My contribution to Pi Day Celebrations: a student-made necklace that encodes the first 80 or so digits of pi in beads!
Starting with the pendant as 3, the student carefully strung the beads in a circle (clockwise) according to the following mapping:
Thus, you can read off 3.14159265358, and so on. A truly thoughtful, creative, and inspired work! I think the student’s original inspiration might have been this other pi-themed necklace.
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This is an innovative and intriguing idea: a graphic novel based on the infamous struggles to articulate the foundations of mathematics.
The story is apparently narrated by the great mathematician and philosopher Bertrand Russell, and the cast of characters includes Georg Cantor, Kurt Godel, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and many other prominent figures from mathematics and logic. A review in the New York Times can be found here.
The philosophy of mathematics is extremely interesting (start by asking yourself “What is a number?”), and this particular tale is truly a fascinating one. I am eager to see how these graphic artists tell the story.
This is a cool article about how important the ellipse is to the artist.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/09/23/the-frisbee-of-art/
The author gives a nice, if long, explanation about the significance of the ellipse, but it basically boils down to this: circles are everywhere. And often, when we are looking at circles, we’re looking at them atilt. We see projections of the circle, and projections of circles are ellipses.
Think of it this way: suppose you have a hula hoop and you hold it parallel to the ground. The shadow you see is circular, but if you tilt the hula hoop, the shadow will change–into an ellipse. I don’t have a hula hoop, so I made do with a spare key ring:
As the circular key ring is rotated, it becomes less parallel to the ground; the shadow becomes less circular and more elliptical. And at the end, the ellipse vanishes–an ellipse eclipse!
During some explorations of the one-cut challenge, a student produced this, which we all agreed was beautiful.
Find more math and art in paper at my Fun With Folding page!
In honor of the Bridges Organization and its annual conference on Math and Art, I will be posting about math, art, and their many intersections for the next two weeks.
The Bridges 2011 conference, held in Coimbra, Portugal, features prominent mathematicians and artists from around the world. Fields’ Medalist William Thurston and the soon-to-be Museum of Mathematics‘ George Hart among others will be giving talks and presenting their art. A program of select participants can be seen here:
http://bridgesmathart.org/bridges-2011/2011-speakers-coordinators/