard Feynman, What do you care what other people think?
  • David Richeson, Euler's gem
  • Denis Guedj, The parrot's theorem
  • Marcus du Sautoy, The music of the primes

Quoting

Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit. — William Somerset Maugham

Sed quomodo poterimus amare mundum si amamus Deum? Duo sunt amores: mundi et Dei. Si Dei amor habitet, non est qua intret amor mundi. Recedat amor Dei, et habitet amor mundi. — (almost) Saint Augustine

Il saggio è colui che quando ha sete e beve sente l'acqua fresca che gli scende per la gola e pensa: “Oh quant'è bello bere”. — Luciano de Crescenzo

Tensio condensatoris saltus non facit, Natura nemo scit. — Anonymous, but was used by many to justify their work and life

La migliore non c'è. — Totò in Eduardo Scarpetta's Miseria e Nobiltà

[...] in questo universo globalizzato in cui pare che ormai tutti vedano gli stessi film e mangino lo stesso cibo, esistano ancora fratture abissali e incolmabili tra cultura e cultura. Come faranno mai a intendersi due popoli di cui uno ignora Totò? — Umberto Eco

Come è possibile far capire a un contadino dell'Arkansas cosa vuol dire “Sono un uomo di mondo perché ho fatto il militare a Cuneo”. O ancora: “a prescindere”, “eziandìo”, “mi scompiscio” o “tomo tomo, cacchio cacchio”? — Luciano de Crescenzo