Greek culture did not claim that the world was wholly beautiful. Its myths include monstrosities, mistakes, and bodies that fall outside any ideal. Plato sharpened that tension into philosophy. Sensible reality, as he saw it, was a diminished copy of a more perfect world of forms. The visible world was not the final standard. It …
Author Archives: saemiller
Our Nation – Lincoln
Whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some transatlantic giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe and Asia could not, by force, take a drink from the Ohio river, or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. …
Remembering Family – Photographer Paul Liebhardt
Recently my cousin and family member Paul Liebhardt passed away. He worked at NASA for a time and then became a photographer. While a photographer, he traveled internationally. His work as a photographer is well known. The remembrance celebration (link below) shows nice videos and writing of his students coming together from various paths of …
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Eros Barefoot, Beauty Unfinished
Walk through a museum and the first signal is chromatic. Marble reads as white, and white reads as pure. Aphrodite and Apollo become an argument before they become a figure: ideal beauty, ideal calm, ideal proportion. Neoclassicism did not merely preserve the antique, it manufactured an antique that could serve as a stable reference for …
2025 in Review
2025 was a unique year. I lived in four different states and was a resident of those states. I moved across the country three times, with professional movers, packing and unpacking, registering my car, updating bank accounts, IDs, insurance, and permanent addresses. I leased apartments, sold my beloved house in Florida, and navigated multiple career …
Socially Sanctioned Incompetence
In America, there is a funny, and revealing, version of mathematics. One popular joke is that, at a dinner party, the only socially acceptable thing to be bad at is mathematics. Someone recalls high school and says they are terrible at math, another says, me too, and everybody laughs. This is not so common in …
Note on Early Medieval Universities, the Scholastic Method, and the Formation of Critical Thought
Early medieval universities formed a distinct intellectual system built around structure, discipline, and the controlled expansion of reasoning. These institutions emerged from cathedral schools and monastic centers and evolved into formal environments where knowledge was not only preserved but interrogated. Their core mechanism was the scholastic method, a systematic approach that treated ideas as analytical …
Remember a Perfect Day
On a spring day at University of Florida, I walked from Professor Haftka’s office, now my own. Up the small rise from aerospace, near the student union and under the trees, I made my way to class. Years of developing the Navier–Stokes equations for aerospace students, joined by mathematics students. The room held thirty, yet …
Leaves
In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the …
Remembering Dennis Bushnell
I received word via the NASA Alumni Association that Dennis Bushnell passed away. Dennis Bushnell was a long-serving Chief Scientist of NASA Langley Research Center. I remember meeting him for the first time when there was internal research funding available at NASA for researchers. I wrote a proposal on fluid thrust factoring of a particular …