Handicrafts and Sesshu I have almost never judged a work of art by first looking at its signature. This way of assessment holds no interest for me. If what I see is good, it is good with or without a seal. Whether it is a painting or a pot, you must first look at the thing itself. Yanagi Sōetsu, The Beauty of Everyday Things fameseeing
Prestige is just fossilized inspiration Prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you'd like to like. Prestige is just fossilized inspiration. If you do anything well enough, you'll make it prestigious. Plenty of things we now consider prestigious were anything but at first. Jazz comes to mind—though almost any established art form would do. So just do what you like, and let prestige take care of itself. Paul Graham, How to do what you love fame
Spelled with a lowercase letter I used to tease John Tukey that you are famous only when your name was spelled with a lowercase letter such as watt, ampere, volt, fourier (sometimes), and such. Richard Hamming, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn fame
Somebody is living on this beach Once, I had a dream of fame. Generally, even then I was lonely. To the castle, a sign must have said. Somebody is living on this beach. David Markson, Wittgenstein's Mistress famelonelinesssolitude
1,000 True Fans An Essay by Kevin Kelly kk.org To be a successful creator you don’t need millions. You don’t need millions of dollars or millions of customers, millions of clients or millions of fans. To make a living as a craftsperson, photographer, musician, designer, author, animator, app maker, entrepreneur, or inventor you need only thousands of true fans. A true fan is defined as a fan that will buy anything you produce. These diehard fans will drive 200 miles to see you sing; they will buy the hardback and paperback and audible versions of your book; they will purchase your next figurine sight unseen; they will pay for the “best-of” DVD version of your free youtube channel; they will come to your chef’s table once a month. If you have roughly a thousand of true fans like this (also known as super fans), you can make a living — if you are content to make a living but not a fortune. artmakingfame
Wang tiles Wang tiles (Hao Wang, 1961) are a class of formal systems. They are modelled visually by square tiles with a color on each side. A set of such tiles is selected, and copies of the tiles are arranged side by side with matching colors, without rotating or reflecting them. The basic question about a set of Wang tiles is whether it can tile the plane or not, i.e., whether an entire infinite plane can be filled this way. The next question is whether this can be done in a periodic pattern. In 1966, Wang's student Robert Berger solved the problem in the negative. He proved that no algorithm for the problem can exist, by showing how to translate any Turing machine into a set of Wang tiles that tiles the plane if and only if the Turing machine does not halt. The undecidability of the halting problem then implies the undecidability of Wang's tiling problem. Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org Truchet TilesThe Tiling Patterns of Sebastien Truchet and the Topology of Structural Hierarchy mathalgorithms