Thesis - Responsive Architecture

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Nicholas Negroponte

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Nicholas Negroponte (born 1943) is a Greek-American architect and computer scientist best known as the founder and Chairman Emeritus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab, and also known as the founder of The One Laptop per Child association (OLPC).

Origins of responsive architecture.

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Inverse kinematics

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inverse kinematics problem must be solved so that the desired endpoint location can be specified in Cartesian coordinates, rather than in the joint space of the manipulator

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Chaos story

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We will meet Isaac Newton, the champion of order who gave us a picture of the universe so orderly that it seemed to outlaw chaos once and for all. Two hundred years later, a chink in Newton’s armor appeared and gave humanity its first glimpse of mathematical chaos. When it was revealed to Henri Poincaré, however, he recoiled from it; the picture he uncovered was horrifying in both its implications and its appearance. We will see why Poincaré’s discovery was overshadowed and forgotten for 70 years before being rediscovered in even starker form by Ed Lorenz, a meteorologist at MIT. His work gave us the concept of the butterfly effect, which incredibly had no impact until the 1970s and 1980s, when the tidal wave of chaos theory finally hit.

Chaos theorists were among the earliest scientists to focus on nonlinear systems in which the whole is more (or less) than the sum of the parts.

involve thickets of interlocking feedback loops in which everything affects everything else and the simple logic of cause and effect breaks down.

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Philosophy of science

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Two stories about the origins, doctrines, and criticisms of the logical
empiricist project:


The first centers on notions of meaning and evidence and leads from the positivists through the
work of Thomas Kuhn to various kinds of social constructivism and postmodernism.

The second story begins from the notion of explanation and culminates in versions of naturalism and scientific realism.