Category: Digital Art

Yesterday was our final meeting of the Bay Area Mathematical Artists for the academic year 2017–2018.  We were back at Santa Clara University to visit their virtual reality lab, the Imaginarium!  It was an amazing visit, coordinated by Frank Farris, Tom Banchoff (who is visiting Santa Clara University this semester), and Imaginarium director Max Sims.

While we were waiting for everyone to arrive, Tom generously provided donuts for us to snack on.  But not until we were given a short presentation on a very special property of donuts — the “two-piece” property, which Tom discussed in his doctoral thesis.

A perfectly smooth donut — this is important, since bumps or ridges are problematic — has the property that if you take a knife and make a planar cut, you always get exactly two pieces.

Of course any convex shape automatically has this property.  Donuts, however, are not convex, so they are special in this regard.  Tom remarked that discussing this makes good breakfast conversation, since smooth bagels also have the two-piece property.  But a sufficiently curved banana does not (think of the letter U and make a horizontal cut to get three pieces).

Once everyone arrived, Tom began with a presentation of his forays into computer graphics and animations.  The first video he showed was made in 1968 with computer scientist Charles Strauss, also at Brown, which showed a torus turning inside out.

What was fascinating was how the video was made.  Keep in mind this was long before platforms like Processing were available….  Even though each frame was black-and-white and consisted of line drawings of a torus in various different configurations, it still took about a minute to create each frame.

Then, each frame had to be photographed — using film, if you remember what that is.  Then another minute, another photograph.  Next, the film was sent on to Boston, where it was processed into a movie.  The movie was sent back — and hopefully, it was just what you wanted….

Fast-forward to 1978, where the subject of the video was rotating cubes and hypercubes. I won’t try to describe it in words, but you can actually see the video online here.

It looks like the graphics in this movie were color graphics!  But no, that wasn’t available yet.  You see color because each frame used four photographs — each taken with a different filter on.  These were overlaid to create a color graphic.  Very creative, and again, certainly much more work than it would take today.  Keep in mind that 1978 was forty years ago….

There were still three movies to go!  Next, Tom showed us his 1985 movie about the hypersphere.  We then got to see Tom’s animation of donut slicing, which was the virtual version of our initial demonstration.  Finally, the last video was from 1999, which was a rotation of the flat torus.

The movies and talk took us halfway through the afternoon.  Now it was time to try on the headsets and have our very own virtual reality experience!

We learned from Max Sims a little about the technical challenges of creating a good VR experience.  First, 90 frames per second is ideal — contrast that with 30 frames per second when creating movies with a platform like Processing.  And second, the response time of the headsets needs to be no longer than 11 milliseconds — that is, when you turn your head to look at something, the image has to change that fast — or else you’ll get motion sickness.

The way the lab was set up, everyone got their own computer (although it took me three tries to find one which had everything working properly).  You can see people with headsets on and controls in their hands.

It is very hard to describe what it feels like with the headset on without experiencing it for yourself.  But when you put on the goggles, you’re in a 360-degree visual environment.  That is, when you turn your head to the right, you are seeing what’s to the right of your visual range in the VR simulation.  You can even look down and see what’s underneath you!  It was a little dizzying to look down and see a stream running underneath you, since that meant you were suspended in midair….

The hand controls were different for every experience.  Some allowed you to move things, or select different types of building blocks to make 3D images, or select a different simulation.  It took a bit of getting used to, and I didn’t fully get the hang of it in the hour we had to play around.  But Max said we were welcome back to try out the lab again, and I do intend to take him up on his offer.

After our incredible experience, we went out for Thai — sixteen of us, this time!  We spent over two hours at dinner, which is typical.  These gatherings bring together a diverse group of people interested in all aspects of mathematics and art, and it seems we never run out of things to talk about.

Then the drive home.  I was driving Nick, and we were amazed by the cloud formations we saw all along the way.  Despite my rather dirty windshield, Nick snapped this gorgeous pic.

The clouds were like this for most of the drive home, and were a very fitting end to our last gathering of the semester.

Plans are underway to continue meeting throughout the summer, so stay tuned!

We had yet another amazing meeting of the Bay Area Mathematical Artists yesterday!  Just two speakers — but even so, we went a half-hour over our usual 5:00 ending time.

Our first presenter was Stan Isaacs.  There was no real title to his presentation, but he brought another set of puzzles from his vast collection to share.  He was highlighting puzzles created by Wayne Daniel.

Below you’ll see one of the puzzles disassembled.  The craftsmanship is simply remarkable.

If you look carefully, you’ll see what’s going on.  The outer pieces make an icosahedron, and when you take those off, a dodecahedron, then a cube…a wooden puzzle of nested Platonic solids!  The pieces all fit together so perfectly.  Stan is looking forward to an exhibition of Wayne’s work at the International Puzzle Party in San Diego later on this year.  For more information, contact Stan at stan@isaacs.com.

Our second speaker was Scott Kim (www.scottkim.com), who’s presentation was entitled Motley Dissections.  What is a motley dissection?  The most famous example is the problem of the squared square — that is, dissecting a square with an integer side length into smaller squares with integer side lengths, but with all the squares different sizes.

One property of such a dissection is that no two edges of squares meet exactly corner to corner.  In other words, edges always overlap in some way.

But there are of course many other motley dissections.  For example, below you see a motley dissection of one rectangle into five, one pentagon into eleven, and finally, one hexagon into a triangle, square, pentagon and hexagon.

Look carefully, and you’ll see that no single edge in any of these dissections exactly matches any other.  For these decompositions, Scott has proved they are minimal — so, for example, there is no motley dissection of one pentagon to ten or fewer.  The proofs are not exactly elegant, but they serve their purpose.  He also mentioned that he credits Donald Knuth with the term motley dissection, who used the term in a phone conversation not all that long ago.

Can you cube the cube?  That is, can you take a cube and subdivide it into cubes which are all different?  Scott showed us a simple proof that you can’t.  But, it turns out, you can box the box.  In other words, if the length, width, and height of the larger box and all the smaller boxes may be different, then it is possible to box the box.

Next week, Scott is off to the Gathering 4 Gardner in Atlanta, and will be giving his talk on Motley Dissections there.  He planned an activity where participants actually build a boxed box — and we were his test audience!

He created some very elaborate transparencies with detailed instructions for cutting out and assembling.  There were a very few suggestions for improvement, and Scott was happy to know about them — after all, it is rare that something works out perfectly the first time.  So now, his success at G4G in Atlanta is assured….

We were so into creating these boxed boxes, that we happily stayed until 5:30 until we had two boxes completed.

I should mention that Scott also discussed something he terms pseudo-duals in two, three, and even four dimensions!  There isn’t room to go into those now, but you can contact him through his website for more information.

As usual, we went out to dinner afterwards — and we gravitated towards our favorite Thai place again.  The dinner conversation was truly exceptional this evening, revolving around an animated conversation between Scott Kim and magician Mark Mitton (www.markmitton.com).

The conversation was concerned with the way we perceive mathematics here in the U.S., and how that influences the educational system.  Simply put, there is a lot to be desired.

One example Scott and Mark mentioned was the National Mathematics Festival (http://www.nationalmathfestival.org).  Tens of thousands of kids and parents have fun doing mathematics.  Then the next week, they go back to their schools and keep learning math the same — usually, unfortunately, boring — way it’s always been learned.

So why does the National Mathematics Festival have to be a one-off event?  It doesn’t!  Scott is actively engaged in a program he’s created where he goes into an elementary school at lunchtime one day a week and let’s kids play with math games and puzzles.

Why this model?  Teachers need no extra prep time, kids don’t need to stay after school, and so everyone can participate with very little needed as far as additional resources are concerned.  He’s hoping to create a package that he can export to any school anywhere where with minimal effort, so that children can be exposed to the joy of mathematics on a regular basis.

Mark was interested in Scott’s model:  consider your Needs (improving the perception of mathematics), be aware of the Forces at play (unenlightened administrators, for example, and many other subtle forces at work, as Mark explained), and then decide upon Actions to take to move the Work (applied, pure, and recreational mathematics) forward.

The bottom line:  we all know about this problem of attitudes toward mathematics and mathematics education, but no one really knows what to do about it.  For Scott, it’s just another puzzle to solve.  There are solutions.  And he is going to find one.

We talked for over two hours about these ideas, and everyone chimed in at one time or another.  Yes, my summary is very brief, I know, but I hope you get the idea of the type of conversation we had.

Stay tuned, since we are planning an upcoming meeting where we focus on Scott’s model and work towards a solution.  Another theme throughout the conversation was that mathematics is not an activity done in isolation — it is a communal activity.  So the Needs will not be addressed by a single individual, rather a group, and likely involving many members of many diverse communities.

A solution is out there.  It will take a lot of grit to find it.  But mathematicians have got grit in spades.

As I mentioned last time, this meeting took place at Santa Clara University.  As we have several participants in the South Bay area, many appreciated the shorter drive…it turns out this was the most well-attended event to date.  Even better, thanks to Frank, the Mathematics and Computer Science Department at Santa Clara University provided wonderful pastries, coffee, and juice for all!

Our first speaker was Frank A. Farris, our host at Santa Clara University.  (Recall that last month, he presented a brief preview of his talk.)  His talk was about introducing a sound element into his wallpaper patterns.

In order to do this, he used frequencies based on the spectrum of hexagonal and square grids.  It’s not important to know what this means — the main idea is that you get frequencies that are not found in western music.

Frank’s idea was to take his wallpaper patterns, and add music to them using these non-traditional frequencies.  Here is a screenshot from one of his musical movies:

Frank was really excited to let us know that the San Jose Chamber Orchestra commissioned work by composer William Susman to accompany his moving wallpaper patterns.  The concert will take place in a few weeks; here is the announcement, so you are welcome to go listen for yourself!

Frank has extensive information about his work on his website http://math.scu.edu/~ffarris/, and even software you can download to make your very own wallpaper patterns.  Feel free to email him with any questions you might have at ffarris@scu.edu.

The second talk, Salvador Dali — Old and New, was given by Tom Banchoff, retired from Brown University.  He fascinated us with the story of his long acquaintance with Salvador Dali.  It all began with an interview in 1975 with the Washington Post about Tom’s work in visualizing the fourth dimension.

He was surprised to see that the day after the interview, the article Visual Images And Shadows From The Fourth Dimension in the next day’s Post, as well as a picture of Dali’s Corpus Hypercubus (1954).

But Tom was aware that Dali was very particular about giving permission to use his work in print, and knew that the Post didn’t have time to get this permission in such a short time frame.

The inevitable call came from New York — Dali wanted to meet Tom.  He wondered whether Dali was simply perturbed that a photo of his work was used without permission — but luckily, that was not the reason for setting up the meeting at all.  Dali was interested in creating stereoscopic oil paintings, and stereoscopic images were mentioned in the Post article.

Thus began Tom’s long affiliation with Dali.  He mentioned meeting Dali eight or nine times in New York (Dali came to New York every Spring to work), three times in Spain, and once in France.  Tom remarked that Dali was the most fascinating person he’d ever met — and that includes mathematicians!

Then Tom proceeded to discuss the genesis of Corpus Hypercubus.  His own work included collaboration with Charles Strauss at Brown University, which included rendering graphics to help visualize the fourth dimension — but this was back in the 1960’s, when computer technology was at its infancy.  It was a lot more challenging then than it would be today to create the same videos.

He also spent some time discussing a net for the hypercube, since a hypercube net is the geometrical basis for Dali’s Corpus Hypercubus.  What makes understanding the fourth dimension difficult is imagining how this net goes together.

It is not hard to imagine folding a flat net of six squares to make a cube — but in order to do that, we need to fold some of the squares up through the third dimension.  But to fold the hypercube net to make a hypercube without distorting the cubes requires folding the cubes up into a fourth spatial dimension.

This is difficult to imagine!  Needless to say, this was a very interesting discussion, and challenged participants to definitely think outside the box.

Tom remarked that Dali’s interest in the hypercube was inspired by the work of Juan de Herrera (1530-1597), who was in turn inspired by Ramon Lull (1236-1315).

Tom also mentioned an unusual project Dali was interested in near the end of his career.  He wanted to design a horse that when looked at straight on, looks like a front view of a horse.  But when looked from the side, it’s 300 meters long!  For more information, feel free to email Tom at banchoff@math.brown.edu.

Suffice it to say that we all enjoyed Frank’s and Tom’s presentations.  The change of venue was welcome, and we hope to be at Santa Clara again in the future.

Following the talks, Frank generously invited us to his home for a potluck dinner!  He provided lasagna and eggplant parmigiana, while the rest of us provided appetizers, salads, side dishes, and desserts.

As usual, the conversation was quite lively!  We talked for well over two hours, but many of us had a bit of a drive, so we eventually needed to make our collective ways home.

Next time, on April 7, we’ll be back at the University of San Francisco.  At this meeting, we’ll go back to shorter talks in order to give several participants a chance to participate.  Stay tuned for a summary of next month’s talks!

The Spring semester is now well underway!  This means it’s time for the Bay Area Mathematical Artists to begin meeting.  This weekend, we had our first meeting of 2018 at the University of San Francisco.

As usual, we began informally at 3:00, giving everyone plenty of time to make it through traffic and park.  This time we had three speakers on the docket:  Frank A. Farris, Phil Webster, and Roger Antonsen.

Frank started off the afternoon with a brief presentation, giving us a teaser for his upcoming March talk on Vibrating Wallpaper.  Essentially, using the complex analysis of wave forms, he takes digital images and creates geometrical animations with musical accompaniment from them.  A screenshot of a representative movie is shown below:

You can click here to watch the entire movie.  More details will be forthcoming in the next installment of the Bay Area Mathematical Artists (though you can email him at ffarris@scu.edu if you have burning questions right now).  Incidentally, the next meeting will be held at Frank’s institution, Santa Clara University; he has generously offered to host one Saturday this semester as we have several participants who drive up from the San Jose area.

Our second speaker was Phil Webster, whose talk was entitled A Methodology for Creating Fractal Islamic Patterns.  Phil has been working with Islamic patterns for about five years now, and has come up with some remarkable images.

Here, you can see rings of 10 stars at various levels of magnification, all nested very carefully within each other.  While it is fairly straightforward to iterate this process to create a fractal image, a difficulty arises when the number and size of rosettes at a given level of iteration are such that they start overlapping.  At this point, a decision must be made about which rosettes to keep.

This decision involves both mathematical and artistic considerations, and is not always simple.  One remark Phil hears fairly often is that he’s actually creating a model of the hyperbolic plane, but this is in fact not the case.  Having sat down with him while he explained his methodology to me, I can attest to this fact.  His work may be visually somewhat reminiscent of the hyperbolic plane, but the mathematics certainly is not.

Moreover, in addition to creating digital prints, Phil has also experimented with laser cutting Islamic patterns, as shown in the intricate pieces below.

If you would like to learn more about Phil’s Islamic fractal patterns, feel free to email him at phil@philwebsterdesign.com.

We ended with a talk by Roger Antonsen, From Simplicity to Complexity.  Roger is giving a talk at the Museum of Mathematics in New York City next month, and wanted a chance to try out some ideas.  He casually remarked he had 377 slides prepared, and indicated he needed to perhaps trim that number for his upcoming talk….

Roger remarked that as mathematicians, we know on a hands-on basis how very simple ideas can generate enormous complexity.  But how do you communicate this idea to a general audience, many who are children?  This is his challenge.

The idea of this “tryout” was that Roger would share some of his ideas with us, and we would give him some feedback on what we thought.  One idea that was very popular with participants was a discussion of Langton’s ant.  There are several websites you can visit — but to see a quick overview, visit the Wikipedia page.

The rules are simple (as you will already know if you googled it!).  An ant starts on a grid consisting totally of white squares.  If the ant is on a white square, it turns right a quarter-turn, moves ahead one square, and the square the ant was on turns to black.  But if the ant is on a black square, it turns left a quarter-turn, moves one unit, and the square the ant was on turns to white.

It seems like a fairly simple set of rules.  As the ant starts moving around, it seems to chaotically color the squares black and white in a random sort of pattern.

The image above shows the path of the ant after 11,000 steps (with the red pixel being the last step).  Notice that the path has started to repeat, and continues to repeat forever!

Why?  No one really knows.  Yes, we can see that it actually does repeat, but only sometime after 10,000 apparently random steps.  The behavior of this system has all of a sudden become very mysterious, without a clear indication of why.

If the rules for moving the ant always resulted in just random-looking behavior, perhaps no one would have looked any further.  But there are so many surprises.  Especially since  there is no reason you have to stick to the rules above.  As suggested in the Wikipedia article, you can add more colors, more rules, and even more ants….

For example, consider the set of rules in the following image.  It should be relatively self-explanatory by now:  there are four colors; if the ant is on a black square, turn right a quarter-turn and move forward one unit, then change the color of the square the ant was on to white; then continue (where green squares becomes black, in cyclic order).

This looks like a cardiod!  And if you actually zoom in enough, you’ll see that this is the image after 500,000,000 iterations…though again, no one has the slightest idea why this happens.  Why should a simple set of rules based on 90° rotations generate a cardioid, of all things?

From the simple to the complex!  This was only one of literally dozens of topics Roger was able to elaborate on — and he illustrated each one he showed us with compelling images and animations.  For more examples, please see his web page, or feel free to email him at rantonse@ifi.uio.no.  You can also see the announcement for his MoMath talk here.

As usual, we went our for dinner afterwards, this time for Thai.  It seems that no one wanted to leave — but some of the participants had a 90-minute drive ahead of them, so eventually we had to head home.  Stay tuned for the summary of next month’s meeting, which will be at Santa Clara University!

Yesterday was the second meeting of the Bay Area Mathematical Artists!  We had a somewhat different group — some who came last time were unable to make it, but there were some new faces among the enthusiasts as well.  Fourteen showed up for the afternoon, and two others joined us for dinner afterwards.

After the last meeting, I received a few emails offering suggestions about different ways to organize the gatherings.  One suggestion was to have a social period for the first part of the meeting, where participants could meet those they didn’t already know, or perhaps bring artistic items for show-and-tell.

This seemed like a good idea, since in addition to letting participants get to know each other or just catch up on the previous month, it gave them a 30-minute buffer to arrive on campus.  It turns out this part of the afternoon went very well, with just about everyone arriving by 3:30.  Dan Bach was giving away old copies of mathematics journals he had collected over the years, while Colin Liotta was giving away laser-etched wooden pendants.

The only scheduled talk of the afternoon was given by Roger Antonsen, entitled Mathematical explorations and visualizations.

Roger talked about several of his extensive library of Processing animations. He takes his inspiration from many different places – but his Processing mantra is sometimes “make it move.” He takes an image which fascinates him, recreates it as best as he can, and then varies different parameters to make the image move.

Some of his most intriguing examples involved optical illusions, and are based on the work of Pinna; see his web page on Art to see some examples.

He also emphasized the need to create balance in his work – when you parameterize features of an image, you need to decide the range the parameter takes. Too much motion, and the animation looks too distorted, but too little, and the animation is too static. Of course the need to create balance in artwork is not restricted to creating animations, but it is constantly in Roger’s mind as he creates.

After Roger’s talk, we moved on to a discussion about the nature of mathematical and digital art.  There are other similar terms in use, such as algorithmic art and generative art.  Typically, generative art is described as art generated by some autonomous system.  This means that algorithmic art — that is, art created by use of a computer program — is a subset of generative art.  But what do all these terms mean to us, individually, as artists?

I had originally thought to break into smaller groups at first, but the group wanted to have just one, larger discussion.

There were many and varied opinions expressed — from commentary about the art community as a whole, to those who thought the question “What is mathematical art?” is nonsensical to ask because there is really no answer, and it doesn’t impact the creative process at all.

Two points I made relate to my teaching Mathematics and Digital Art.  First, every time you settle on the value for a parameter in some work you’re doing, you are making an aesthetic choice.  You can tweak all you like, but then all of a sudden you just say to yourself, “OK, that’s it!”  Of course there are times you just stop because you can’t find precisely what you want and just need to move on, but I think you get the gist of what I’m saying.  You’re making artistic choices all the time.

And second, I have students write short narratives about their work, describing the parameter choices they make.  I want to them to think about when a digital image becomes a piece of digital art.  Of course (as alluded to above) there really is no definitive answer to this question, but for students just beginning to dive into the world of digital and mathematical art, it is a useful question to consider.

This took us right to our designated ending time, 5:00.  One of the participants suggested a Thai place nearby, and so eleven of us made the short trek just north of campus.  It was actually quite good, according to all accounts.  And as I mentioned earlier, two participants who couldn’t make it earlier in the day joined us at the restaurant.  The discussions were lively, covering a broad range of mathematics, art, and other topics as well.

So again, a good time was had by all!  To round out today’s post, I’d like to say a few words about the new Digital Art Club I’m advising at the University of San Francisco.  It seems each week, one or two more students become interested, mostly by word of mouth.  There are new faces all the time!

It turns out this is a great opportunity for mathematics or science majors to learn about digital art.  The Mathematics and Digital Art course I’m teaching is not at a high enough level to count towards a mathematics major, and many students in the sciences (like computer science or physics) have required mathematics courses, also at a higher level.

We’re focusing on learning Processing at the moment, since not only are students very interested in learning the software, but I have written quite a bit about Processing on my blog.  So I can easily get students started by pointing them to an appropriate post.

Not only that, we’ve got a few students willing to take leadership positions and secure status as an officially recognized student club.  This means there are funds available for field trips and other activities.  We’re hoping to make a trip to the Pace Gallery in Palo Alto.  I’ll occasionally update on our progress in future posts.  Stay tuned!