The animated short above, The Dot and the Line, directed by the great Chuck Jones and narrated by English actor Robert Morley, won an Oscar in 1965 for Best Animated Short Film.

I have not seen the new Spiderman reboot, so I’ll have to reserve judgment on the virtues of the movie. But, in general, superhero movies succeed or fail for me based on how plausible and consistent the physics of the alternate universe they create are.

Today marks what would be the 100th birthday of Alan Turing, one of the great mathematicians of the 20th century, who laid the foundations for computer science by developing the concepts of “algorithms” and “computing machines.” (See his seminal 1936 paper “On Computable Numbers.

The eye and the intellect play off one another in surprising and beautiful ways in the art of M.C. Escher. Where the Renaissance masters used shading and perspective to create the illusion of three-dimensional depth on two dimensional surfaces, Escher turned those tricks in on themselves to create puzzles and paradoxes.

This weekend, the Wall Street Journal published a gushing little profile on Sebastian Thrun. By now, you probably know his bio.

Today is the 84th birthday of the mathematician John Forbes Nash, Jr., whose groundbreaking work in game theory earned him a Nobel Prize in economics, and whose troubled mental life inspired a bestselling book and Hollywood movie, A Beautiful Mind.

Tom Lehrer earned a BA and MA in mathematics from Harvard during the late 1940s, then taught math courses at MIT, Harvard, Wellesley, and UC-Santa Cruz. Math was his vocation. But, all along, Lehrer nurtured an interest in music.

Almost two years ago, Spanish filmmaker Cristóbal Vila shot an exquisite little film, Nature by Numbers, which captured the ways in which mathematical concepts (Fibonacci Sequence, Golden Number, etc.) reveal themselves in nature. And the short then clocked a good 2.1 million views on YouTube alone.

This week the British government once again refused to pardon Alan Turing. One of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, Turing laid the foundations for computer science and played a key role in breaking the Nazi Enigma code during World War II. In 1952 he was convicted of homosexuality.

“Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life,” wrote Bertrand Russell in the prologue to his autobiography: “the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind.