Diversions

Moiré SIM demo

I put this together to capture some of the flavor of structured illumination microscopy, an influential microscopy technique that doubles the resolving power of a microscope by patterning the light hitting the sample. Andrew York presented this at the 2019 ESRIC summer school. Using a striped “illumination” mask printed on an overlay transparency, you can get a surprisingly recognizable image out of what looks like a mostly featureless array of stripes. These make fun handouts. The Jupyter notebook in the repository explains what’s going on and offers tips on building your own.

Inspiration

Bill Thurston, one of the great mathematicians of the 20th century, had this beautiful response to a question about how “mere mortals” can contribute to mathematics. It is the best justification for science I know.