Functional Drawing at C&!
Last week I taught at the first (year 0) of C&!, the Camp for Algorithmic Math Play. It was a lot of fun working on mathematical play and games with a group of… Continue reading
Tag Archive: Concrete art
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Snowflake, Seashell, Star
Alex and I initially met thanks to this blog. He was fact checking for an article that included the Taylor-Socolar aperiodic tiling that I had written up. The general theme of the article… Continue reading
Handcrafting the digital: Wedding rings
This is cross posted on Brian Lockyear’s Gnarly Architecture blog. Those interested in the intersection of the technical and artistic worlds (probably a majority given the topics of this blog) should take a… Continue reading
Permutations, weaving and wedding rings
For a strange variety of reasons, even though we have just celebrated our third anniversary the process of our wedding has only really just been completed. In particular I only recently got a… Continue reading
2+2 = 1? Patterns in Modular arithmetic
When someone is talking about the absolute truth of mathematics and declares that once you have defined 2 and +, then 2+2 must equal 4, there is a slightly glib response: but 2+2… Continue reading
Arrange whatever pieces come your way
(with apologies to Virginia Wolff) A simple, classic puzzle is to give two shapes and ask if there is a way to cut one up so the pieces can be rearranged into the… Continue reading
Islamic Geometry
Marc Pelletier is a geometric artist, one of the visionaries behind the amazing Zometool system and the designer and builder of 120-cell models including one given to John Conway at Princeton and one… Continue reading
The strange quest: Mathematics as Concrete Art
Is mathematics just a giant piece of constructive art?
Building Mathematics: Sculpture system No. 5
[Update 15/1/10: More pictures (in the snow!) now up] [Update 16/3/10: A second sculpture built in Newcastle] [Update 13/5/10: Volcanic background] Can you get children and young people to build mathematical scultptures in… Continue reading
Surfaces 1: The ooze of the past
Curves and surfaces are a wonderful visual representation of mathematics. They can move from the simple and profound to the complex and intriguing. They have even been accused of being part of a sinister plot. In addition the mathematics behind them is becoming increasingly useful in many areas, algebraic statistics for example.
Book Review: Mathematics a Very Long Introduction
I recently received my copy of the wonderful The Princeton Companion to Mathematics. In the title of this piece, I could not help making the obvious joke, as the editor Tim Gowers also… Continue reading
Working with constraints
There is a theory that one can have too much freedom, at least in art. With constraints the imagination is forced to work harder, and might achieve an elegance and beauty unobtainable when… Continue reading