The mutual inspiration of art and mathematics
Economics, origami and other fields trigger new and original creations
Mathematics is art, and art is mathematics. So claim the father-son pair of Erik and Martin Demaine of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. “Our math and our art have blended together so much we can’t tell them apart anymore,” Martin Demaine says.
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The Demaines were among a number of artist-mathematicians whose work appeared in the Mathematical Art Exhibition at the Joint Mathematics Meetings held in San Francisco in January. Their sources of inspiration ranged from debugging computer code, to the mathematical principles underlying economics, to the folds of origami. But all of the creators agree that a conversation between math and art can inform both disciplines.
For instance, Ian Sammis, a mathematician at the University of California, Davis, found that the best way to debug his computer code was to create artistic representations of it. He was working to compute the “fast Fourier transform” of any mathematical function, which represents the function as a combination of simple sine waves, much as sound is produced by a combination of simple sound waves.