Happy birthday to #mathematician & #polymath, Mary Fairfax Somerville (1780-1872). As a young widow she made a name for herself when she won a silver medal in 1811 from the Military College at Marlow math journal. Wallace suggested she read Laplace & finding she understood it as well as her tutor her confidence increased, & she expanded her studies to #astronomy, chemistry, #geography, microscopy, electricity & magnetism.

🧵1/n
#printmaking #womeninstemm #linocut #sciart

A 2023 #scientist #linocut for #ArtAdventCalendar of #astronomer Vera Rubin (neé Cooper, ‘28-‘16) & her discovery that angular motion of galaxies deviates from predictions, 1st evidence for dark matter, now known as 5x as common as matter & the stuff which dictates dynamics of galaxies & evolution of our universe! The Nobel committee waited 3 years after she died to reward another for the theory of dark matter.

She found 6 months mat leave post MSc very difficult 🧵1/n

#printmaking #sciart

For #ArtAdventCalendar Day 3, a new scientist portrait: my #linocut of ancient Chinese Han Dynasty #polymath & statesman Zhang Heng (78-139) who invented a seismoscope (a simplified seismometer which doesn’t record earth motions) to detect distant earthquakes & indicate their direction, 2000 years ago! Here with a reconstruction of his seismoscope, schematic of how it might have worked & horizontal earthquake surface waves (Rayleigh waves in particular).

#histSci #printmaking #sciart 🧵1/n

Project #linocut steampunk #piecepack is under way!

Quite a few months ago I started the project by making this

and buying some supplies (such as non-black linocut ink :D ), and then procrastination happened and I got quite stuck.

Today I've actually drawn all most of the pieces on tracing paper, I need to add the smaller suites, trace everything from the reverse, and then finally carve the linoleum.

And then maybe I'll start procrastinating again, or maybe I'll actually do some test prints in the weekend?

I may also be thinking of regular piecepack suites and playing card suites in the same style, but first I need to actually assemble a piecepack and discover whether it will work.