Posts tagged mathematical art
MoMA to MoMath: A Mathematician’...
Charles James (American, born Great Britain, 1906–1978) Evening Dress, 1946 Black silk-rayon velvet, red silk satin, brown silk faille, black silk crepe The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum Costume Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of the Brooklyn Museum, 2009; Gift of Arturo and Paul Peralta-Ramos, 1954 (2009.300. [...]
The Slowest Way to Draw a Lute
Man Drawing a Lute, by Albrecht Dürer. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
Last month, I went to a talk by mathematician Annalisa Crannell of Franklin and Marshall College called Math and Art: the good, the bad, and the pretty. She talked about how mathematical ideas of perspective show up in art and how it can help us create and appreciate [...]
What T.S. Eliot Told Me about the Cha...
T.S. Eliot, who probably never thought about the chain rule while he was writing poetry. Photograph by Lady Ottoline Morrell. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
“We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.”
—from Little Gidding [...]
Knotted Needles Make Knitted Knots
A wearable, knitted (5,3) torus knot. Image: sarah-marie belcastro.
Step aside, infinity scarves, you aren’t infinite at all. The (5,3) torus knot cowl is where it’s at.
For me, one of the highlights of January’s Joint Mathematics Meetings was the mathematical fiber arts session. You can view a slide show I put together from [...]
A Cuddly, Crocheted Klein Quartic Cur...
A cuddly Klein quartic made with crochet. Image copyright Daina Taimina. Used with permission.
Last week, mathematician and artist Daina Taimina shared her latest creation on Twitter. It’s a model of a surface called the Klein quartic. Isn’t it cute?
So what is it? The Klein quartic surface is a 2-dimensional object with 3 holes t [...]
A Tasty Geometric Morsel Every Day
#426 Tectonic Activity. Image copyright Tilman Zitzmann. Used with permission.
It’s fun to look through the Geometry Daily archives and notice similarities between designs published around the same time. Tilman seems to have had a hexagon phase in the 320’s, and you can definitely see the designs getting more complex but also more [...]
The Poetry of Calculus
A cylindrical silo in South Dakota, perhaps the basis of a related rates problem in calculus. Image: flickr user Lars Plougmann
“Facing a streetlight under batty moths
And June bugs racheting like broken clock springs,
I stand, for the sake of a problem, on the curb—
Neither in grass nor gutter—while those wings
Switch down the light an [...]
Binary Bonsai and Other Mathematical ...
A “binary bonsai” created using an algorithmic knitting process. Image copyright Madeleine Shepherd. Used with permission.
Many of us have seen Fibonacci numbers in sunflowers and hyperbolic curvature in kale leaves. Botanica Mathematica, “a textile taxonomy of mathematical plant forms,” takes mathematical-botanical correspondences like these [...]
Award-Winning Teachers Put Math on Ha...
A mathematical hat made by Patrick Honner’s students as part of an award-winning lesson plan. Image: Patrick Honner.
Many math teachers have a hands-on approach to their subject, but those hands aren’t usually covered in finger paint. Scott Goldthorp, however, sometimes teaches messy math classes. Goldthorp, a teacher at Rosa Internatio [...]
Wear Your Geeky Heart on Your Sleeve,...
Over at Roots of Unity, I wrote about a “geek chic” fabric design contest.
I had been aware of Spoonflower for a while, but I really got excited about fabric design at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in January. I attended a talk by Frank Farris, a mathematician at Santa Clara University, in which he described how he used Spoonflo [...]
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