Dr. Robert Erdmann helps count threads in Van Gogh canvas.

A Cornell electrical engineering professor is helping art historians do a little detective work by using computing algorithms to identify which of Vincent Van Gogh's paintings came from the same original rolls of canvas.

C. Richard Johnson Jr., the Geoffrey S.M. Hedrick Senior Professor of Engineering, is on leave from Cornell this semester to serve as an adjunct research fellow at the Van Gogh Museum and other museums in the Netherlands. Computer algorithms are allowing Johnson and colleagues to count the number of individual threads per centimeter in the canvases Van Gogh painted on -- tasks that would take multiple lifetimes to complete by hand.

Read full article: http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/2011/03/professors-algorithms-unlock-van-gogh-mysteries
Further reading: http://people.ece.cornell.edu/johnson/annrep10.pdf