I realized that I haven’t showed you all of my black hole doodles yet! This is probably the most recent one. I can tell because the shading makes the holes look more convincing, and that took me a lot of practice to figure out how to do that. Can you find the waterbear?
I call this piece… Cosmic Ooze Doodle No. 108 Watercolor, ink, colored pencil on 8” square cotton paper #art#MathArt#BlackHole#surface#watercolor#painting#astronomy#microbes
I have an interactive art piece I sometimes bring with me when I go to festivals called “Math Anxiety Camp.” The project consists of a little math book I wrote, more of a pamphlet, full of funny, weird, and famous math problems that are designed to elicit both laughter and anxiety. Problem number 1 is “Name a number that is 3.” Problem 18 asks you to count backwards from 100 by 7s and state the last positive number you count. This problem is known as “serial sevens,” and even has its own Wikipedia page because it is used by psychologists to elicit anxiety in experimental subjects. When I give problems, I try to rush my subjects, and I make buzzing noises when they get wrong answers. I say things math teacher should never say like “You should have learned this last year.”
Good art elicits emoitions, and I know of no other art piece that is designed to elicit the emotion of math anxiety. As a math teacher, math anxiety is an emotion I deal with regularly. Manifesting it at a festival where this emotion is out of context and the stakes are low gives me a novel way to interact with people around their math anxiety, and I’ve learned a lot from adults about their experiences learning mathematics as children.
Anyone who achieves anxiety from my art project wins an a achievement award, namely a yellow sticker. Interestingly, I’m not able to make everyone anxious with my little book of math problems because a lot of people enjoy math. I still give them a sticker if they want one.
Work in progress. I like this pattern a lot (left hand image) but if you rotate it 90 degrees (right hand image) it looks terrible! There's some weird perceptual thing going on with the vertical lines that I'm trying to break up.
Ammann-Beenker 𓂀 #tiling (using inflation😳)
ðere's exactly 1 vertex configuration for 3/4/5/6/7/8 polygons
Also apparently you can see ðis tiling by just looking at a 4d grid at ðe right angle 𓂀
As one who studied Euclidean #geometry in college, I sometimes have trouble engaging too deeply sacred geometry, but that star figure on the top left actually has some really nice properties around basic fractions. At a party, I once had someone ask me if sacred geometry was a non-Euclidean geometry. Fair question. I wonder what the cat thinks.
This piece is #watercolor, ink, and mica watercolor on paper. The bronze knot shimmers on the light. #MathArt
The tiniest of sculptures, a beaded bead made with 270 seed beads all stitched into one hollow dodecahedron. I call this a Conway Bead because it’s based upon a portion of a 4D object composed of tetrahedrons and prisms that I read about in his book “The Symmetry of Things.” Like many 4D polytopes, we can build a part of them in 3D without too much distortion. I wrote a tutorial on how to make Conway Beads if you’d like to learn to make your own, including 2 sizes larger than this one. #mathart