The LASERs (Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous) are an international program of evening gatherings that bring artists and scientists together for informal presentations and conversation with an audience. See the program for the whole international series and the dates for the Bay Area.
Send an email to "scaruffi at stanford dot edu" if you want to be added to the mailing list for the LASERs.
Where:
LiKaShing building - Room LK101/102
There should be ample parking in the structure on corner of Campus Drive West and Roth Way (355 Roth Way).
Parking is mostly free at Stanford after 6pm.
Stanford events page
Program (the order of the speakers might change):
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Greg Niemeyer (UC Berkeley Center for New Media) on "Data Art"
If you missed this presentation, you can view it by clicking on the image:  .
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Michael Heaney (Physicist) on "The paradoxes of quantum mechanics"
If you missed this presentation, you can view it by clicking on the image:  .
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Paul Max Payton (Computer Scientist) on "Complex Geometry -- Completing the Map of Space".
If you missed this presentation, you can view it by clicking on the image:  .
- Discussions, networking
You can mingle with the speakers and the audience
Bios:
- Michael Heaney has a BS in physics from MIT and a PhD in physics from Berkeley. He has worked for various companies in Silicon Valley for the past several decades. He was for seven years a Principal Physicist at Amazon. His research interests included electrostatic discharge, photovoltaics, disordered conductor-insulator composites, superconductive quantum interference devices, quantum computing, and problems in the foundations of quantum mechanics. He now works full time on paradoxes in the foundations of quantum mechanics.
- Greg Niemeyer is a professor of Media Innovation in the Department of Art Practice and the College of Computing, Data Science, and Society at UC Berkeley. He views data, like any observation, as a sample of the world we live in: a source for artistic expression, a path to empathy, and a way to perceive reality from new perspectives. Originally from Switzerland, Niemeyer studied Classics and Photography before earning an MFA in New Media at Stanford. At Berkeley, he co-founded the Berkeley Center for New Media, where he continues to champion media innovation as a tool to deepen awareness and foster human connection. His current research focuses on uncovering hidden solidarities through data-driven media, with particular attention to water security in Kenya, Oaxaca, and Michigan.
Niemeyer will present recent advances in Data Art, featuring projects that transform scientific data into powerful visual experiences. Highlights include: "Synchronicity", a year-long portrait of life in the Bay Area, displayed atop the Salesforce Tower; "To the Sun", a visualization of the Parker Solar Probe's journey through the solar system; A new work in progress exploring the magnetic fields of the Sun
- Paul Max Payton is a computer scientist, applied mathematician, software engineer, and intellectual gadfly. He spent 30 years at Lockheed Martin working on missions of national importance, publishing over 50 articles in projective geometry, image compression, data fusion, and error-correcting codes, with appearances in SPIE, IEEE, CVGIP, PAMI, and ACM proceedings. His work was featured in the DARPA Image Understanding Workshop and earned him roles of technical leadership at Visa International, where he led the use of LLMs and deep learning in profiling, loyalty programs, and fraud detection. He is the sole inventor on more than three dozen patents spanning image compression, coding theory, photogrammetry, cloud storage, and homomorphic encryption. Paul received the 2019 Albert Nelson Marquis Lifetime Achievement Award from Who's Who, was artist-in-residence at Djerassi, and has previously lectured at Apple and LASER. Now retired, he is developing an algorithmic art toolkit to visualize abstract mathematical concepts.
In 1913, D.M.Y. Sommerville introduced analytic geometry on curved surfaces using a metric constant K: real for elliptic geometry and imaginary for hyperbolic. But what happens when K is complex? In 1970, C.R. Wylie extended projective geometry using conic-based metrics and their adjoints to define distance and angle. What happens when the metric conic itself becomes complex? This talk answers those questions—and closes a conceptual loop left open since Lobachevsky and Riemann. Elliptic (positive curvature), hyperbolic (negative), and Euclidean (zero) geometries are revealed to be limiting cases of a larger, continuous structure: a complex-valued curvature space. Just as complex numbers complete the reals, complex metrics complete classical geometry. The result is not a new geometry but a superset—one that accommodates twist, chirality, duality, and richer topologies, fully testable through computation and visualization. The dual conic formalism connects this to projective geometry, where modern physics and twistor theory already dwell. This is geometry as it has never been seen before. This is what Escher might have drawn—if he had a GPU and a math library. This talk outlines how geometry becomes meta-geometry.
- Piero Scaruffi is a cultural historian who has lectured in three continents and published several books on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, the latest one being "The Nature of Consciousness" (2006). He pioneered Internet applications in the early 1980s and the use of the World-Wide Web for cultural purposes in the mid 1990s. His poetry has been awarded several national prizes in Italy and the USA. His latest book of poems and meditations is "Synthesis" (2009). As a music historian, he has published ten books, the latest ones being "A History of Rock and Dance Music" (2009) and "A History of Jazz Music" (2007). His latest book of history is "A History of Silicon Valley" (2011). The first volume of his free ebook "A Visual History of the Visual Arts" appeared in 2012. His latest book is "Intelligence is not Artificial" (2013). He has also written extensively about cinema and literature. He founded the Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous (LASER) in 2008. Since 2015 he has been commuting between California and China, where several of his books have been translated.
Photos and videos of this evening
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