Fernando Zalamea is a Colombian mathematician, philosopher, cultural critic and writer living in Bogotá, Columbia. He opens up the vast spectrum of modern and contemporary mathematics and the new philosophical possibilities they suggestto any of us who have ever read an epic novel, been moved by a piece of art, or wonder about the complexity of human understanding and social life. His thinking — as summarised in English in his book Synthetic Philosophy of Contemporary Mathematics (Urbanomic x Sequence Press 2012) — weaves together strands of the modern and postmodern, the rational and the romantic into a synthetic universality, endlessly revisable and updatable, and puts forward an idea of the trans and transmodernity as a term to encompass our unfolding epoch.

Study Session General Info

Study Sessions are informal, slightly more intimate spaces and a chance to geek out. Some might be presentations, some might be workshops; each will open out the ideas and themes in the Episode, led by people who’ve been considering them for ages. This one is about the interconnectedness of mathematical ways of thinking and the complex back and forth of our cultural lives.

Image Description: Darton & Gardner’s Comparative Chart of World Mountains and Rivers 1823. A hand drawn illustration in light greens and blues. From left to right, moving from the longest to the shortest, are drawn the worlds’ great rivers. They form a triangular shape narrowing to a point at the top right corner. Below them, from right to left, starting with the least tall, and moving to the highest, are drawn the worlds’ great mountains. They start as a narrow point of a triangle in the bottom left, and grow to the highest point at the top right. A chart of data used to compile the illustration obscures the bottom left corner. The image reflects Fernando Zalamea’s obsession with the novels Moby Dick and Under the Volcano, and contemporary maths’ swings from heights to depths.