Celebrating the visionary’s 98th birthday today
May 14 marks the 98th anniversary of Herbert W. Franke’s birth. The Foundation is honoring the visionary with the republication of a historic article that shows the bridge-builder between art and science particularly well: a historical research text from 1999. At the time, Franke used Software language Mathematica to digitally encode his layered model of stalagmite growth and then imported it into virtually designed cave spaces using Bryce Software. This work is based on his theoretical pioneering work from 1951, in which he theoretically derived for the first time how the age of dripstones, which could not be determined at the time, could be determined using the C14 method.
The simulation article with the complete Mathematica code originally appeared in the specialist journal of the Austrian Speleological Society “Die Höhle – Zeitschrift für Karst- und Höhlenkunde”, 51st vol. 2/2000. We are now publishing it in German and English illustrated with several of the historic low resolution 3D visualizations.