George Widener: the incredible life of the man makes art for robots | Alex Bellos

Cold War spy, homeless dropout and semi-professional gambler, the autistic savant George Widener is now an internationally renowned artistAll through his life George Widener has been fascinated with calendars."Other kids lined toys up in a row," he said. "I lined up dates."Yet his fixation with calendars has ultimately turned him into a celebrated artist whose striking paintings of numbers, cities, maps and machines have been exhibited all around the world. "[In my art] I am using the dates as the medium," he said.I met Widener last week, and he walked me through Hayward Gallery in London, where his work is appearing in the exhibition The Alternative Guide to the Universe.Widener has "savant syndrome", the general term for people who have high-functioning abilities coexisting with autism spectrum disorders. Perhaps the most famous savant was Kim Peek – the man about whom the film Rain Man was based – and Widener says that meeting Peek before he died was a turning point in his life. "I accepted that I could be myself and that was okay."Widener's work lets us envisage the world as a savant does. One of his more recent interests is magic squares, which are squares of numbers such that each line, each column and each diagonal adds up to the same number.For example, in the piece above, the top line is 23 + 6 + 19 + 2 + 15 = 65, and the first column is 23 + 4 + 10 + 11 + 17 = 65.But Widener - who cannot see a number without turning it into a date – has turned the magic square...
Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Blogposts guardian.co.uk Mathematics Science Source Type: news