At the top of Bob Phillips’ Blog home page is a quote from Charles Mingus, the great jazz bassist, band leader and composer:

“Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity”

If Bob hadn’t bagged it already, that would make an excellent statement of the common theme connecting the intertwined topics of this blog, whether it be:

• Robert Hooke’s latin anagram describing the optimum shape of an arch
• or the reason why the formula for the buckling load of a straight column includes the factor π, and what it has to do with a ball falling through a hole through the centre of the Earth
• or a few lines of code that allow text based functions on the spreadsheet to be evaluated
• or type an equation into a cell in Excel and immediately see the resulting graph
• or a Bach suite for solo cello
• or Anne Briggs singing a simple folk tune

all share the attribute of making the complex simple.

Now all of this was probably the last thing that Richard Thompson had in mind, when he wrote his song Mingus Eyes, but since he tells his story in only 35 different words (count them):

it all fits anyway.

And finally, let’s hear from the man himself, Charles Mingus playing Haitian Fight Song (edit 4th May 2011, the Mingus link got cut, so here is the Mingus Big Band playing the same composition in 2001):

What do you think?  What are your favourite examples of making the complex simple?