  warning: this is a rant in response to the attitude taken by many artists that mathematics is something beyond their means, a playground solely for mathematicians. or that programming, too, is outside of their scope. perhaps i was once in this category, but i've been discovering that nature is essentially programmatic. the way that dna functions to copy information to propagate the species can be broken down into a sequence of steps. we exist in the midst of sequences: seasons, planetary phases, the life cycle of humans from childhood through puberty to adulthood, and so on. to avoid the underlying mathematics of our daily existence and to leave it up to intuition and gut feeling is to completely sidestep what it means to live in this century. we are machines, and the machines that we create mimic computational capabilities found in basic elements of life. the more sophisticated our algorithms get will mean that we are better able to understand the world we live in. 
