Art as Science or Science as Art?

The 2009 Art of Science competition winners are in. My favorite below.

Uncovering Lost Painting of Vincent van Gogh, Andrei Brasoveanu '09 (undergraduate) and Ingrid Daubechies (faculty), Department of Mathematics, Program in Applied and Computational Mathematics.

Around 1885, Vincent van Gogh painted the portrait of a woman and then later reused this canvas, painting over her portrait to create "Pasture in Bloom," a painting found today in the Kroller-Muller Museum in Otterlo, The Netherlands. Following X-ray and chemical analysis performed at a laboratory in Delft, The Netherlands, a fragment of the original portrait was revealed. Our work was to first reconstruct digitally the gray-scale version of this portrait, by registering it to the pasture painting, by identifying and removing grass and flower traces, and by filling in the regions lacking content. Afterward, we needed to bring the portrait to life by coloring it using local pigment information and color distributions from similar portraits produced in the same period by the artist. 

(via Bioephemera)...