Niles Johnson

Most of what I do has some kind of artistic component; it's more apparent in some projects than others.

• Recently I finished an animation Visualizing Seven-Manifolds based on Milnor's 1956 construction of exotic 7-spheres. This 9-minute video is my longest to date!


A slice of the seven-sphere, computed using Sage and Tachyon.

• Some time ago I made a few Paintings and photographs.
• My first major video project was an animation of the Hopf fibration, inspired by Ken Shoemake's famous picture. Check out the result on my Hopf video page!
  

  A raytraced visualization of the Hopf fibration, computed using Sage and Tachyon.

  

  A second version, showing the base 2-sphere and the special fibers over the North and South poles.

• Here are the images from some t-shirts I made for my son; maybe I'll put up some pictures of him wearing them eventually.
  

Here is a list of other projects or things I think are neat.

• This webpage is equipped with alternate style sheets. The default is Hopf, and the other is SOHO. There is also an option for No Style. Background information about these is available on the Design Info page.
• Some time I'd like to learn how to use trackbacks. Then I could send links to the arXiv.
• I use Valery Alexeev's fantastic GmailTeX greasemonkey script to view compiled LaTeX from within Gmail! A Chrome extension and bookmarklet are also available.
• I have started using MathJax to display LaTeX on my webpage: \[ \int_{- \infty}^\infty e^{-x^2} \, dx = \sqrt{\pi} \]
• I use TeX4ht to generate pdf and html versions of my CV from the same source file.
• A friend showed me how to set the Apple touch icon in case you want to bookmark my page from an apple touch device. The link also provides a javascript function to reset the touch icon using the URL of any image: try
  http://www.nilesjohnson.net/images/tshirt/Free-Hugs.png
  if you don't have another one in mind! ... does that make you want to bookmark my page from an Apple touch device?
• I've just added a JavaScript feature which you can use to send me an RSA-encrypted message using my public key, in case that was something you needed to do. In the HTML source there, you can also read how to set up a function like this for yourself, using your own public key.
• A QR code (slightly tweaked):
  

  Where does it point? Well, that's for you to figure out :) Here is one link which will let you generate your own.

• I've started to be a regular user of TikZ, and now I have my own TikZ demo page.