Most of what we do can be understood as work in understanding form. We work on an interdisciplinary level, ranging from formal systems to what is considered artistic. There may have been a government project or two rich enough to cover all these disciplines, but there is basically nowhere one can go in the professional or scholarly worlds to get this range. Probably this is related to market forces driving specialization, political tendencies to reinforce tribes and linguistic issues.

The only place we know that reliably supports interdisciplinary interaction, at the deep level of form is the International Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Symmetry. This group was chartered in 1986 and is administered from Budapest. It has had some ups and downs but continues to host some remarkable world meetings every three years:

• 1989 in Budpest, Hungary
• 1992 in Hiroshima, Japan
• 1995 in Washington DC, US
• 1998 in Haifa, Israel
• 2001 in Sydney, Australia
• 2004 in Tihany, Hungary
• 2007 in Buenos Aires, Argentina
• 2010 will be in Gmünd, Austria

They also produce a world class journal, albeit hard to find. We have a personal history with ISIS-S [More] so, we support the organization by hosting a US sister society: ISIS-US, whose focus is a website. This site provides administrative support to the Budapest society, serves on-line versions of the journal to members and hosts special projects. The kutachi project [More] is the first such project.

The ISIS-US site [Here ]. The kutachi site [Here ].

There have been troubles in the leadership. Gyorgy Darvas stole the Society’s money and set up a competing organization, the International Symmetry Association. I submitted two depositions to the Hungarian courts. One concerned a disputed General Assembly [Here] and the other a series of emails concerning his secession [Here].