Math 21a Summer 2023
Multivariable Calculus
The Black Mountain college was an interesting college experiment.
The unusual holistic setting mixed arts and science. While some might call it a failure (it did not survive), amazing names
are associated with it like the musician John Cage, the sculpture Ruth Asawa, the mathematicians Max Dehn or
the architect Buckminster Fuller.
The college appears in the movie "The longest ride" which I had put in my math in movie collection because it also features a scene in a Math class. See this. The movie is a romance between Luke and Sophia features an inner story of an older romance of Ira and Ruth and it is in this story that the Black mountain college appears. Sophia (a senior college student in the main story writes her thesis about the Black Mountain college.
The Wall street Journal WSJ has an article: "Return to Black Mountain College". "The bucolic location in North Carolina's Blue Ridge Mountains was the final campus of Black Mountain College, a kind of midcentury cultural Camelot that opened in 1933 and boasts a legacy far more extensive than its 24 years of existence suggests. Black Mountain was not only a wartime refuge for artists and intellectuals fleeing the Nazis but was also a hotbed of progressive education where many renowned postwar cultural figures were formed."
and Black Mountain wasn't limited to performance. Josef Albers, the great Bauhaus teacher who fled Nazi Germany for the United States and arrived at Black Mountain as a professor in 1933, sent students like painters Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly out into the fields and woods to gather rocks and leaves for their studies of color, material and abstract form. His wife, Anni Albers, who would later be the first textile artist to have a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, ran the weaving workshop. Willem de Kooning taught at Black Mountain in 1948 while his wife, Elaine, studied painting, before he returned to New York to found the fabled abstract expressionist hangout known as the Club; drips of paint from that era are still visible on a former studio floor. And it was in one of the school's meadows one day in 1949 that the visionary inventor Buckminster Fuller, there to direct the summer program, raised the first large-scale geodesic dome. In its heyday, Black Mountain was also known for mathematics, history and science: Natasha Goldowski, who worked on the Manhattan Project, later taught chemistry and physics there, and Albert Einstein visited in 1944 and subsequently became a member of its advisory council. 
The college appears in the movie "The longest ride" which I had put in my math in movie collection because it also features a scene in a Math class. See this. The movie is a romance between Luke and Sophia features an inner story of an older romance of Ira and Ruth and it is in this story that the Black mountain college appears. Sophia (a senior college student in the main story writes her thesis about the Black Mountain college.
The Wall street Journal WSJ has an article: "Return to Black Mountain College". "The bucolic location in North Carolina's Blue Ridge Mountains was the final campus of Black Mountain College, a kind of midcentury cultural Camelot that opened in 1933 and boasts a legacy far more extensive than its 24 years of existence suggests. Black Mountain was not only a wartime refuge for artists and intellectuals fleeing the Nazis but was also a hotbed of progressive education where many renowned postwar cultural figures were formed."
and Black Mountain wasn't limited to performance. Josef Albers, the great Bauhaus teacher who fled Nazi Germany for the United States and arrived at Black Mountain as a professor in 1933, sent students like painters Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly out into the fields and woods to gather rocks and leaves for their studies of color, material and abstract form. His wife, Anni Albers, who would later be the first textile artist to have a solo show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, ran the weaving workshop. Willem de Kooning taught at Black Mountain in 1948 while his wife, Elaine, studied painting, before he returned to New York to found the fabled abstract expressionist hangout known as the Club; drips of paint from that era are still visible on a former studio floor. And it was in one of the school's meadows one day in 1949 that the visionary inventor Buckminster Fuller, there to direct the summer program, raised the first large-scale geodesic dome. In its heyday, Black Mountain was also known for mathematics, history and science: Natasha Goldowski, who worked on the Manhattan Project, later taught chemistry and physics there, and Albert Einstein visited in 1944 and subsequently became a member of its advisory council.
