The architect for the 9/11 memorial chose not to list the names of the dead alphabetically. Instead Michael Arad solicited “meaningful adjacencies” from the families. Nick Paumgarten appraises the algorithms used:
“It was a computer-science problem, but it was also a big, crazy typography problem,” [media designer Jake] Barton said last week. As a spatial puzzle, it also owed a little bit to the so-called “knapsack problem” in mathematics, which involves trying to optimize the fit of irregularly shaped or weighted objects in a backpack.
Their solution was really a combination of algorithms, which they called the Names Arrangement. A graphic representation of the computational armature, color-coded on a laptop screen, brings to mind Tetris, but the sight of the names themselves, inscribed in bronze, linked together by happenstance and blood, calculus and font size, is a little like the faint silhouette of a cosmic plan, or else of the total absence of one.
The Dish 