Jason (jcreed) wrote,
Jason
jcreed

Poking around the library again today. Found out Martin Schongauer had already developed the amazing German Renaissance cross-hatching style I had associated mainly with Dürer. In fact according to one book young Albrecht had attempted a pilgrimage in 1492 at the age of 21 to Schongauer's home town of Colmar, only to find out that the master had died a year earlier. So now I don't know for sure if Schongauer himself had really "invented" that style in any significant sense, but at least I know that Dürer didn't.

In other news I found a 1986 paper by Alexander Herold and Jörg H. Siekmann in the Journal of Automated Reasoning titled "Unification in Abelian Semigroups" that puts to rest a minor conjecture I had made that I had sincerely hoped to be true — sadly it isn't. ACU-unification (that is, equational unification where the theory is associativity and commutativity of some binary symbol *, plus unit laws for some unit element e) with constants isn't unitary, (i.e. doesn't have most general unifiers) but merely finitary (has finite complete sets of unifiers). So everything is still well and good for typechecking in my little substructural hybrid LF variant being decidable, but term reconstruction at the world level is going to be incomplete just as it is for the rest of term reconstruction. Not at all a disaster, but I thought I had convinced myself that MGUs existed, which would have been nice.
Tags: art, duerer, german, math, renaissance, work
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