John Man says "29 May 1453 . . . was the birthday of the Renaissance" (Man, 2002, p. 231).

Here's John Man's hypothesis:

Thus, when the Turks seized Constantinople in 1453 and turned it into Istanbul, it was to Venice that its scholars fled, forming a community of expatriate academics, La scuola e la nazione greca and creating an irony. The Fall of Constantinople was a notorious disaster for Christendom; yet it contributed to a boom in scholarship in Europe. The date 29 May 1453 [when the Turks took Constantinople] . . . was the birthday of the Renaissance . . .
...........
The influx of Greeks and their manuscripts fuelled a feeling among Renaissance scholars and artists that, in their search for classical antecedents, they had better explore their pre-Latin roots among the writings of the ancient Greeks. [Man, 2002, p. 231]

John Man sees this as a positive outcome of what some see as a negative,
an example of the so-called Law of Unintended Consequences -- good things can come from bad events,
and vice versa.

The key insight isn't that good came of the Fall of Constantinople. The key insight
is that knowledge moved when knowledgeable people moved. It's information transfer,
to new conditions, that fed the renaissance fires that were already burning brightly in Italy.

Here's a good introductory essay on him from the Wikipedia entry for Henri Poincaré where you get a sense of who he is and what he accomplished:

Jules Henri Poincaré (April 29, 1854 – July 17, 1912) (IPA: [pwɛ̃kaˈʀe][1]) was one of France's greatest mathematicians and theoretical physicists, and a philosopher of science. Poincaré is often described as a polymath, and in mathematics as 'The Last Universalist', since he excelled in all fields of the discipline as it existed during his lifetime.

As a mathematician and physicist, he made many original fundamental contributions to pure and applied mathematics, mathematical physics, and celestial mechanics. He was responsible for formulating the Poincaré conjecture, one of the most famous problems in mathematics. In his research on the three-body problem, Poincaré became the first person to discover a chaotic deterministic system which laid the foundations of modern chaos theory. He is considered to be one of the founders of the field of topology.

Poincaré introduced the modern principle of relativity and was the first to present the Lorentz transformations in their modern symmetrical form.

Here's an interesting account on his contributions and fields:

He was also a popularizer of mathematics and physics and wrote several books for the lay public.

And here's some information on how his mind worked,
along with his strengths and foibles:

Character

Poincaré's work habits have been compared to a bee flying from flower to flower. Poincaré was interested in the way his mind worked; he studied his habits and gave a talk about his observations in 1908 at the Institute of General Psychology in Paris. He linked his way of thinking to how he made several discoveries.

The mathematician Darboux claimed he was un intuitif (intuitive), arguing that this is demonstrated by the fact that he worked so often by visual representation. He did not care about being rigorous and disliked logic. He believed that logic was not a way to invent but a way to structure ideas and that logic limits ideas.

[edit] Toulouse' characterization

Poincaré's mental organization was not only interesting to Poincaré himself but also to Toulouse, a psychologist of the Psychology Laboratory of the School of Higher Studies in Paris. Toulouse wrote a book entitled Henri Poincaré (1910). In it, he discussed Poincaré's regular schedule:

* He worked during the same times each day in short periods of time. He undertook mathematical research for four hours a day, between 10 a.m. and noon then again from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m.. He would read articles in journals later in the evening.

* His normal work habit was to solve a problem completely in his head, then commit the completed problem to paper.

* He was ambidextrous and nearsighted.

* His ability to visualise what he heard proved particularly useful when he attended lectures since his eyesight was so poor that he could not see properly what his lecturers were writing on the blackboard.

However, these abilities were somewhat balanced by his shortcomings:

* He was physically clumsy and artistically inept.

* He was always in a rush and disliked going back for changes or corrections.

* He never spent a long time on a problem since he believed that the subconscious would continue working on the problem while he consciously worked on another problem.

In addition, Toulouse stated that most mathematicians worked from principles already established while Poincaré was the type that started from basic principle each time. (O'Connor et al., 2002)

His method of thinking is well summarized as:

Habitué à négliger les détails et à ne regarder que les cimes, il passait de l'une à l'autre avec une promptitude surprenante et les faits qu'il découvrait se groupant d'eux-mêmes autour de leur centre étaient instantanément et automatiquement classés dans sa mémoire. (He neglected details and jumped from idea to idea, the facts gathered from each idea would then come together and solve the problem.) (Belliver, 1956)

Here are the sources--some referenced above--from the General References on the Wikipedia for a point of departure for more research:

General References

* Bell, Eric Temple, 1986. Men of Mathematics (reissue edition). Touchstone Books. ISBN 0671628186.
* Belliver, André, 1956. Henri Poincaré ou la vocation souveraine. Paris: Gallimard.
* Bernstein, Peter L, 1996. "Against the Gods: A Remarkable Story of Risk". (p. 199-200). John Wiley & Sons.
* Boyer, B. Carl, 1968. A History of Mathematics: Henri Poincaré, John Wiley & Sons.
* Olivier Darrigol (2004): "The Mystery of the Einstein-Poincaré Connection". Isis: Vol.95, Issue 4; pg. 614, 14 pgs
* Ewald, William B., ed., 1996. From Kant to Hilbert: A Source Book in the Foundations of Mathematics, 2 vols. Oxford Uni. Press. Contains among others:
* Grattan-Guinness, Ivor, 2000. The Search for Mathematical Roots 1870-1940. Princeton Uni. Press.
* Gray, Jeremy, 1986. Linear differential equations and group theory from Riemann to Poincaré, Birkhauser
* Kolak, Daniel, 2001. Lovers of Wisdom, 2nd ed. Wadsworth.
* Murzi, 1998. "Henri Poincaré".
* O'Connor, J. John, and Robertson, F. Edmund, 2002, "Jules Henri Poincaré". University of St. Andrews, Scotland.
* Peterson, Ivars, 1995. Newton's Clock: Chaos in the Solar System (reissue edition). W H Freeman & Co. ISBN 0716727242.
* Poincaré, Henri. 1894. "On the nature of mathematical reasoning," 972-81.
* ________. 1898. "On the foundations of geometry," 982-1011.
* ________. 1900. "Intuition and Logic in mathematics," 1012-20.
* ________. 1905-06. "Mathematics and Logic, I-III," 1021-70.
* ________. 1910. "On transfinite numbers," 1071-74.
* Sageret, Jules, 1911. Henri Poincaré. Paris: Mercure de France.
* Toulouse, E.,1910. Henri Poincaré. - (Source biography in French)

I've linked to the author's home page above and here for your convenience.

Yet before I linked to Gelb's page, I wrote my headline above.

You'll see why as I extend the entry with a passage from one of my reporter's notebooks
that I carried during my term as a Visiting Fellow (Professor) at Harris Manchester College,
University of Oxford in 2005.

4.2.4 How to act/do like/as Leonardo da Vinci:

4.2.4.1 Keep a notebook. L's notebooks are treasured to this day. One of the most impt purchases Bill Gates made when he became the world's richest man, was to buy a notebook of Leonardo da Vinci. He bought it from a wealthy oil company owner--Occidental Petroleum's Armand Hammer.[1] [1 cite]

4.2.4.2 So keep a notebook. Mark Twain did (cite volume 3 of Mark Twain's Notebooks and Journals).

4.2.4.3 Here is what Walter Benjamin said, the great German literary critic and essayist:

"Let no thought pass incognito. Keep your notebook as carefully as the authorities keep their registry
of aliens." [From "13 Theses on Writing."]

Here you have three great thinkers who used a notebook to remember what they thought
and observed.

I remember this observation from 2005, when I was in Oxford thinking about the Information Renaissance
in a city that was inspired by the European Renaissance.

And I wrote it down in my notebook.

That is how today I bring it to you.

Work like Leonardo da Vinci. Keep a notebook.

with a quick blog entry.

Here's a reference to
Wikipedia's entry on Renaissance Music
as a point of departure for understanding the European renaissance
"directly,"
through hearing its music,
which still exists,
lots of it,
and a pleasure to explore.

Scholars will enjoy with ironic laughter
the Wikipedia author's confession
of the difficulty of definition,
especially those from the Center for Information and Communication Sciences,
where they have to struggle
with theoretical definition
of dynamic phenomena
on a regular basis:

Renaissance music is European classical music written during the Renaissance, approximately 1400 to 1600. Defining the beginning of the era is difficult, given the lack of abrupt shifts in musical thinking during the 15th century. Additionally, the process by which music acquired "Renaissance" characteristics was a gradual one, but 1400 is used here.

Yet having confessed the difficulties of definition,
the Wikipedia author does hypothesize
a general definition as we see above.

Then it gets interesting. Look at this:

Principal liturgical forms which endured throughout the entire Renaissance period were masses and motets, with some other developments towards the end, especially as composers of sacred music began to adopt secular forms (such as the madrigal) for their own designs.

Common sacred genres were the mass, the motet, the madrigale spirituale, and the laude.

During the period, secular music had an increasingly wide distribution, with a wide variety of forms, but one must be cautious about assuming an explosion in variety: since printing made music more widely available, much more has survived from this era than from the preceding Medieval era, and probably a rich store of popular music of the late Middle Ages is irretrievably lost. Secular music included songs for one or many voices, forms such as the frottola, chanson and madrigal.

Note this important observation about the power of information technologies
in the time to emphasize particular historical understanding of the world:

one must be cautious about assuming an explosion in variety: since printing made music more widely available, much more has survived from this era than from the preceding Medieval era, and probably a rich store of popular music of the late Middle Ages is irretrievably lost.

We can't assume real life was less rich in bygone days. We just lack the information,
almost any information about it.

That's why our weblogging today is doubly important--first, we provide information about our world,
and second, we are leaving a record, which we hope scholars in the future will recover.

Enjoy the music of the European renaissance.

Now, what is the music from today that will be remembered and emphasized by scholars
about the music of our information renaissance in the future?

How about the recovery and emphasis on the music of Messiaen?

This course will be essentially comparative cultural studies
with a leadership and management emphasis,
noting the impact of information and communication technologies
as a catalyst for social change.

This course will develop a double perspective—the first objectives will be
to familiarize the learner with the era of the European renaissance
and its similarities and differences
with the current era of the information renaissance.

The second set of objectives is as important as the first:
to discourse on what leaders in the information renaissance need to know and to do—
a sort of contemporary Book of the Courtier, together by us as a course community,
taking the place of the original author Baldesar Castiglione—
a discourse on leadership attributes appropriate for our time.

The information outcome of the course for the learners will be a research report,
with historical sections on the European renaissance,
forecasts for “a history of the future” for our time and the coming generation,
and a practical guide--a type of management handbook--
for information renaissance leaders.

We’ll also use the capability of the Internet to build a group weblog like the successful
Information Renaissance weblog at Ball State University.

Below is a list of books that can be used for course readings:

Kenneth J. Atchity, ed., The Renaissance Reader: Firsthand Encounters with the Renaissance,
including letters, diaries, orations, autobiographies, essays, songs, poetry, and art.
New York: HarperCollins, 1996.

Taichi Sakaiya. The Knowledge-Value Revolution, or, A History of the Future.
Tokyo and New York: Kodansha Publishers, 1991.

J. Thomas Wren, ed. The Leader’s Companion: Insights on Leadership Through the Ages.
New York: Free Press, 1995.

Recommended:

Clayton M. Christensen, Erik A. Roth, Scott D. Anthony, eds.
Seeing What's Next: Using Theories of Innovation to Predict Industry Change.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2004.

Frans Johansson. The Medici Effect: Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts, and Cultures.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2004.

Tom Peters. Thriving on Chaos: Handbook for a Management Revolution.
New York: Harper Perennial, 1991.

Douglas S. Robertson. Phase Change: The Computer Revolution in Science and Mathematics.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Douglas S. Robertson. The New Renaissance: Computers and the Next Level of Civilization.
New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian. Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1998.

Tom J. Van Weert, ed.
Education and the Knowledge Society: Information Technology Supporting Human Development.
New York: Springer, 2006.

This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see several panels of Lorenzo Ghiberti's famous doors
from the Baptistery church in the main plaza in Florence.

I saw the door's modern reproductions installed there in the summer of 2005.

Now, in USA, in Atlanta, Chicago, and New York, we can see original panels in our own
art museums. After the panels tour here, New York Times reports
they will not travel again out of Italy.

Here is their lead, the first few paragraphs:

The early-Renaissance sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti spent 27 years creating the monumental gilded bronze doors for the eastern portal of the Baptistery in the Piazza del Duomo in Florence. And it has taken teams of conservators just about as long to restore them. [. . . a project that has taken 26 years so far.]

Their 10 panels depict scenes from the Old Testament, intricately illustrated in high and low relief. When the three-ton, 20-foot-tall doors were completed, in 1452, Michelangelo pronounced them grand enough to adorn the entrance to paradise, and so they became known as “The Gates of Paradise.”

They have for centuries been considered one of the masterpieces of Western art.

Now three of the newly restored panels are scheduled to tour North America for the first time, traveling to the High Museum of Art in Atlanta in April, and then to the Art Institute of Chicago and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

This remarkable opportunity calls for a trip to one the hosting art museums, linked here, in Chicago, or Atlanta, or New York.

Or maybe all three.

I have reproduced some of their significant explanations and arguments as found in their book.
I have retained their paragraph structure, signaled by indented paragraph beginnings.

However, for emphasis and clarity in their complex argumentation, I have sometimes broken
their paragraphs by a full line of space.

In such cases, their text continues flush left, to show it is not an original paragraph break.
Intermediate page references should make it possible
for researchers to find the original quotations in their authors' contexts.

Here is the discussion by Thomas A. Brady Jr. and others:

"THE RENAISSANCE" AND "THE REFORMATION": TWO CLASSIC CONCEPTS

The pivotal role in European history of the two centuries between 1400 and 1600
has sometimes been questioned but rarely denied. Since the middle of the nineteenth century,
two terms--"the Renaissance" and "the Reformation"--have commonly been employed to express
the historians' sense of this role.

Each term can claim roots in an era it helped to organize.

Although "the Renaissance" is a nineteenth-century coinage,
the notion behind it descends from the fourteenth century. . . .

Rather older than "the Renaissance,"
"the Reformation" has long expressed the sense of momentous change
that shrouded the religous schism of the sixteenth century. . . .

By the mid-nineteenth century, "the Renaissance" and "the Reformation" became categories
of periodization, designating not just events or series of events but great turning points
in history. (Brady Jr. et al., 1996, p. xiii)

The changes of sensibility after 1918 made the concepts of "the Renaissance" and "the Reformation"
controversial, disputed, and ambiguous. For one thing, the rise of economic and social history
tended to carve the boundary between modern and older Europe ever more deeply into the
era between1750 and 1815. For another, the ebbing prestige of individualism and Christianity
in European high culture undermined the concepts' explanatory power.
..........................................................................................................................................
Once "the Renaissance" and "the Reformation" are robbed of their explanatory power,
what becomes of the centuries between 1400 and 1600? (Brady Jr. et al., 1996, p. xv-xvi) . . .

The most probable answer is that we can still have a Renaissance and a Reformation--
more accurately, Renaissances and Reformations--providing that we no longer force them
to serve us as the turning points from medieval to modern times.

The concepts retain their value for designating respectively the literate, classicizing, urban-based,
culture of the lay elites and the great upheaval in the Christian church.

Today, one speaks of Renaissance and Reformation as movements--the influence of social history--
but they are no longer grand categories of periodization.

Nowadays, the place of the old revolutionary shift from medieval to modern
has been taken by a gradual, fluctuating, highly contextualized blending
of "late medieval" with "early modern," the central phase of which unfolds
in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. . . .

A focus on the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, therefore,
stakes out the heart of this era and emphasizes its main characteristics
rather than its becoming and passing. (Brady Jr. et al., 1996, p. xvi-xvii)
.................................................................................................................
"The Renaissance" still means the recovery, adaptation, and expansion of knowledge
associated with the neo-classical revival, but it can no longer stand for Burckhardt's
birth of modernity in the form of individualism.

"The Reformation" still means the transformation and differentiation of western Christianity
during the sixteenth century, but it can no longer stand for Motley's liberation of the world
from priestcraft and superstition.

Thus shorn of their former ideological freight, the concepts still retain distinct signatures
as aspects of a world which was, at the same time, late medieval and early modern.

To relativize these old concepts is not to discard them, and indeed may be regarded,
in the spirit of Burckhardt and Motley, as a kind of liberation. Free from the great burden
of being "the turning point" of European history, these centuries--late Middle Ages, Renaissance,
Reformation, and early modern era--have become a conceptual bridge between the world
of pre-modern Europe and the histories of most other parts of the world.

This role, which the nineteenth-century historians could hardly have suspected, has lent
the study of these centuries a remarkable energy in our time. (Brady Jr. et al., 1996, p. xxi)

The somewhat technical discussion of these terms by professional historians is helpful for us.

They let us see how the community of scholars is handling the terms today. As we can see, the terms
"renaissance" and "reformation" can be more general than was the case in the nineteenth century.

We'll continue to work with them.

We will access and add value in the "remarkable energy in our time" for renaissance and reformation studies,
that help us inform today's information renaissance.

JEG

In 1995 Brigham Young University Library had an exhibition of books published by Manutius. The following is from the exhibition's introduction, giving the historical context and importance of this extraordinary information networker in his time, and ours:

The invention of movable type in the mid-fifteenth century and the subsequent development of printing amounted to a vast change in western European thought and habits comparable to that wrought by the information revolution of our own day. Aldus Manutius and his heirs, although not originators of that change, rode the crest of the wave and decisively influenced not only the subsequent course of printing itself, but the general course of ideas in their time. In a very real sense they, along with a few other select printers, determined what the intellectuals of their time would read; thus, their impact on Renaissance thought was extraordinary.

In his nearly twenty years as a printer, Aldus labored tirelessly at the press and left to the world a rich legacy of beautiful books and scholarly texts. These books are still admired for their attractive typography, clean lines, and good design as well as their scholarly contributions. Through his publications, Aldus contributed to the survival of many ancient texts and greatly facilitated the diffusion of the values, enthusiasm, and scholarship of the Italian Renaissance across the rest of Europe. In Aldus was an alliance of printer and scholar, who demonstrated to the printing world that scholarly books could be produced finely as well as profitably; and he convinced the scholarly world of the value of printing.

"In Aldus was an alliance of printer and scholar," the introduction says, just above.

So what about the alliance of technology expert and scholar in our era? We hope at the Center for Information and Communication Sciences that we're about the work of producing leaders for the information renaissance today.

Aldus Manutius is a great role model.

December 12, 2004
Muncie Media in the Year 2014: Predicting a Day in Your Life
November 15, 2004
General Definition of the European Renaissance, with Links--from Web Museum, Paris
November 12, 2004
Poets of the Italian Renaissance: Vittoria Colonna
November 11, 2004
Michelangelo Buonarroti
October 31, 2004
Small Entry- link to Renaissance Webblog
October 29, 2004
Dear Friends of the Renaissance
October 26, 2004
Some Internet Sites on the European Renaissance

Information networking is the heart of the information economy.

Social change is driven first by information networking.

Information networking is how new worlds rise.

The entry below shows information networking in practice. It's a momentary snapshot of the action in the dynamic of the information renaissance.

The sense I am suggesting is that the static snapshot captures the dynamic action only for a moment.

Like the still photos in a sports section, the pictures capture only moments in time. Yet they give a sense of the game, the stakes, the intensity, the outcomes.

Take a look:

November 27, 2005
A demonstration of information networking--Good professional weblog from our colleagues at California State University, Dominguez Hills

Here is a good weblog from Professor Larry Press of the Computer Information Systems group at California State University, Dominguez Hills. The university is in the Los Angeles area. CSUDH is an active university with a reputation for trying out innovations. The university is important to its region, especially as a beacon of light demonstrating the power of education in a changing and complex environment.

The information about the CSUDH weblog is courtesy two professionals from Ball State University's Information Systems and Operations Management (ISOM) group--Professor Fred Kitchens and one of their graduate assistants, Geoff Ginther.

Geoff Ginther is also an active master's degree candidate at the Center for Information and Communication Sciences, Ball State University.

In the European renaissance in the birth of the modern period, scholars developed information links and networks by postal mail and books brought by couriers, carried by muscle power. Today's information renaissance scholars develop links using email and internetworks, forwarded by electrons.

The professionals here are information networking--which I define as the movement and use of information--so that people who are geographically distant can share ideas and perspectives.

It's how new eras are built--person by person, group by group, organization by organization. Like a building going up, you can see it happen, a little at a time. Construction projects are messy and complex--it takes imagination to remember how it was before, and to see what is to come.

Picture how it was; imagine how it will be. That's the unfolding history of today's information renaissance.

Photographer, writer, movie director, and composer, Gordon Parks is a giant among the men of any era. The youngest of fifteen children, Gordon Roger Alexander Buchanan Parks was born on November 30th 1912 to Sarah Ross Parks and Andrew Jackson Parks in Fort Scott, Kansas. Although the family was poor the parents instilled in the children the values of honor, education, and equality. Parks’ travels would begin at the age of 16 with the death of his mother. He was sent to St. Paul Minnesota to live with his sister and her husband. After an argument with his sister’s husband, he was asked to leave the house. He took a job as a busboy at the Hotel Lowry in St. Paul where in his spare time he played the piano and wrote songs. Upon being heard by a band leader, Parks was asked to join the band and go on tour. Sadly, the group disbanded while in New York City.

Early Interest in Photography
While working on the railroad, Parks became interested in photography. He would take his first pictures while traveling in Seattle WA. When he returned to Minneapolis, he dropped the film off at Eastman Kodak. According to Parks, “The man at Kodak told me the shots were very good and if I kept it up, they would give me an exhibition.” And it was Kodak that sponsored his first exhibition.

Against many obstacles, Parks began to make a name for himself as a fashion photographer. After seeing his work, Marva Louis (wife of boxing champ Joe Louis) persuaded Parks to move to Chicago to further his career. It was in Chicago that his documentary photographs won him a Julius Rosenwald Fellowship in 1942. The fellowship offered him his choice of employers and in January of 1942 he took a job with the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in Washington, D.C. When FSA was closed in 1943 he took a job with the Office of War Information. It was there that he began to write. He was assigned to photograph the training of the 332nd Fighter Group (also know as the Tuskegee Airmen). But his stay would be short. Not allowed to travel with the unit and document their participation in the war, Parks left the Office of War Information and moved back to Harlem.

Parks tried to secure a job with a major fashion magazine but many publishers like the Hearst Organization (Harper’s Bazaar), would not hire a Black man. But this did not discourage Parks. Famed photographer Edward Steichen was impressed with Parks’ work and sent him to the director of Vogue magazine, Alexander Liberman. Towards the end of 1944 Parks had photos appearing in both Glamour and Vogue magazines.