Katsuhiko Murooka

 is a Japanese professional shogi player ranked 7-dan.
Promotion history.
Murooka's promotion history is as follows:


Gladys Goldstein

Gladys Goldstein (1918–2010) was an American artist who lived and worked within the art community of Baltimore, Maryland. Having begun as a representational artist specializing in portraits, she achieved recognition first for abstractions that were clearly based on natural forms and later for abstractions whose origin in natural forms was imperceptible. She was known for her deft handling of light and color in these works: atmospheric and subtle in some of them, intense and garish in others. Some critics saw an impressionist impulse in her paintings while others noted an expressionist ability to imbue them with emotion. In 1958 a critic said, "In nature Mrs. Goldstein finds a constant change in mood through patterns, rhythms, color; flamboyant now, wistfully delicate tomorrow; light, light that is reflected, light that is absorbed, light that is charged with the buoyancy of champagne or as quietly, morosely romantic, as any passage of Baudelaire." Goldstein chose to be a regional artist. She occasionally exhibited elsewhere but did not actively promote her career outside a mid-Atlantic region centered on Baltimore. She taught art for most of her long career, first in classes held in community centers and later in Baltimore's College of Notre Dame.
Early life and training.
Born in Ohio, she was brought to Baltimore when her family relocated there in 1920. She took art classes as a child. After graduating from that city's Western High School, she attended, successively, Johns Hopkins and Columbia universities, the Art Students League of New York, and the Maryland Institute College of Art. While taking still more art classes in a summer session at Pennsylvania State College, she decided to become a professional artist.
Career in art.
At the beginning of her career she used Gladys V. Hack as her professional name. In the late 1940s Goldstein joined the Art Group of the Baltimore Branch, National League of American Pen Women. The group held annual exhibitions of members' art in the Peale Museum. The art on display was said to be predominantly representational and Goldstein's contributions were mostly portraits. In 1950 she became head of the Art Group and a year later she was jointly responsible for arranging the Baltimore branch's annual show. In 1952 she participated in an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. that was held during the biennial convention of the National League. A year later she participated in a large exhibition of regional artists at the Baltimore Museum of Art. By this time she was using Gladys Hack Goldstein as her professional name.
At the end of that year she organized a show designed to sell paintings based on size rather than artistic value and priced low enough to be purchased as holiday gifts. The objective, she said, was to enable local citizens "to acquire an appreciation of original pictures by contemporary artists." The painting that she offered for sale was a departure from her earlier work. Called "Tree and Pink Sky," it was entirely abstract. She later said her transition from realist portraits to nature-derived abstractions was sudden and complete, but a fellow artist and art instructor, James G.A. Murphy, said that she continued to make portraits for private sale, but would only exhibit her abstract work.
In the early 1950s Goldstein joined a local group called the Painters' Seminar and in January 1956 she participated in, and help to hang, an exhibition of members' paintings in the lobby of a movie theater called the Film Center. The two paintings she showed, "Lights" and "Foliage of the Fall," were both abstracts. The critic for the Baltimore Sun said these two works dominated the show. In February 1956 she won second prize in the Maryland Artists Exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Art. The award-winning painting, "Big City," was also the favorite of the show's visitors whose votes put it at the top of the best-liked list. A few months later, she received a best-in-show award for an oil painting in the art exhibition that accompanied the biennial conference of the National League of American Pen Women. In November she was given a solo exhibition at the Baltimore Museum of Arts. Her work appeared in one gallery while two other Baltimore artists, Shelby Shackelford and William Waller, were given separate solo shows. In 1956 Goldstein began using Gladys Goldstein rather than Gladys Hack Goldstein as her professional name. In 1957 Goldstein was given a solo exhibition at the Duveen-Graham Galleries in New York. She showed fifteen oil paintings along with watercolors and some drawings. a critic for the "New York Times" gave the show a positive review, saying "Her most promising work is in a lyrical vein; softly rendered drifts of color, freely moving over a luminous base."
In May 1959, when her work appeared in an invitational exhibition at Morgan State University, a critic for the "Baltimore Sun" said "Gladys Goldstein seldom fails to furnish a fresh insight on whatever matter she undertakes; her "Blossom," the sparest imaginable oil-on-paper, seems composed of light." In December of the same year her paintings appeared in a solo exhibition in the lobby of a motion picture theater called the Playhouse. Regarding the show, the same "Baltimore Sun" critic said, "Her Playhouse show is not a major effort given the aspiration of the recent oils, but in its small way it is perfection." In February of the next year she showed with Amalie Rothschild, Bernard Perlman, and William Waller in a four-artist exhibition at the I.F.A. Galleries in Washington, D.C. and in September she showed with Lowell Nesbitt in a two-artist exhibition at Johns Hopkins University. Regarding her work in the latter, a "Sun" said, "As always, her sources are nature in its multiple aspects: the sea, tempestuous or calm, a summer landscape, a stony bank at the first moment of spring. But Mrs. Goldstein increasingly works toward essences; the literal fact becomes the esthetic fact, for she is, above all things a painter... With a touch of brush, artist turns the literal into the esthetic."
The "Baltimore Sun" gave extensive coverage to a solo exhibition held in a Baltimore suburban gallery in 1963. The newspaper's article, by Robert G. Breen, included comments by Goldstein and others about a new direction her work had taken. It said she aimed at establishing what she called "horizontal perspective" and quoted her description of it. She said, "This perspective is perspective in space. It moves across the canvas, not back into the canvas. But it moves across in layers. This does not violate the picture plane but simply creates an illusion of movement by virtue of the depth created horizontally in flat layers, each layer retaining its own identity, yet uniting itself with the whole." The "Sun" gave a further description in reviewing another solo show the following year. The author said, "has set herself the sticky problem of capturing space and light by almost completely abstract means... Mrs. Goldstein is thus working with layers of lightnear and far and mediansomething as evanescent as smoke and more capricious." The exhibition was mounted in the library of College of Notre Dame, the school in Baltimore where Goldstein was then an art instructor.
During the 1960s and 1970s Goldstein's work continued to appear frequently in group or solo exhibitions held in non-commercial settings such as colleges, community centers, religious organizations, benefit auctions, and municipal spaces. By 1976 she had participated in somewhat more than 150 exhibitions according to an article in the "Baltimore Sun". She showed less frequently than before in commercial galleries such as the I.F.A. Gallery in Washington. When she showed at Villa Julie College in 1972, Lincoln F. Johnson, "Baltimore Sun" critic, wrote that, "Villa Julie College is showing works by Gladys Goldstein, abstractions which operate, most of them, as visual metaphors for states of nature." "Elegant and refined," he added, "they sometimes have the appearance of precious objects."
Oil paintings and gouaches had predominated in Goldstein's output until the late 1970s when she began to produce collages and other mixed-media work. Writing about a solo exhibition of close to fifty paintings and collages she had made during the previous few years, Elisabeth Stevens, a "Baltimore Sun" critic, called the collages "shimmering works featuring painstakingly placed fragments of foil, newspaper clippings and printed papers." In the 1980s showed paintings in square format that contained square and rectangular design elements. She told a reviewer that she found these shapes to be "peaceful and elegant," having "a purity of form" and the possibility of endless variations. At the end of the decade she showed mixed-media pieces which a critic called "collaged paintings," having on their surfaces pieces of paper and fabric as well as sand. They were "two-dimensional, non-illusionistic and non-representational," but they nonetheless suggested "land and landscape," "calligraphy and hieroglyph," and occasionally "stained glass window."
Critics had increasingly seen inconsistency in Goldstein's work. They saw some high-quality pieces alongside ones that disappointed them. Regarding an exhibition at a commercial gallery in 1991, John Dorsey, of the "Baltimore Sun", wrote: "Goldstein is nothing if not erratic. When her abstractions succeed, they're a delight to behold. When they don't, they're frustratingly disappointing. It's not as if they're someone else's pictures or as if they needed work; they're unmistakably hers, they're unquestionably finished and they're clearly professional -- but they somehow just don't make it." He added, "That's not to say that Goldstein, even when disappointing, is a bad artist. She works at a level that always deserves respect. But at her best the level is a lot higher than that." Between this time and her death nineteen years later, Goldstein seems to have stopped exhibiting, or, at any rate, news reports of exhibits stopped appearing. She died on March 20, 2010. After her death, a curator said that during her career she had "focused on creating and teaching art and was not as interested in the financial gain through the sale of her pieces."
Artistic style.
Goldstein began her career as a representational painter. In the late 1940s she showed realist portraits in the exhibitions of the League of Pen Women. "Babushka", painted about 1935 and shown at right, is one of her earliest works. When she turned to abstraction in the early 1950s, she took natural objects as the basis for her work. "Sunflowers," of 1968, shown at left illustrates this style. During the 1970s, she handled references to nature more obliquely, as seen in "Peace Doves" of 1974, shown at right. Thereafter her work became more purely abstract. "Summer Garden" of 1980, shown at left, is a painting of this type. Many of her mid-career paintings were notable for their handling of light. She possessed an ability, as one critic said, to produce works that seem to be "composed of light." Another said her paintings appeared to have "layers of filmy colored veils with one color moving into the next." Goldstein said she aimed to show light coming from within the canvas... a living force from within."
During roughly the first half of her long career she worked mainly in oil on canvas, supplemented by gouaches on paper and some drawings. She employed impasto for many of the early works and used the brush more and more toward the mid-point of her career. Later, she made many paintings in mixed media, collage forms and sometimes used staining and dripping techniques and incorporated metallics in her work. A critic said she maintained "extraordinary control" over her collages, weaving items "into the fabric of the painting so that it is the image rather than the materials which take precedence." Another said, "Her collages are small, shimmering works featuring painstakingly placed fragments of foil, newspaper clippings and printed papers." "Candy Wrappers," a small undated collage, shown at right, is an example of this style. She said, "I will sometimes take an object that I find on the floor or something that I've collected and I'll paste it on the canvas because that is part of living."
During the 1980s, Goldstein focused on square and rectangular shapes. Of one of these paintings, "Signals," shown at left, a critic wrote, "the colors—reds, greens, blues, pinks—are beautiful and they glow almost as if they were stained glass." Goldstein said the shapes had intrigued her for a long time. She found them to be "peaceful and elegant" and said her response to them sometimes "verges on the mystic. Some of these paintings were themselves squares and some were as large as six feet long or high.
Toward the end of her career Goldstein began to supplant oils with acrylics and to combine organic forms with geometric ones. In 1991 a critic said she made "subtle use of color and a reserved but sensuous touch to create graceful, somewhat veiled, almost seductive effects." During this period she also made prints using a technique that originated in Mexico in 1970 and was called mixographia. Employing a beeswax surface rather than a metal plate or lithographic stone, this printing process allowed the artist to add a three-dimensional texture to her work. The untitled and undated print shown at right ("mixographia print") is an example of the prints she made using this technique.
Art teacher.
In the mid-1950s Goldstein began to teach art in a program called "Forest Park Evening Classes" in Baltimore. The program offered instruction in practical subjects such as typing and dressmaking at no cost to Baltimore residents and was directed by her husband, Edward H. Goldstein. It had begun to offer art classes in 1950. In 1957 she also began to teach classes at the newly-opened Metropolitan School of Art. Aiming to give art students an alternative to the relatively conservative instruction offered at the Maryland Institute of Art, the school taught amateurs and professionals, children and adults, in day and evening classes from that year until 1960. The following year and for the next two, she taught at the Maryland Institute of Art. In 1959 she began teaching art classes in the recreation center of Oheb Shalom temple and from the early 1960s she left that position to teach at the Jewish Community Center. In 1964 Goldstein joined the faculty of the College of Notre Dame as an art instructor. In 1982, at the age of 62, she left her teaching jobs at the Jewish Community Center and Notre Dame, but continued to give private instruction.
Personal life and family.
Goldstein's father was Samuel Edward Hack (1893-1956), a ceramics artist and instructor. Her mother was Dorothy (Isaacson) Hack (1895-1952). Her paternal grandparents had been born in Polish Russia. Her paternal grandfather, Simon (18xx-1981), operated a shoe repair business in Baltimore. Her paternal grandmother, Goldie, died in 1915, age 44. She had an older brother, Ernest (1915-2003) and a younger one, Homer (1920-2007).
In the early 1940s Goldstein married Edward H. Goldstein (born about 1912, died 2002), an administrator in the Baltimore public school system. The couple had a son, William N. Goldstein (1943-2006), a psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry at Georgetown University Medical Center in Washington, D.C.
Goldstein died from complications after surgery at Seasons Hospice in Randallstown, Maryland on March 13, 2010, and was interred in Oheb Shalom Memorial Park, Reisterstown, Maryland.


David Sawin

David Sawin (April 22, 1922 – ) was an American painter working primarily in New York City during the middle part of the 20th century. His style, though singular, was described by Meyer Schapiro and Arthur Danto as second-generation abstract expressionism.
Biography.
Sawin was born in New York City. He attended Brown University, received a B.A. from Columbia University and an M.A. from the University of Iowa. He studied in Paris on the G.I. Bill with Fernand Léger.
t Columbia, Sawin studied under Meyer Schapiro, who admired him and collected his work. Their correspondence in the archives at Columbia University indicates a lifelong friendship. He was also deeply admired by the philosopher and critic Arthur Danto
Sawin taught at Brooklyn College from 1959-1984 in an art department that included Philip Pearlstein, Walter Rosenblum, Lois Dodd, and Lennart Anderson. He also taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Williams College, and Columbia University.
From 1949 to 1969 he was married to the art historian and writer Martica Sawin.
His work is held in numerous private collections. It was included in the 1955 Annual Exhibit of Contemporary Painting at the Whitney Museum of American Art and in “New York School – Second Generation” at the Jewish Museum in 1957. A 1986 exhibit at the Waverly gallery was the subject an article in The Nation by Arthur Danto and he was the subject of a retrospective at the Newport Art Museum in 1988, with a catalogue essay by Arthur Danto.
Work.
Meyer Schapiro and Arthur Danto held the view that Sawin’s paintings both share a certain spirit with the abstract expressionist movement yet decidedly defy that categorization.


Sequence point

A sequence point defines any point in a computer program's execution at which it is guaranteed that all side effects of previous evaluations will have been performed, and no side effects from subsequent evaluations have yet been performed. They are often mentioned in reference to C and C++, because they are a core concept for determining the validity and, if valid, the possible results of expressions. Adding more sequence points is sometimes necessary to make an expression defined and to ensure a single valid order of evaluation.
With C++11, usage of the term sequence point has been replaced by sequencing. There are three possibilities:
The execution of unsequenced evaluations can overlap, with catastrophic undefined behavior if they share state. This situation can arise in parallel computations, causing race conditions. However, it can already arise in simple non-concurrent situations like codice_1, where part of the assignment to codice_2 (eg., half of the bits) may happen before codice_3, and the rest afterwards, such that after evaluation of the expression, codice_4 may contain a meaningless intermediate state of codice_2.
Examples of ambiguity.
Consider two functions codice_6 and codice_7. In C and C++, the codice_8 operator is not associated with a sequence point, and therefore in the expression codice_9 it is possible that either codice_6 or codice_7 will be executed first. The comma operator introduces a sequence point, and therefore in the code codice_12 the order of evaluation is defined: first codice_6 is called, and then codice_7 is called.
Sequence points also come into play when the same variable is modified more than once within a single expression. An often-cited example is the C expression codice_15, which apparently both assigns codice_16 its previous value and increments codice_16. The final value of codice_16 is ambiguous, because, depending on the order of expression evaluation, the increment may occur before, after, or interleaved with the assignment. The definition of a particular language might specify one of the possible behaviors or simply say the behavior is undefined. In C and C++, evaluating such an expression yields undefined behavior. Other languages, such as C#, define the precedence of the assignment and increment operator in such a way that the result of the expression codice_15 is guaranteed.
Sequence points in C and C++.
In C and C++, sequence points occur in the following places. (In C++, overloaded operators act like functions, and thus operators that have been overloaded introduce sequence points in the same way as function calls.)


Yaneer Bar-Yam

Yaneer Bar-Yam (born 1959) is an American scientist and activist specializing in complex systems. An expert in the quantitative analysis of pandemics, he advised policy makers on the Western African Ebola virus epidemic and founded EndCoronavirus.org, a global network of over 4,000 volunteers formed in February 2020 to provide information, guidelines, and policy advocacy to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. He is the founding president of the New England Complex Systems Institute (NECSI), an independent research institution that studies complex systems science and its real-world applications.
Biography.
Yaneer Bar-Yam was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1959 to Israeli parents. His father, Zvi Bar-Yam, is a high-energy particle physicist, and his mother, Miriam Bar-Yam, is a developmental psychologist. He received his BS degree in 1978 and his Ph.D. degree in 1984, both in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was a Bantrell Postdoctoral Fellow, and a joint postdoctoral fellow at MIT and IBM. In 1991, following a junior faculty appointment at the Weizmann Institute of Science, he was appointed an Associate Professor of Engineering at Boston University. He left Boston University in 1997 to become the founding president of the New England Complex Systems Institute, a position he holds as of May 2020.
Bar-Yam was a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology at Harvard University and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston. He was chairman of the International Conference on Complex Systems, an annual forum dedicated to bridging the domains of complexity science and real-world systems, and is the managing editor of InterJournal, a NECSI publication on selected topics in science and engineering.
Bar-Yam is currently a Research Scientist at the MIT Media Lab, and is the managing editor of the Springer book series on complexity.
Ideas and Theories.
The NECSI website defined "complex systems" as systems that "have multiple interacting components whose collective behavior cannot be simply inferred from the behavior of components." Bar-Yam is considered a contributor to the founding of the field of complex systems science, having introduced fundamental rigor, real-world applications, and educational programs to the field.
Bar-Yam studies the unified properties of complex systems as a systematic strategy for answering basic questions about the world. His research is focused both on formalizing complex systems concepts and relating them to everyday problems. In particular, he studies the relationship between observations at different scales, formal properties of descriptions of systems, the relationship of structure and function, the representation of information as a physical quantity, and quantitative properties of the complexity of real systems. Applications have been to physical, biological, and social systems.
His recent work analyzes the origins and impacts of market crashes, social unrest, ethnic violence, military conflict and pandemics, the structure and dynamics of social networks, and the bases of creativity, panic, evolution, and altruism. Bar-Yam has made further contributions to the theory of the structural and electronic dynamics of materials, the theory of polymer dynamics and protein folding, the theory of neural networks and structure-function relationships, the theory of quantitative multiscale complexity, and the theory of evolution. His development of multiscale representations as a generalization of renormalization group addressed the limitations of calculus and statistics in the study of nonlinear and network system dependencies on collective behaviors.
Work.
NECSI.
Bar-Yam is the president of Cambridge, Massachusetts-based NECSI, an independent research institution and think tank dedicated to the study of complex systems and its applications to solving real-world problems. NECSI was established by faculty members of various New England academic institutions, including MIT, Harvard, Brandeis, and others, to encourage collaboration among researchers. In addition to its in-house research team, NECSI has co-faculty, students, and affiliates from universities around the world. NECSI also conducts classes, seminars, and conferences to assist students, faculty, and professionals in their understanding of complex systems. NECSI's faculty, co-faculty, and affiliates represent a wide range of scientific disciplines, and have included Jerome Kagan, Thomas Schelling, and Nassim Nicholas Taleb. NECSI researchers have contributed to such varied areas as networks, social systems, food crises, and economic systems.
In February 2020, NECSI and Bar-Yam established EndCoronavirus.org to offer information, guidelines, and policy advocacy to fight the COVID-19 pandemic.
Consulting and advisory.
Bar-Yam has advised many policymaking and regulatory bodies on various topics, including: the Pentagon's Chairman Action Group on global social unrest and the crises in Egypt and Syria; the National Security Council and the National Counter Terrorism Council on global strategy; the Chief of Naval Operations Strategic Studies Group on military force transformation; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on delivery of prevention services and control of hospital infections; Congressman Barney Frank (as chairman of the House Financial Services Committee) on market regulation and the financial crisis. He has given 175 invited presentations, and has taught the concepts and methods of complex systems science to over 2,000 graduate students, professionals, and executives.
Pandemics Research and Activism.
Overview.
Pandemics are a natural field of study for complex systems scientists, as many of the main insights of the discipline—including network theory, nonlinearity, chaos, emergent properties, adaptation, and non-ergodicity—can be directly brought to bear on the analysis of infectious diseases and their spread.
Bar-Yam has studied pandemics since the early 2000s, in concert with NECSI's stated mission to foster collaboration among different disciplines (e.g. mathematics and epidemiology) and to apply theoretical work to problems in the real world. His research has emphasized the role of increasing global travel in pandemics; community monitoring of symptoms as potentially superior to conventional testing, tracking, and tracing techniques; and specific guidelines for individuals, policymakers, healthcare workers, and businesses to slow the spread of infectious diseases.
Bar-Yam's early research on pandemics identified the fatality rate of an infectious disease as a key limiting factor in its ability to spread. For the deadliest diseases, he argued that the pathogen would rapidly exhaust the local supply of hosts to infect, and would therefore disappear before it could spread beyond the initial local area of outbreak.
In a 2006 paper co-authored with Erik Rauch, Bar-Yam introduced global travel (e.g. international long-distance flights and overseas shipment of livestock) as a new variable to his earlier pandemic models, which yielded a nonlinear relationship between the amount of global travel and the ultimate severity of an outbreak. Specifically, the authors found that up to a certain point, increasing global travel had little impact on the overall severity of an outbreak. However, when the amount of travel approached a critical threshold, the ultimate severity of the outbreak (and its likelihood of becoming a global pandemic) increased suddenly and sharply. "Due to increasing global travel," Bar-Yam and Rauch wrote in the 2006 paper, "human beings may cross the transition into the realm of pandemics unless preventive actions are taken that either limit global transportation or its impact."
Ebola.
During the Western African Ebola virus epidemic which began in 2013, Bar-Yam advocated in favor of curtailing transportation from West Africa, arguing that even in cases where significant interconnectivity between populations already existed, even a small amount of "additional" interconnectivity could dramatically increase the severity of an outbreak.
Bar-Yam also advocated in favor of community monitoring to fight the Ebola epidemic. The conventional response to infectious disease outbreaks emphasizes individual contact tracing, i.e. the effort to locate all individuals who were in contact with an individual known to carry the disease. Bar-Yam argued that it would be more effective and efficient to monitor local communities (defined as a natural population unit to and from which transportation can be logically curtailed) as a whole—in other words, to treat an entire community as "infected" once one individual in that community is infected, and then intensively screen that community for additional cases while instituting local transportation restrictions. This type of community response would progressively limit the disease to smaller geographical areas, Bar-Yam argued, while improving the allocation of resources. Bar-Yam argued that community monitoring played a significant role in halting the Ebola epidemic in Liberia.
COVID-19.
On January 26, 2020, one week after the first case of COVID-19 disease in the United States was reported, Bar-Yam co-authored a note with Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Joseph Norman. The note outlined several principles in connection with the novel coronavirus outbreak, and argued that policy responses should follow a precautionary approach, including drastically constraining human mobility patterns as soon and as swiftly as possible.
On February 29, 2020, Bar-Yam and NECSI established EndCoronavirus.org, a global volunteer network, to provide information and guidelines for action to fight the COVID-19 pandemic. EndCoronavirus.org was among the first organizations in the United States to offer specific guidelines for policymakers, businesses, and individuals. As of May 2020, EndCoronavirus.org had over 4,000 volunteers.
On March 13, 2020, the "Coronavirus Guidelines for Businesses" written by EndCoronavirus.org were adopted by the International Chamber of Commerce, the global business organization representing over 45 million members in over 100 countries.
On March 21, 2020, "USA Today" published an opinion piece by Bar-Yam, in which he argued for an immediate five-week lockdown in the entire United States to defeat COVID-19.
On April 5, 2020, Bar-Yam and Chen Shen published a paper titled "COVID-19: How to Win," which summarized his recommendations. Those recommendations included a lockdown, separate quarantine facilities for mild and moderate COVID-19 cases to prevent transmission within households, mask wearing in shared spaces, travel restrictions, improved safety of essential services, increased testing, health guidelines to prevent mild cases from becoming severe, and increased support for hospitals and healthcare workers.
On April 15, 2020, Bar-Yam reported via Twitter that he was assisting the government of Kosovo in its efforts to fight the COVID-19 pandemic.
On April 28, 2020, Bar-Yam was consulted by Virginia residents on an open letter to Ralph Northam, the governor of Virginia, calling for more aggressive action to fight COVID-19 in that state. The letter was signed by 430 scientists, doctors, and citizens as of May 25, 2020.
On May 12, 2020, CNN.com published an opinion piece by Bar-Yam, in which he argued against the premature opening of states, and urged individual citizens to continue strict restrictions on their movement and contact with others.
Publications.
Bar-Yam is the author and/or editor of several books, as well as the author of more than 200 research papers in professional journals, including in Science, Nature, PNAS, American Naturalist, and Physical Review Letters. He has published on a range of scientific and real-world problems, including cell biology and the global financial crisis, and is the holder of four patents.


Hiromi Nakakura

 is a Japanese women's professional shogi player ranked 2-dan. She is the current representative director of the Ladies Professional Shogi-player's Association of Japan (LPSA).
LPSA representative director.
Nakakura was selected to replace Sachio Ishibashi as representative director of the in February 2014. She was re-elected as president in 2016 and 2018.
Personal life.
Nakakura's sister Akiko is a retired women's professional shogi player.
Promotion history.
Nakakura has been promoted as follows:
Note: All ranks are women's professional ranks.


Peter Lowe (artist)

Peter Lowe (born 17 June 1938) is an English artist. He was born in London at Victoria Park, Hackney. He studied at Goldsmiths College 1954–60 where he was taught by Mary Martin and Kenneth Martin. Lowe's work is rational, abstract and geometric. In 1960 he constructed and exhibited his first relief and experimented with balanced transformable constructions. His work is mainly exhibited and appreciated in Europe where it is in many national collections, Vienna mumok Sammlung Dieter und Gertraud Bogner, Muzeum Sztuki w Lodzi . In 1972 he cofounded Systems group. Since 1974 he has been a member of Arbeitskreis.
The constructivist work of Peter Lowe is mentioned in Alastair Grieve's authoritative book of 2005, and an interview with him by the art historian Alan Fowler is given in the Southampton City Art Gallery exhibition catalogue, 2008.


Functional programming

In computer science, functional programming is a programming paradigm where programs are constructed by applying and composing functions. It is a declarative programming paradigm in which function definitions are trees of expressions that map values to other values, rather than a sequence of imperative statements which update the running state of the program.
In functional programming, functions are treated as first-class citizens, meaning that they can be bound to names (including local identifiers), passed as arguments, and returned from other functions, just as any other data type can. This allows programs to be written in a declarative and composable style, where small functions are combined in a modular manner.
Functional programming is sometimes treated as synonymous with purely functional programming, a subset of functional programming which treats all functions as deterministic mathematical functions, or pure functions. When a pure function is called with some given arguments, it will always return the same result, and cannot be affected by any mutable state or other side effects. This is in contrast with impure procedures, common in imperative programming, which can have side effects (such as modifying the program's state or taking input from a user). Proponents of purely functional programming claim that by restricting side effects, programs can have fewer bugs, be easier to debug and test, and be more suited to formal verification.
Functional programming has its roots in academia, evolving from the lambda calculus, a formal system of computation based only on functions. Functional programming has historically been less popular than imperative programming, but many functional languages are seeing use today in industry and education, including Common Lisp, Scheme, Clojure, Wolfram Language, Racket, Erlang, Elixir, OCaml, Haskell, and F#. Functional programming is also key to some languages that have found success in specific domains, like JavaScript in the Web, R in statistics, J, K and Q in financial analysis, and XQuery/XSLT for XML. Domain-specific declarative languages like SQL and Lex/Yacc use some elements of functional programming, such as not allowing mutable values. In addition, many other programming languages support programming in a functional style or have implemented features from functional programming, such as C++11, Kotlin, Perl, PHP, Python, Go, Rust, Raku, and Scala.
History.
The lambda calculus, developed in the 1930s by Alonzo Church, is a formal system of computation built from function application. In 1937 Alan Turing proved that the lambda calculus and Turing machines are equivalent models of computation, showing that the lambda calculus is Turing complete. Lambda calculus forms the basis of all functional programming languages. An equivalent theoretical formulation, combinatory logic, was developed by Moses Schönfinkel and Haskell Curry in the 1920s and 1930s.
Church later developed a weaker system, the simply-typed lambda calculus, which extended the lambda calculus by assigning a type to all terms. This forms the basis for statically-typed functional programming.
The first functional programming language, LISP, was developed in the late 1950s for the IBM 700/7000 series of scientific computers by John McCarthy while at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). LISP functions were defined using Church's lambda notation, extended with a label construct to allow recursive functions. Lisp first introduced many paradigmatic features of functional programming, though early Lisps were multi-paradigm languages, and incorporated support for numerous programming styles as new paradigms evolved. Later dialects, such as Scheme and Clojure, and offshoots such as Dylan and Julia, sought to simplify and rationalise Lisp around a cleanly functional core, while Common Lisp was designed to preserve and update the paradigmatic features of the numerous older dialects it replaced.
Information Processing Language (IPL), 1956, is sometimes cited as the first computer-based functional programming language. It is an assembly-style language for manipulating lists of symbols. It does have a notion of "generator", which amounts to a function that accepts a function as an argument, and, since it is an assembly-level language, code can be data, so IPL can be regarded as having higher-order functions. However, it relies heavily on the mutating list structure and similar imperative features.
Kenneth E. Iverson developed APL in the early 1960s, described in his 1962 book "A Programming Language" (). APL was the primary influence on John Backus's FP. In the early 1990s, Iverson and Roger Hui created J. In the mid-1990s, Arthur Whitney, who had previously worked with Iverson, created K, which is used commercially in financial industries along with its descendant Q.
John Backus presented FP in his 1977 Turing Award lecture "Can Programming Be Liberated From the von Neumann Style? A Functional Style and its Algebra of Programs". He defines functional programs as being built up in a hierarchical way by means of "combining forms" that allow an "algebra of programs"; in modern language, this means that functional programs follow the principle of compositionality. Backus's paper popularized research into functional programming, though it emphasized function-level programming rather than the lambda-calculus style now associated with functional programming.
The 1973 language ML was created by Robin Milner at the University of Edinburgh, and David Turner developed the language SASL at the University of St Andrews. Also in Edinburgh in the 1970s, Burstall and Darlington developed the functional language NPL. NPL was based on Kleene Recursion Equations and was first introduced in their work on program transformation. Burstall, MacQueen and Sannella then incorporated the polymorphic type checking from ML to produce the language Hope. ML eventually developed into several dialects, the most common of which are now OCaml and Standard ML.
In the 1970s, Guy L. Steele and Gerald Jay Sussman developed Scheme, as described in the Lambda Papers and the 1985 textbook "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs". Scheme was the first dialect of lisp to use lexical scoping and to require tail-call optimization, features that encourage functional programming.
In the 1980s, Per Martin-Löf developed intuitionistic type theory (also called "constructive" type theory), which associated functional programs with constructive proofs expressed as dependent types. This led to new approaches to interactive theorem proving and has influenced the development of subsequent functional programming languages.
The lazy functional language, Miranda, developed by David Turner, initially appeared in 1985 and had a strong influence on Haskell. With Miranda being proprietary, Haskell began with a consensus in 1987 to form an open standard for functional programming research; implementation releases have been ongoing since 1990.
More recently it has found use in niches such as parametric CAD courtesy of the OpenSCAD language built on the CSG geometry framework, although its restriction on reassigning values (all values are treated as constants) has led to confusion among users who are unfamiliar with functional programming as a concept.
Functional programming continues to be used in commercial settings.
Concepts.
A number of concepts and paradigms are specific to functional programming, and generally foreign to imperative programming (including object-oriented programming). However, programming languages often cater to several programming paradigms, so programmers using "mostly imperative" languages may have utilized some of these concepts.
First-class and higher-order functions.
Higher-order functions are functions that can either take other functions as arguments or return them as results. In calculus, an example of a higher-order function is the differential operator formula_1, which returns the derivative of a function formula_2.
Higher-order functions are closely related to first-class functions in that higher-order functions and first-class functions both allow functions as arguments and results of other functions. The distinction between the two is subtle: "higher-order" describes a mathematical concept of functions that operate on other functions, while "first-class" is a computer science term for programming language entities that have no restriction on their use (thus first-class functions can appear anywhere in the program that other first-class entities like numbers can, including as arguments to other functions and as their return values).
Higher-order functions enable partial application or currying, a technique that applies a function to its arguments one at a time, with each application returning a new function that accepts the next argument. This lets a programmer succinctly express, for example, the successor function as the addition operator partially applied to the natural number one.
Pure functions.
Pure functions (or expressions) have no side effects (memory or I/O). This means that pure functions have several useful properties, many of which can be used to optimize the code:
While most compilers for imperative programming languages detect pure functions and perform common-subexpression elimination for pure function calls, they cannot always do this for pre-compiled libraries, which generally do not expose this information, thus preventing optimizations that involve those external functions. Some compilers, such as gcc, add extra keywords for a programmer to explicitly mark external functions as pure, to enable such optimizations. Fortran 95 also lets functions be designated "pure". C++11 added codice_1 keyword with similar semantics.
Recursion.
Iteration (looping) in functional languages is usually accomplished via recursion. Recursive functions invoke themselves, letting an operation be repeated until it reaches the base case. In general, recursion requires maintaining a stack, which consumes space in a linear amount to the depth of recursion. This could make recursion prohibitively expensive to use instead of imperative loops. However, a special form of recursion known as tail recursion can be recognized and optimized by a compiler into the same code used to implement iteration in imperative languages. Tail recursion optimization can be implemented by transforming the program into continuation passing style during compiling, among other approaches.
The Scheme language standard requires implementations to support proper tail recursion, meaning they must allow an unbounded number of active tail calls. Proper tail recursion is not simply an optimization; it is a language feature that assures users that they can use recursion to express a loop and doing so would be safe-for-space. Moreover, contrary to its name, it accounts for all tail calls, not just tail recursion. While proper tail recursion is usually implemented by turning code into imperative loops, implementations might implement it in other ways. For example, CHICKEN intentionally maintains a stack and lets the stack overflow. However, when this happens, its garbage collector will claim space back, allowing an unbounded number of active tail calls even though it does not turn tail recursion into a loop.
Common patterns of recursion can be abstracted away using higher-order functions, with catamorphisms and anamorphisms (or "folds" and "unfolds") being the most obvious examples. Such recursion schemes play a role analogous to built-in control structures such as loops in imperative languages.
Most general purpose functional programming languages allow unrestricted recursion and are Turing complete, which makes the halting problem undecidable, can cause unsoundness of equational reasoning, and generally requires the introduction of inconsistency into the logic expressed by the language's type system. Some special purpose languages such as Coq allow only well-founded recursion and are strongly normalizing (nonterminating computations can be expressed only with infinite streams of values called codata). As a consequence, these languages fail to be Turing complete and expressing certain functions in them is impossible, but they can still express a wide class of interesting computations while avoiding the problems introduced by unrestricted recursion. Functional programming limited to well-founded recursion with a few other constraints is called total functional programming.
Strict versus non-strict evaluation.
Functional languages can be categorized by whether they use "strict (eager)" or "non-strict (lazy)" evaluation, concepts that refer to how function arguments are processed when an expression is being evaluated. The technical difference is in the denotational semantics of expressions containing failing or divergent computations. Under strict evaluation, the evaluation of any term containing a failing subterm fails. For example, the expression:
 print length([2+1, 3*2, 1/0, 5-4])
fails under strict evaluation because of the division by zero in the third element of the list. Under lazy evaluation, the length function returns the value 4 (i.e., the number of items in the list), since evaluating it does not attempt to evaluate the terms making up the list. In brief, strict evaluation always fully evaluates function arguments before invoking the function. Lazy evaluation does not evaluate function arguments unless their values are required to evaluate the function call itself.
The usual implementation strategy for lazy evaluation in functional languages is graph reduction. Lazy evaluation is used by default in several pure functional languages, including Miranda, Clean, and Haskell.
 argues for lazy evaluation as a mechanism for improving program modularity through separation of concerns, by easing independent implementation of producers and consumers of data streams. Launchbury 1993 describes some difficulties that lazy evaluation introduces, particularly in analyzing a program's storage requirements, and proposes an operational semantics to aid in such analysis. Harper 2009 proposes including both strict and lazy evaluation in the same language, using the language's type system to distinguish them.
Type systems.
Especially since the development of Hindley–Milner type inference in the 1970s, functional programming languages have tended to use typed lambda calculus, rejecting all invalid programs at compilation time and risking false positive errors, as opposed to the untyped lambda calculus, that accepts all valid programs at compilation time and risks false negative errors, used in Lisp and its variants (such as Scheme), though they reject all invalid programs at runtime when the information is enough to not reject valid programs. The use of algebraic datatypes makes manipulation of complex data structures convenient; the presence of strong compile-time type checking makes programs more reliable in absence of other reliability techniques like test-driven development, while type inference frees the programmer from the need to manually declare types to the compiler in most cases.
Some research-oriented functional languages such as Coq, Agda, Cayenne, and Epigram are based on intuitionistic type theory, which lets types depend on terms. Such types are called dependent types. These type systems do not have decidable type inference and are difficult to understand and program with. But dependent types can express arbitrary propositions in higher-order logic. Through the Curry–Howard isomorphism, then, well-typed programs in these languages become a means of writing formal mathematical proofs from which a compiler can generate certified code. While these languages are mainly of interest in academic research (including in formalized mathematics), they have begun to be used in engineering as well. Compcert is a compiler for a subset of the C programming language that is written in Coq and formally verified.
A limited form of dependent types called generalized algebraic data types (GADT's) can be implemented in a way that provides some of the benefits of dependently typed programming while avoiding most of its inconvenience. GADT's are available in the Glasgow Haskell Compiler, in OCaml and in Scala, and have been proposed as additions to other languages including Java and C#.
Referential transparency.
Functional programs do not have assignment statements, that is, the value of a variable in a functional program never changes once defined. This eliminates any chances of side effects because any variable can be replaced with its actual value at any point of execution. So, functional programs are referentially transparent.
Consider C assignment statement codice_2, this changes the value assigned to the variable codice_3. Let us say that the initial value of codice_3 was codice_5, then two consecutive evaluations of the variable codice_3 yields codice_7 and codice_8 respectively. Clearly, replacing codice_2 with either codice_7 or codice_8 gives a program a different meaning, and so the expression "is not" referentially transparent. In fact, assignment statements are never referentially transparent.
Now, consider another function such as int plusone(int x) {return x+1;} "is" transparent, as it does not implicitly change the input x and thus has no such side effects.
Functional programs exclusively use this type of function and are therefore referentially transparent.
Data structures.
Purely functional data structures are often represented in a different way than their imperative counterparts. For example, the array with constant access and update times is a basic component of most imperative languages, and many imperative data-structures, such as the hash table and binary heap, are based on arrays. Arrays can be replaced by maps or random access lists, which admit purely functional implementation, but have logarithmic access and update times. Purely functional data structures have persistence, a property of keeping previous versions of the data structure unmodified. In Clojure, persistent data structures are used as functional alternatives to their imperative counterparts. Persistent vectors, for example, use trees for partial updating. Calling the insert method will result in some but not all nodes being created.
Comparison to imperative programming.
Functional programming is very different from imperative programming. The most significant differences stem from the fact that functional programming avoids side effects, which are used in imperative programming to implement state and I/O. Pure functional programming completely prevents side-effects and provides referential transparency.
Higher-order functions are rarely used in older imperative programming. A traditional imperative program might use a loop to traverse and modify a list. A functional program, on the other hand, would probably use a higher-order “map” function that takes a function and a list, generating and returning a new list by applying the function to each list item.
Side-by-side comparison of imperative vs. functional programming.
The following two examples (written in JavaScript) achieve the same effect: they multiply all even numbers in an array by 10 and add them all, storing the final sum in the variable "result".
Traditional Imperative Loop:
const numList = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10];
let result = 0;
for (let i = 0; i < numList.length; i++) {
 if (numList[i] % 2 === 0) {
 result += numList[i] * 10;
Functional Programming with higher-order functions:
const result = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10]
 .filter(n => n % 2 === 0)
 .map(a => a * 10)
 .reduce((a, b) => a + b);
Simulating state.
There are tasks (for example, maintaining a bank account balance) that often seem most naturally implemented with state. Pure functional programming performs these tasks, and I/O tasks such as accepting user input and printing to the screen, in a different way.
The pure functional programming language Haskell implements them using monads, derived from category theory. Monads offer a way to abstract certain types of computational patterns, including (but not limited to) modeling of computations with mutable state (and other side effects such as I/O) in an imperative manner without losing purity. While existing monads may be easy to apply in a program, given appropriate templates and examples, many students find them difficult to understand conceptually, e.g., when asked to define new monads (which is sometimes needed for certain types of libraries).
Functional languages also simulate states by passing around immutable states. This can be done by making a function accept the state as one of its parameters, and return a new state together with the result, leaving the old state unchanged.
Impure functional languages usually include a more direct method of managing mutable state. Clojure, for example, uses managed references that can be updated by applying pure functions to the current state. This kind of approach enables mutability while still promoting the use of pure functions as the preferred way to express computations.
Alternative methods such as Hoare logic and uniqueness have been developed to track side effects in programs. Some modern research languages use effect systems to make the presence of side effects explicit.
Efficiency issues.
Functional programming languages are typically less efficient in their use of CPU and memory than imperative languages such as C and Pascal. This is related to the fact that some mutable data structures like arrays have a very straightforward implementation using present hardware. Flat arrays may be accessed very efficiently with deeply pipelined CPUs, prefetched efficiently through caches (with no complex pointer chasing), or handled with SIMD instructions. It is also not easy to create their equally efficient general-purpose immutable counterparts. For purely functional languages, the worst-case slowdown is logarithmic in the number of memory cells used, because mutable memory can be represented by a purely functional data structure with logarithmic access time (such as a balanced tree). However, such slowdowns are not universal. For programs that perform intensive numerical computations, functional languages such as OCaml and Clean are only slightly slower than C according to The Computer Language Benchmarks Game. For programs that handle large matrices and multidimensional databases, array functional languages (such as J and K) were designed with speed optimizations.
Immutability of data can in many cases lead to execution efficiency by allowing the compiler to make assumptions that are unsafe in an imperative language, thus increasing opportunities for inline expansion.
Lazy evaluation may also speed up the program, even asymptotically, whereas it may slow it down at most by a constant factor (however, it may introduce memory leaks if used improperly). Launchbury 1993 discusses theoretical issues related to memory leaks from lazy evaluation, and O'Sullivan "et al." 2008 give some practical advice for analyzing and fixing them.
However, the most general implementations of lazy evaluation making extensive use of dereferenced code and data perform poorly on modern processors with deep pipelines and multi-level caches (where a cache miss may cost hundreds of cycles) .
Functional programming in non-functional languages.
It is possible to use a functional style of programming in languages that are not traditionally considered functional languages. For example, both D and Fortran 95 explicitly support pure functions.
JavaScript, Lua, Python and Go had first class functions from their inception. Python had support for "lambda", "map", "reduce", and "filter" in 1994, as well as closures in Python 2.2, though Python 3 relegated "reduce" to the codice_12 standard library module. First-class functions have been introduced into other mainstream languages such as PHP 5.3, Visual Basic 9, C# 3.0, C++11, and Kotlin.
In PHP, anonymous classes, closures and lambdas are fully supported. Libraries and language extensions for immutable data structures are being developed to aid programming in the functional style.
In Java, anonymous classes can sometimes be used to simulate closures; however, anonymous classes are not always proper replacements to closures because they have more limited capabilities. Java 8 supports lambda expressions as a replacement for some anonymous classes.
In C#, anonymous classes are not necessary, because closures and lambdas are fully supported. Libraries and language extensions for immutable data structures are being developed to aid programming in the functional style in C#.
Many object-oriented design patterns are expressible in functional programming terms: for example, the strategy pattern simply dictates use of a higher-order function, and the visitor pattern roughly corresponds to a catamorphism, or fold.
Similarly, the idea of immutable data from functional programming is often included in imperative programming languages, for example the tuple in Python, which is an immutable array, and Object.freeze() in JavaScript.
Applications.
Spreadsheets.
Spreadsheets can be considered a form of pure, zeroth-order, strict-evaluation functional programming system. However, spreadsheets generally lack higher-order functions as well as code reuse, and in some implementations, also lack recursion. Several extensions have been developed for spreadsheet programs to enable higher-order and reusable functions, but so far remain primarily academic in nature.
Academia.
Functional programming is an active area of research in the field of programming language theory. There are several peer-reviewed publication venues focusing on functional programming, including the International Conference on Functional Programming, the Journal of Functional Programming, and the Symposium on Trends in Functional Programming.
Industry.
Functional programming has seen use in a wide variety of industrial applications. For example, Erlang, which was developed by the Swedish company Ericsson in the late 1980s, was originally used to implement fault-tolerant telecommunications systems, but has since become popular for building a range of applications at companies such as Nortel, Facebook, Électricité de France and WhatsApp. Scheme, a dialect of Lisp, was used as the basis for several applications on early Apple Macintosh computers, and has been applied to problems such as training simulation software and telescope control. OCaml, which was introduced in the mid-1990s, has seen commercial use in areas such as financial analysis, driver verification, industrial robot programming, and static analysis of embedded software. Haskell, though initially intended as a research language, has also been applied by a range of companies, in areas such as aerospace systems, hardware design, and web programming.
Other functional programming languages that have seen use in industry include Scala, F#, Wolfram Language, Lisp, Standard ML, and Clojure.
Functional "platforms" have been popular in finance for risk analytics (particularly with the larger investment banks). Risk factors are coded as functions that form interdependent graphs (categories) to measure correlations in market shifts not unlike Gröbner basis optimizations but also for regulatory compliance such as Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review. Given the use of OCAML or CAML variations in finance, these systems are sometimes considered related to a categorical abstract machine or CAM. Indeed, functional programming is heavily influenced by category theory.
Education.
Many universities teach or have taught functional programming as part of their undergraduate Computer Science degrees. Some use it as their introduction to programming, while others teach it after teaching imperative programming.
Outside of computer science, functional programming is being used as a method to teach problem solving, algebra and geometric concepts.
It has also been used as a tool to teach classical mechanics in "Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics".


Isao Nakata

 is a Japanese professional shogi player, ranked 8-dan.
Nakata's nickname is コーヤン "Kōyan," after the on'yomi reading of his first name.
Theoretical contributions.
The Kōyan variation (コーヤン流 "Kōyan-ryū") of Third File Rook is named after him. In particular, his development of the so-called "Isao Nakata XP" is a very popular Third File Rook quick attack countermeasure against Static Rook Anaguma.
Promotion history.
Nakata's promotion history is as follows:
Awards and honors.
Nakata received the Japan Shogi Association's "25 Years Service Award" in 2011 in recognition of being an active professional for twenty-five years.


Akira Inaba

 is a Japanese professional shogi player, ranked 8-dan. Inaba, together with Tetsurō Itodani, Masayuki Toyoshima and Akihiro Murata, is one of four Kansai-based young shogi professionals who are collectively referred to as the "Young Kansai Big Four" (関西若手四天王 "Kansai Wakate Shitennō").
Promotion history.
Inaba's promotion history is as follows:
Titles and other championships.
Inaba has appeared in a major title match only once: he was the challenger for the Meijin title in 2017. He earned the right to challenge Amahiko Satō for the title by winning the 2016-2017 Class A ranking tournament with a record of 8 wins and 1 loss, thus becoming the eighth player in history to win the right to challenge for the Meijin title in his first year in Class A.
Inaba has won two non-major title championships: the 21st tournament in 2013, and the 70th NHK Cup tournament in 2021.
Year-end prize money and game fee ranking.
Inaba has finished in the "Top 10" of the JSA's once: he finished 6th with JPY 28,010,000 in earnings in 2017.


Clara Steinitz

Clara Steinitz (; 16 April 1852 – 1931) was a German novelist, feuilletonist, and translator from English, French, Italian, and Norwegian.
She was born to Jewish parents Bernhard and Pauline Klausner in Kobylin, Prussia, and was educated at Halle-on-the-Saale. In 1873 she married Siegfried Heinrich Steinitz, editor of "Die Deutsche Presse", with whom she moved to Berlin.
Among Steinitz's novels were "Des Volkes Tochter" (1878), "Die Hässliche" (1884), "Ihr Beruf" (1886), "Im Priesterhause" (1890), "Ring der Nibelungen" (1893), and "Irrlicht" (1895). She also translated several novels from foreign languages, including Bayard Taylor's "", Octave Feuillet's "Les amours de Philippe", Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen's "Gunnar: A Tale of Norse Life" and "Under the Glacier", and Edward Bellamy's "Miss Ludington's Sister: A Romance of Immortality".


Zahoor ul Akhlaq

Zahoor ul Akhlaq (4 February 1941 – 18 January 1999) was a pioneering artist from Pakistan. He is known for his approach to painting, sculpture, design and architecture, as well as his teaching at the NCA (National College of Arts) in Lahore.
Background and family life.
Born in Delhi, India in 1941, he was the eldest in a family of 11 children. His family moved to Lahore after the independence of Pakistan in 1947, eventually settling in Karachi, Pakistan. Akhlaq attended the Sindh Madrassah (now called Sindh Madressatul Islam University) as a young boy and went to study art in Lahore at the Mayo School of Arts (now called National College of Arts) back in 1958. The well-known Pakistani painter Shakir Ali was teaching art there as a professor back then. Shakir Ali encouraged him greatly in his art studies. Zahoor graduated from this college in 1962 and he then started teaching at the same college in the Fine Arts Department. Shakir Ali heavily influenced him to learn the Cubist style and other modern ideas of that time.
In 1971, he married Sheherezade Alam, a potter, and the couple had two daughters, Jahanara, (1974–1999), Nurjahan (born in 1979).
Death.
Akhlaq along with his elder daughter, Jahanara, was shot dead in their Lahore home on 18 January 1999.
Work and influences.
Akhlaq's painting invoked a dialogue between modernist abstraction and many traditional forms and practices found within South Asia (including Mughal Miniature painting, calligraphy and vernacular architecture). At a time when his contemporaries in South Asia were developing their work within a modernist tradition, or had primitivist leanings, he eschewed both schools by merging his interest in abstractions with traditional and vernacular practices. Although he evaded the label of an abstract artist, his work mostly fits this definition.
Akhlaq's influences are from a vast range of sources, which include painting, literature, philosophy, Sufism, dance, and music. His teaching and practice is considered to have had a significant impact on a generation of Contemporary Pakistani art and artists. Zahoor ul Akhlaq is best known for pioneering the contemporary miniature painting in Pakistan.
Designs.
Zahoor ul Akhlaq played an important role in the establishment of Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture in Karachi.
The logo of the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture was designed by him. In 1981, he designed 2 of a set of 5 stamps issued to mark the Third Islamic Summit Conference at Makkah, Saudi Arabia. Both designs (40 paisas and Re 1) depicted an Afghan refugee girl.
Memorials.
An art gallery at the National College of Arts, Lahore is named in his memory as is the gallery at the Indus Valley School of Art and Architecture, Karachi.
Commemorative postage stamp issued.
On 14 August 2006, Pakistan Post issued a Rs. 40 sheetlet to posthumously honour 10 Pakistani Painters. Besides Zahoor ul Akhlaq, the other 9 painters are: Laila Shahzada, Askari Mian Irani, Sadequain, Ali Imam, Shakir Ali, Anna Molka Ahmed, Zubeida Agha, Ahmed Pervez and Bashir Mirza.


Carlos Cruz-Diez

Carlos Cruz-Diez (17 August 1923 – 27 July 2019) was a Venezuelan artist said by some scholars to have been "one of the greatest artistic innovators of the 20th century."


Ronnie Landfield

Ronnie Landfield (born January 9, 1947) is an American abstract painter. During his early career from the mid-1960s through the 1970s his paintings were associated with Lyrical Abstraction, (related to Postminimalism, Color Field painting, and Abstract expressionism), and he was represented by the David Whitney Gallery and the André Emmerich Gallery.
Landfield is best known for his abstract landscape paintings, and has held more than seventy solo exhibitions and more than two hundred group exhibitions. In 2011 he was described by the LewAllen Gallerie as "at the forefront of contemporary art...one of the best painters in America."
Early career.
Landfield first exhibited in New York in 1962. He continued his study of painting by visiting major museum and gallery exhibitions in New York during the early sixties and by taking painting and drawing classes at the Art Students League of New York and in Woodstock, New York. He graduated from the High School of Art and Design in June 1963. He briefly attending the Kansas City Art Institute before returning to New York in November 1963. At sixteen Landfield rented his first loft at 6 Bleecker Street near The Bowery (sublet with a friend from the figurative painter Leland Bell), during a period when his abstract expressionist oil paintings took on hard-edged and large painterly shapes. In February 1964, Landfield traveled to Los Angeles; and in March he began living in Berkeley where he began painting Hard-edge abstractions primarily painted with acrylic. He briefly attended the University of California, Berkeley and the San Francisco Art Institute before returning to New York in July 1965.
Mid period.
From 1964 to 1966 he experimented with minimal art, sculpture, hard-edge geometric painting, found objects, and finally began a series of 15 - 9' x 6' mystical "border paintings". After a serious setback in February 1966 when his loft at 496 Broadway burned down, he returned to painting in April 1966 by sharing a loft with his friend Dan Christensen at 4 Great Jones Street. "The Border Painting" series was completed in July 1966, and soon after architect Philip Johnson acquired "Tan Painting" for the permanent collection of The Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery in Lincoln, Nebraska.
In late 1966 through 1968 he began exhibiting his paintings and works on paper in leading galleries and museums. Landfield moved into his loft at 94 Bowery in July 1967; there, he continued to experiment with rollers, staining, hard-edge borders, and painted unstretched canvases on the floor for the first time. Briefly in 1967-1968 he worked part-time for Dick Higgins and the Something Else Press.
Landfield was part of a large circle of young artists who had come to Manhattan during the 1960s. Peter Young, Dan Christensen, Peter Reginato, Eva Hesse, Carlos Villa, David R. Prentice, Kenneth Showell, David Novros, Joan Jonas, Michael Steiner, Frosty Myers, Tex Wray, Larry Zox, Larry Poons, Robert Povlich, Neil Williams, Carl Gliko, Billy Hoffman, Lee Lozano, Pat Lipsky, John Griefen, Brice Marden, James Monte, John Chamberlain, Donald Judd, Frank Stella, Carl Andre, Dan Graham, Robert Smithson, Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Kenneth Noland, Clement Greenberg, Bob Neuwirth, Joseph Kosuth, Mark di Suvero, Brigid Berlin, Lawrence Weiner, Rosemarie Castoro, Marjorie Strider, Dorothea Rockburne, Leo Valledor, Peter Forakis and Marisol were just a few of the artists and writers he befriended and saw regularly at Max's Kansas City - the favorite place for artists in New York City during the 1960s.
By 1970 Landfield was recognized as one of the first painters to have led the "movement away from the geometric, hard-edge, and minimal, toward more lyrical, sensuous, romantic abstractions in colors which were softer and more vibrant." His paintings were part of the Whitney Museum of American Art's Annual exhibitions in 1967 and 1969, and he was included in the first Whitney Biennial in 1973. During the late 1960s through the early '70s his work was included in group exhibitions at the Park Place Gallery, the Bianchini Gallery, the Bykert Gallery, the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts (formerly Stanford University Museum of Art) amongst other places. In 1967-1968 two drawings were reproduced in "S.M.S. III" by the Letter Edged in Black Press, and he was included in "New York 10" 1969, a portfolio of prints published by Tanglewood Press.
In October 1969 he had his first one-man exhibition at the David Whitney Gallery in NYC, featuring works of that period which were partially inspired by Chinese Landscape painting. His painting "Any Day Now", 1969, 108 x 93 inches was acquired by the Whitney Museum of American Art. His painting "Diamond Lake" 1969, 108 x 168 inches, was acquired from Philip Johnson by the Museum of Modern Art in 1972 and was installed in the lobby of MoMA for several months. His painting "Elijah" 1969, 108 x 55 inches was later exhibited in Beijing, China in the early 1990s; and it is currently on view in Havana, Cuba.
During 1970 Landfield participated in a three-person show in New York City at the David Whitney Gallery and he had solo exhibitions in Cleveland, St. Louis and in Corona Del Mar, California. In 1971 he held his second solo exhibition at the David Whitney Gallery in New York City. From that exhibition his painting "Chinese Winter", 108 x 88 inches was acquired by the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, and his painting "Storm Thread", 108 x 94 inches, was acquired by the Smith College Museum of Art. Landfield joined the Andre Emmerich Gallery in April 1972 one month after the David Whitney Gallery closed in March 1972.
1973 to 1993.
Landfield traveled throughout the southwest in 1973 and again in 1975. With his wife and artist friends Peter Young and Carmen Megeath he camped, lived and painted dozens of paintings on canvas and limestone in the mountains outside Zion National Park in southern Utah. He taught Fine Arts at the School of Visual Arts from 1975 until 1989. For ten years from 1975 until 1984 four of Landfield's paintings from the collection of Philip Johnson were installed in the Four Seasons Restaurant in the Seagram Building on Park Avenue between 52nd and 53rd Streets in Midtown Manhattan, on the so-called Mark Rothko wall.
Spending the early summer of 1980 on the Caribbean island of St. Barts Landfield produced a series of india ink and acrylic paintings on paper there. Throughout the later 1980s and 1990s he often spent summers in various towns throughout the western Catskill Mountains painting abstractions and abstract landscapes in oil paint and acrylic. During the 1980s and early '90s he showed his paintings with the Charles Cowles Gallery and Stephen Haller Fine Arts in New York City. During this period Landfield exhibited his paintings widely. He had solo exhibitions or was included in group exhibitions in Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New Orleans, Paris, San Francisco, Seattle, Washington DC and Zurich, to name a few places.
During the early 1970s to the early 1990s many of Landfield's major paintings entered important public collections. In 1970 his painting "St. Augustine", 1968, 108 x 120 inches was acquired by the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena; in 1971 "Shenandoah (for Eva Hesse)" 1970, 90 x 113 inches, was acquired by the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; in 1972, his painting "Rain Dance III," was acquired by the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, and his painting "From Portal to Paradise," 1982, 107 x 78 inches, was acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1983, among dozens of others. In 1989-1990 Landfield began correspondence with the late art historian, Professor Daniel Robbins, about the neglected historical understanding of abstract painting in New York since the mid-1960s. Landfield began extensive writing and lecturing about abstract painting from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s.
Recent work.
In 1994 Landfield presided over two public panel discussions at the New York Studio School and the Tenri Institute both in Manhattan called "Cool and Collected or Too Hot to Handle". In 1995 he curated "Seven Painters" at the Nicholas/Alexander Gallery in SoHo, an exhibition that featured seven important abstract painters whose careers began in the mid to late 1960s, some of whom hadn't been shown for many years. In 1996 Landfield had a solo exhibition in Sapporo, Japan and lectured there on American art. In 1997 he aided colleague Ronald Davis's creation of an educational website highlighting abstract art from the 1960s. He was represented by the Salander/O'Reilly Gallery in New York from 1997 until 2007. In October 2005 he had a solo exhibition of his paintings accompanied by a solo show of sculpture by Peter Reginato at the Heidi Cho Gallery in Chelsea.
In 2007 Landfield had a retrospective exhibition "Ronnie Landfield: Paintings From Five Decades," at the Butler Institute of American Art Later that year, he had an exhibition of recent paintings entitled "Toward Monochrome" at the Heidi Cho Gallery in Manhattan. Landfield has exhibited his work in important institutions and galleries for nearly five decades. Currently he lives and works in TriBeCa, and teaches at The Art Students League of New York; during a recent lecture there he said ""It's important for maximum freedom for an artist, to stay under the radar for as long as possible"." From 2007 until 2016, his work has been exhibited at the Stephen Haller Gallery in New York City and LewAllen Galleries in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He currently is represented by the Findlay Galleries in New York and Florida. He draws, paints and writes left-handed. Landfield's two sons are artists who live in New York: Matthew Hart Landfield is an actor, writer and director, and Noah Landfield is a painter and musician.
At the time of his exhibition at the Butler Institute of American Art in 2007, Landfield was referred to as "one of the best painters in America and has been since he first came on the scene in the 1960s." Louis Zona, director of the institute, says "To stand in front of a Landfield painting is to be transported into a world where color feeds upon color and every inch of the canvas is considered ... Ronnie Landfield is, pure and simple, one of the best painters in America."
Landfield's show "Where it All Began" was the debut exhibition at the gallery space of the High School of Art and Design in the fall of 2012. In late October 2012 Landfield's home and studio in Tribeca was adversely affected by Hurricane Sandy. In the fall of 2013 his paintings were included in an exhibition called "Come Together: Surviving Sandy, Year One" curated by Phong Bui and The Daedalus Foundation.
Most recently, he has been under the representation of Findlay Galleries, and has had his work in several group and one-man shows. In January 2018, he participated in a live discussion with Michael Rips, the director of the Art Students League of New York, about his life and his art at Findlay Galleries.


Curse of the Boulder Valley

The Curse of Boulder Valley, also known as Niwot's Curse, is attributed to Chief Niwot, who is said to have first stated it upon meeting the first white gold seekers to visit what is now known as the Boulder Valley in Boulder County, Colorado. According to the chief, the curse of the valley was its breathtaking landscape.
Niwot was the leader of the Southern Arapaho. The visitors were encamped at what the Arapaho considered to be a sacred site, Valmont Butte, some four miles to the north east of what is now central Boulder, Colorado. Niwot and his closest elder braves, Bear Head and Many Whips, rode out to the site where the new arrivals had decided to camp, near the place where Boulder Creek releases from the Front Range onto the Great Plains. Some see the Curse as portentous of the settling of not only the Boulder Valley, but of the entire Western United States.
Europeans come to Boulder Valley.
In fall 1858, led by Captain Thomas Aikins, a group of gold prospectors, part of the Colorado Gold Rush, came from Fort St. Vrain, 30 miles east. As they made camp at the site where Boulder Creek rushes down from Nederland to meet Sunshine Creek and flow onto the Great Plains, Niwot and his braves met them.
They had ridden from Valmont Butte to greet them in peace, and to admonish them to leave.
Chief Niwot, it is said, as eloquent and capable as he was with the English language learned from his brother-in-law, his sister's husband, the trapper John Poisal, told the European erstwhile settlers the area was cursed. He is said to have told them the Curse of Boulder Valley is: "People seeing the beauty of this valley will want to stay, and their staying will be the undoing of the beauty." As the conversation heightened, he proceeded to threaten them with a visitation by War Party if they did not leave.
Battle looms and a dream brings initial peace.
Aikins and his men refused to leave and prepared to do battle against the Arapaho. At some point, Bear Head and Many Whips headed back to the Arapaho encampment to raise a War Party while the Chief lingered.
While they were away, Aikins and his group took steps to avoid hostilities by focusing personal attention on Chief Niwot, plying him with canned beans and salt pork, and getting him drunk. As a result, when Bear Head and Many Whips and the War Party returned, Niwot was advocating peace with the gold seeking Caucasians, yet tension reigned.
After three tense days, the threat of battle remained in the air. Then, abruptly, Niwot rode into Aikins’ camp once more. He had come to tell them one of his Arapaho shamans had received a dream from the Great Spirit the night before. In the dream, a flood covered the earth and swallowed the Arapaho people, while the whites survived. Niwot interpreted this to mean that gold seekers would flood his homeland, and he could do nothing to stop it. Peace with the whites, Niwot realized, was the only way his people would avoid being swept away by the flood.
Starting then, Niwot and his fellow chief Little Raven, who had recently welcomed white settlers to the Denver gold camps, maintained their stance of peaceful coexistence with the newly arrived Europeans, at least for the time being. He was killed shortly thereafter in the notorious Sand Creek massacre.


Maude Kerns

Maude Irvine Kerns (August 1, 1876 – August 19, 1965) was an American artist and art educator, known for her avant-garde paintings. Her works were exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum, National Gallery of Art, and the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles, and earned Kerns considerable notoriety among the abstract art movement in New York. She later taught art at the University of Oregon as well as at high schools in Corvallis and Seattle, Washington before her death in 1965.
Early life and education.
Kerns was born in 1876 in Portland, Oregon. She was raised by her pioneer parents, who had migrated to Oregon in 1852 from Indiana. Her father was Samuel Irvine Kerns, and her mother was Elizabeth Claggett; they were married in 1868. Her father was in the Oregon infantry and fought in three Indian wars in 1856, 1865 and 1866. Her mother was a school teacher. She had an older sister, born in 1874, named Edith (married name Edith Kerns Chambers), and two younger brothers, LeRoy Flemming born in 1884, and Harold Claggett, born in 1890. The family moved to Eugene City, Oregon in 1884.
Kerns enrolled in high school in 1891, at the prep school administered by the University of Oregon. She graduated from the University of Oregon in 1899 in a class of thirty-four seniors, with a Bachelor of Arts. In 1900 she attended the Mark Hopkins Institute (now the San Francisco Art Institute) in San Francisco. She moved to New York City in 1904 to attend Columbia University Teacher College, where she received a diploma in Fine Arts and a Bachelor of Science in Art Education under the guidance of Arthur Wesley Dow. Arthur Wesley Dow described her as "a person of dignity and presence, very quiet in manner, but firm and positive in her opinions".
Career.
Prior to moving to New York for school, Kerns taught in Corvallis, Lebanon, and Eugene, Oregon. Kerns taught art in Seattle high schools for fourteen years, after receiving her degree from Columbia. She studied with William Merritt Chase in 1912. She also spent time traveling through Asia and Europe seeing the works of Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Paul Klee and others from the avant-garde art movement, as well as a stint with renowned art teacher Hans Hofmann. Kerns returned to teach at the School of Architecture and Allied Arts at the University of Oregon in Eugene. She was the head of the art education program (also called the Normal Arts Department) from 1921 until 1947, her curriculum was inline with the beliefs and practices of William Morris. She remained until her retirement in the 1940s. Many of her early works were destroyed during a fire at the art school. Kerns was a member of the California WC (watercolor) society and the Oregon Society of Artists.
Her first exhibition of paintings was in 1925 at the Seattle Art Museum as part of their Northwest Annual Show. From the 1930s through the 1950s, Kerns made a name for herself in the world of abstract art, painting in what was called at the time the "non-objective" art movement, being widely known for modernist landscapes. She exhibited work at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting in New York. A spiritual woman, she embraced the art-as-spiritual expression philosophy of Wassily Kandinsky. She was also influenced by Asian art. She was an innovative teacher, being a mentor to University of Oregon professors, she would do things like have her class paint to music to try new styles. Working with Arthur Wesley Dow, Alexander Archipenko contributed to her interest in color and shape relationships. She was also an associate to Albert Patecky. Her paintings were recognized and championed by Hilla von Rebay, chief advisor to Solomon R. Guggenheim, who purchased a number of her paintings, along with art from other standouts in the early American abstract art scene, for his Museum of Non-Objective Painting (later renamed Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum) in New York City.
Death and legacy.
Kerns died in 1965, and later The Eugene Art Center (1950), to which she was a major donor and founder of, was renamed The Maude Kerns Art Center in her honor and served to promote her passion for contemporary art. The art center holds a variety of paintings, mixed media, ceramics, and many other modern forms of art.


Harold Zisla

Harold Zisla (June 28, 1925 – March 18, 2016) was an American abstract expressionist painter and art educator. In 1968 he became the founding chair of the Fine Arts Department at Indiana University South Bend, where he taught until his retirement in 1989.
Early life.
Zisla was born in Cleveland, Ohio. During his youth he took art classes at the Cleveland Museum of Art (1932-1937), and he studied with painter Paul B. Travis at Council Educational Alliance (1938–40). In 1940 he won a scholarship to Young Artist Classes at the Cleveland Museum of Art, where he took classes with Milton S. Fox, a painter and art historian who later served as editor-in-chief and vice president of Harry N. Abrams Inc., an art book publisher.
Zisla earned his high school diploma from East Technical High School in Cleveland in 1943. Following high school, he served in the United States Navy until 1946. He graduated from the Cleveland School of Art with a diploma in painting in 1950. The same year, he received his B.S. in art education at Western Reserve University. The following year he earned his M.S. in art education. He moved to South Bend, Indiana, in 1952, where he worked first as an industrial designer at Uniroyal.
Career.
He directed the South Bend Art Center (now the South Bend Museum of Art) from 1957 to 1966, prior to accepting the professorship at what was then called the South Bend-Mishawaka Campus of Indiana University. Four-year degree programs had just been authorized in 1965, and Zisla had the responsibility of hiring new faculty.
Zisla was long active in service to community arts in the Michiana region. Following his tenure as executive director, he served on the South Bend Art Center board of trustees. He also served on the acquisitions committee of Purdue University, the Advisory Board of the Gallery at Saint Mary’s College, and the Mayor’s Committee to Build a Cultural Complex.
Zisla said about painting that it "should be, more than anything else, a liberation into the spirit of the artist, and to have presence, impact, dynamism, freedom from the trite, the contrived, the boringly dead." Paintings, he said, "must be alive.”
Harold Zisla married Doreen on August 13, 1946. They have two children, Paul Zisla and Beverly Welber.
The Harold and Doreen Zisla Art Scholarship has been established at Indiana University South Bend to support graduate and undergraduate students whose work displays an interest in experimental art.


Mundasupatti

Mundasupatti () is a 2014 Indian Tamil-language period comedy film written and directed by Ram Kumar and produced by C. V. Kumar under his banner Thirukumaran Entertainment and Fox Star Studios. It stars Vishnu Vishal and Nandita Swetha, with Kaali Venkat, Ramdoss, and Anandaraj in supporting roles.
The film is set in the 1980s in a fictional village called Mundasupatti, where people believe bad luck will befall them if they are photographed. The story illustrates what happens when two photographers visit the village. It is based on a short film which was directed by Ram Kumar himself in 2011 for the TV show "Naalaya Iyakunar."
Principal photography commenced in August 2013, with Sathyamangalam being served as the primary location for the film. The shoot was completed within 57 days. The film's technical crew includes Sean Roldan as the music director, while cinematography and editing for the film were handled by P. V. Shankar and Leo John Paul respectively.
"Mundasupatti" released on 13 June 2014 to positive critical response and became a hit at the box office.
Plot.
Gopi (Vishnu Vishal), a Sathyamangalam-based photographer, and his assistant Alagumani (Kaali Venkat) arrive at a remote village called Mundasupatti on an assignment. The natives of this village are superstitious; they fear getting photographed, believing it will lead to death.
Production.
Ram Kumar had shot about 10 short films for the TV show, "Naalaya Iyakunar". When "Kadhalil Sodhappuvadhu Yeppadi" (a film developed from a short film) released, he said he was inspired to make his own film. He took a year off to work on the script and to select his actors. He called it a challenge to convert the script for a short film into a full-length one and stated that he had added new characters for the film version.
Vishnu Vishal was cast for the lead role, with the director stating that he wanted "someone who is funny, but very subtly so". Vishnu, who had till then only played characters that were emotional, for the first time attempted a full-length comedy role, who felt it was "very refreshing" and added that "for the first time, I could relate to my character". Nandita Swetha was signed for the lead female role, and Ram said that he wanted "someone who is dusky" for the role of Kalaivaani, adding that he was impressed by her performance in "Attakathi". Kaali Venkat who had been part of the original short film played the assistant to Vishnu's character. Ramdoss, seen in small roles previously, was given the role of an aspiring actor, a "fantastic role", according to him, that, he said, gave him "a lot of scope for acting".
The filming started on 28 August 2013 and was completed by October 2013. The film was shot in 57 days, in Sathyamangalam, which has houses that are over a 100 years old. Vishnu's Hollywood Photo Studio was located at Nirmala Theatre Road, Sathyamangalam.
Soundtrack.
The film's soundtrack was composed by independent musician Sean Roldan. It was the first film project he had signed on, although two of his soundtrack albums got released before the release of "Mundasupatti". Sean Roldan had composed seven tracks for the film, besides singing three of them. The lyrics for the songs were written by Muthamil and GKB. The soundtrack album was launched along with the film's trailer on 9 May 2014 at the Suryan FM 93.5 Radio Station, Chennai.
The songs as well as the score received very positive feedback by critics. Behindwoods gave it 3.25 out of 5 stars and called it "one of the most enterprising albums of this year". Musicaloud.com gave it a score of 8.5 out of 10 and wrote, "There seems to be no stopping Sean Roldan". Rediff wrote, "Sean Roldan's rustic songs and background score are definitely the highlights of the film, especially the folk styled Rasa Maharasa and the beautiful melody Idhu Enna". Deccan Chronicle wrote, "The [other] standout of the film was Sean Roldan's background and music. His catchy but affectionate songs fit very well with the clayey tones of the film – which is to say that they mould and reshape the landscape in lieu with the plot". Milliblog reviewed "Like Santhosh Narayanan, Sean Roldan is truly on a roll with his inventive spin on conventional Tamil film music." The Rare Field reviewed as "Composer Sean Roldan hits the bulls-eye yet again, and with "Mundasupatti", he has a hat-trick on his hands!"
Release.
The satellite rights of the film were sold to STAR Vijay. To promote the film the makers had created an interactive application on the website, www.mymundasupattistyle.com that allowed visitors to create their own avatars akin to characters from Mundasupatti. The idea was well received and had gone viral on the social networking sites.
A special screening of "Mundasupatti" was arranged for distributors and exhibitors couple of days prior to the release. Subsequently, the film opened across nearly 207 screens in Tamil Nadu, which was considered "very high for a Vishnu film". The film released on 13 June 2014 alongside five other Tamil releases, but according to Sify.com, it got "the best of screens and prime shows in multiplexes".
Reception.
Critical reception.
The film received generally positive feedback from critics. "The Times of India" gave 3.5 stars out of 5 and wrote, "Director Ram Kumar, who is the latest promising find from the TV show Naalaya Iyakkunar, certainly knows how to end a joke with a punchline. The film is a tad overlong ... and some of the comedy feels repetitive but Ram Kumar manages to keep things playful and entertaining at all times ... that we look past some of the indulgences". Sify.com wrote, ""Mundasupatti" is a rip-roaring rocker! It is a full length laugh riot which is fresh and entertaining. The wacky story and treatment of debutant director Ram Kumar, makes it tickling and an absolute fun ride". "Deccan Chronicle" gave 3.5 out of 5 and wrote, "They say that a tragedy today is bound to be a comedy tomorrow – an unfortunate incident, a set of beliefs to explain that incident, and the culture of fear and superstition that this broods are all probable misnomers that we all will look back at and have a mighty laugh. Take it a step further by adding situational comedy to an initial tragedy and what we have is a film that succeeds in many levels with the possible muse of timing and pacing". Silverscreen.in wrote, ""Mundasupatti" is set in the 80s. Fascinatingly so. It is perhaps a bizarrely comical version of a Stephen Leacock essay, but fashionably vintage and very Indian". The New Indian Express wrote, "the debutant director has lived up to the expectations, establishing his credentials with his very first effort. The plot is refreshing, the screenplay engaging, the dialogue sparkling with wit and humour. The director moves his narration deftly and with confidence. "Mundasupatti" with no big names to boast of, yet again proves it. It's a film not to be missed".
Baradwaj Rangan wrote, "I wish more had been done with the central conceit. This is not a lazy film by any stretch. But a comedy should be light on its feet. Linger too much, and it can begin to seem out of focus". Behindwoods gave it 3 stars out of 5 and wrote, ""Mundasupatti" could have used some trimming as it gets slightly tedious at times but the feeling while coming out, is one of satisfaction. This debut offering from director Ram Kumar has turned out to be a worthy product from the CV Kumar – Fox Star Studios camp" and concluded that the film is "A feel-good comedy entertainer". Indiaglitz gave 3 out of 5 and wrote, "though being predictable, this one glues you to the seat for an enjoyable two and half hours. Revolving entirely around the sentiments attached to camera, with a young and vibrant crew, the film is a thorough entertainer". Rediff.com gave it 2.5 out of 5 stars and called the film "an entertaining rom-com" and "a decent attempt by debutant D Ram Kumar", but criticized that "the narration is extremely slow paced and the film too long, taking away some of the fun". OneIndia gave 2.5 out of 5 and concluded, ""Mundasupatti" is a fun-filled drama. Entertains at first watch". "The Hindustan Times" gave 2.5 out of 5 and concluded, ""Mundasupatti" has some delightful moments of freshness to offer". Rajasekar S, from Cinemalead called Mundasupatti as a long and tiring ride, rating it at a half baked 2.5 out of 5.
Box office.
"Mundasupatti" collected 3.1 crore in its opening weekend in Tamil Nadu, which was the highest ever opening for a C V Kumar film. The film collected in Chennai in first weekend.


Renata Bernal

Renata Bernal (born February 3, 1937, in Munich, Germany is a contemporary American artist. Her work spans a broad range of media including oil paintings, acrylic paintings, pastel paintings, lithograph, woodcuts, and ink drawings. She has exhibited in New York City, San Francisco, Providence, Rhode Island, and in numerous cities in upstate New York, and her artwork can be seen in permanent collections at the Binghamton University Foundation and the historic Security Mutual Life building in Binghamton, New York.
Life and work.
Renata Bernal was born in Munich, (Germany) in 1937, and came to the United States at the age of 13.
She attended the Cooper Union Art School in New York City and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute and a Masters in Art Education from Brown University.
While a student at the San Francisco Art Institute, Bernal had a strong interest in the graphic arts. She studied lithography and etching with Nathan Oliveira between 1956 and 1959. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, she also worked with ink drawing, woodcuts and oil painting.
In the late 1960s Bernal began working with acrylic airbrush ("air gun") on canvas. The airbrush allowed her to produce, with acrylic paint, the same feeling of luminosity that she had grown to love about oil paintings. Over the following decades this was the primary medium that she used for her large abstract pieces, although she continued to work in other media and styles: pastel and charcoal portraits in the 1970s and 1980s, and ink drawings in the 1990s.
Renata has donated a number of her works to benefit local charities and non-profit organizations, such as the Art Mission Project and WSKG Public Broadcasting.
Renata is currently retired in Binghamton in upstate New York, where she continues to enjoy practicing her artwork, writing poetry, and participating in her local Unitarian Universalist congregation.


Natsuko Fujimori

 is a retired Japanese women's professional shogi player ranked 4-dan.
Personal life.
Fujimori's son Tetsuya is also a professional shogi player. The two are the only mother and son to be awarded professional shogi player status.
Promotion history.
Fujimori's promotion history was as follows:
Note: All ranks are women's professional ranks.
Awards and honors.
Fujimori received the Japan Shogi Association's received the "25 Years Service Award" in recognition of being an active professional for twenty-five years in 2003.