Imaginary Foundation's All-Star Pattern Seekers Trading Cards

Our friends at the Imaginary Foundation have just published a wonderful set of trading cards featuring their favorite big thinkers and sensemakers. The All-Star Pattern Seekers Trading Cards "pay tribute to 23 giants of pattern recognition -- pathfinders and ideanauts whose shadows loom large across three millennia of discovery." Included are the likes of Buckminster Fuller, Marshall McLuhan, Marie Curie, James Lovelock, Hubble Telecope, Joseph Campbell, and many others. Click the image above to see them all. The set, in an embossed box, is $18. Also available is a new t-shirt design: "To understand is to perceive patterns." Each shirt includes 7 of the trading cards. Imaginary Foundation

[#1 posted by DaveP, August 10, 2009 2:26 PM]

eighteen bones for 23 cards? i'm perceiving a pattern, and it's "more money than sense"

[#2 posted by Cnoocy, August 10, 2009 2:36 PM]

@Davep:
The pattern I'm perceiving is 1 woman, 2 machines, and 21 men. And not one of them non-white. Good job, Imaginary Foundation!

[#3 posted by SomeGuy, August 10, 2009 2:45 PM]

U.S. right wing demands a 24th card be added featuring St. Ronald of Reagan begin in 5....4....3....2...

[#4 posted by IWood, August 10, 2009 3:00 PM]

At first, I see nothing. But now I have had my mushrooms, and I see the Apocalypse.

I always see the Apocalypse. So there is probably no cause for alarm.

Unless I'm right. That does happen from time to time.

[#5 posted by David Pescovitz, August 10, 2009 3:08 PM]

I'm interested in hearing who would be in other people's personal sets of cards... Mine wouldn't necessarily be "pattern seekers," but anyway: Andy Warhol, William S. Burroughs, Jacques Vallee, JG Ballard, Brion Gysin, Yoko Ono, John Lennon, Timothy Leary, PT Barnum, Stewart Brand, RU Sirius... I better stop while I'm a head. ; )

[#6 posted by Antinous / Moderator, August 10, 2009 3:09 PM]

Are they trading cards if you buy them as a set? Shouldn't you get one with every chocolate frog and have to actually trade your duplicates to make a complete set?

[#7 posted by orangebag, August 10, 2009 3:22 PM]

Mendeleev please.
Saw the pattern and used it to predict the discovery of, and the properties of previously unknown elements.

[#8 posted by orangebag, August 10, 2009 3:27 PM]

Lakoff but no Mendeleev???? Surely some mistake!!

[#9 posted by Piers W, August 10, 2009 4:13 PM]

#5 David Pescovitz,

Benoit Mandelbrot, Georges Braque, Joseph Beuys, Bridget Riley, Richard Feynmann, Martin Gardner, Buckminster Fuller, Daniel Dennett, Philip K Dick, Alfred Jarry, Samuel Beckett, Ludwig Wittgenstein, William Blake, Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Gramsci, R D Laing, Eric Satie, John Cage, Robert Hooke, Marcel Duchamp, Mark E Smith, David Hume, David Lindsay, Thomas Pynchon, Alexander Rodchenko, Sigmar Polke, Arnold Geulincx.

[#10 posted by Secret_Life_of_Plants, August 10, 2009 4:24 PM]

There are also these folks called "Structuralists" "Post-structuralists" and "Deconstructionists"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structuralism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poststructuralism

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_thinkers_influenced_by_deconstruction

[#11 posted by Ultan, August 10, 2009 5:34 PM]

Evariste Galois - group theory

William Kingdon Clifford, FRS - Clifford algebra (the algebra of physics, in particular the Dirac theory of the electron), proposed that mass and energy are curvatures of space more than 30 years before Einstein

Richard Feynman - Feynman diagrams, quantum electrodynamics, Feynman Lectures, nanotechnology, etc.

Claude Shannon - information theory

Jagadis Chandra Bose, FRS - inventor of radio, millimeter-wave remote-control in the 1890s

Carl Friedrich Gauss - the greatest mathematician

Robert Hooke, FRS - discoverer of cells and much else

Douglas Hofstadter - author of Godel, Escher Bach

Benjamin Franklin, FRS

Robert Anton Wilson - uncategorizable writing

Samuel Delany - SF writing

Gene Wolfe - fiction

K. Eric Drexler - molecular nanotechnology

Neal Stephenson - writing

Charles Stross - SF writing

Rudy Rucker - SF writing

Greg Egan - SF writing

John Brunner - wrote the most accurately predictive SF novel, The Shockwave Rider

Rene Magritte - painting

M. C. Escher - prints

Leonardo da Vinci - drawings, inventions, physics investigations

Gottfried Leibniz - mathematics and philosophy

Epicurus - the most scientific of the early Greek philosophers

I'm getting tired, but need to mention:
Homer, J.S. Mill, Montaigne, Jung, Pascal, Spinoza, Mark Twain, Lewis Caroll, Scott Adams, Bill Watterson, George Carlin, Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Imhotep, and John Taylor Gatto

[#12 posted by Anonymous, August 10, 2009 5:40 PM]

Watson and Crick? You mean the guys that ripped their research from their assistant? Pffft.

[#13 posted by Keir, August 10, 2009 6:31 PM]

did Fibonacci really look like Frankenstein's monster?

[#14 posted by Anonymous, August 11, 2009 3:28 AM]

Where is Mendeleev?

[#15 posted by Anonymous, August 11, 2009 6:45 AM]

@12

Rosalind Franklin was not actually working for Watson and Crick. Also, her writings indicate that she was already aware of the structure of DNA by the time Watson and Crick were offered a sneak glance at plate 51. So really, shouldn't she maybe get a card, herself? Technically, she would have been eligible for the Nobel prize if she hadn't died five years prior to the decision to award it to Watson and Crick.

[#16 posted by Kreutzer, August 11, 2009 7:17 AM]

How 'bout Aristotle?

Figured out the basic pattern of narrative structure that is the foundation for much of western literature / theater / film / poetry / music.