Are you interested in bringing a mathematical art installation to your school or community? Studio Infinity would love to help!
Mathematical art has the power to inspire and educate. Installing a large work as a group helps foster or reinforce a sense of community around shared intellectual and artistic interests. And it can provide an opportunity for people to engage with and think about math in ways they may never have before.
I serve as the Problem Warden for the Prison Math Project (PMP), meaning I edit The Prisoner’s Dilemma, the quarterly problem section of the PMP newsletter. So I’d love it if you have intersting problems or mathematical puzzles to submit to the column. Of course, you will be credited online and in the newsletter for any problems you submit.
I also welcome solutions to the existing problems from anyone. Problems range in difficulty from high-school contest level up to roughly the easiest end of Putnam competition problems. So to submit problems or solutions, please email me at dilemma “at” pmathp “dot” org. Looking forward to your ideas!
If you’re in the Seattle area, Studio Infinity and the Seattle Universal Math Museum will be hosting a freestyle build on Saturday, January 11th. We have absolutely no clue what this structure will look like when complete and would love for you to be part of the team that plans and executes its construction!
The unit we will be building with is a regular octahedral junction with eight triangular prismatic “arms” protruding from its faces:
We have a few ideas for what this building unit might be good for, but we are far more excited to see what a group of creative math enthusiasts can dream up.
The build will take place on Saturday, January 11th from 9:00am to 12:00pm in the 4th floor exhibit hall of the Seattle Convention Center. While the Joint Math Meetings have a registration fee the rest of the week, entry to the exhibit hall is completely free this Saturday. There will be many cool mathy things in the exhibit hall for both children and adults to enjoy, so bring friends and family of all ages!
In preparation for the announced JMM build, we worked out some kinks this past weekend with a practice build.
Since the final structure is just shy of 17 feet tall, it was important to have a venue with high ceilings. The Seattle Universal Math Museum has an ongoing partnership with the Georgetown Steam Plant, who generously offered their boiler room. (For fun, you can use their virtual tour to navigate yourself to the boiler room, as featured in the photos below.)
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On Wednesday, 2025 January 8th at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Seattle, Studio Infinity will be facilitating a group build using Giant Octablocks. If you follow our projects, you might recognize them as the trunctated octahedra from the TOWARD build at Harvey Mudd College or from a freestyle build at Open Sauce 2024. This time we will be leveraging the fact that the hexagonal faces of the blocks are at the perfect angles to build within a diamond cubic crystal structure if we restrict ourselves to a subset of four of them per block. The end goal — a Diamond Lattice Tower:
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A couple speakers dropping out at the last minute left a hole in the Math & Art session’s schedule the other week at MAA MathFest 2024 in Indianapolis, IN. As the famous expression you’ve no doubt heard countless times goes: when life gives you cancellations, make cantellations!
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We arrived at Princeton early in the evening of August 5th with an assortment of the materials discussed in our planning post, ready to lead the PCMI/IAS Teacher Leadership Program in building an expanded icosidodecahedron.
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With the PCMI/IAS Teacher Leadership Program build approaching, it’s time to pin down some details. We’ve used boxes to make a “cuboxtahedron” and wanted to work with a different symmetry, so we’ve selected the expanded icosidodecahedron as discussed at the end of this MathStream post:
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If you have access to a 3D printer and want a modular way to build TOWARD and other related structures, here are some options for putting together your own construction kit. And if you find yourself intrigued by the different ways these pieces can go together, you might enjoy exploring the mathematical questions they raise along with us.
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We arrived on HMC campus around 9am on March 28th with supplies in tow. Peter had reserved a nice space outside the chemistry department to build and display our planned geometric structure.
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Because TOs Work As a RD, Studio Infinity’s next project has officially been dubbed TOWARD! We are collaborating with Peter Kagey, a Visiting Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Harvey Mudd College, who found the TO particularly appealing due to its double life as a permutohedron. The build will take place at Harvey Mudd College, so we’re opting to use Harvey Mudd’s black, white, and gold as our palette. Here’s our poster for the event, featuring a digital mock-up of what we intend to build:
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Studio Infinity has long been interested in builds consisting of polyhedra as modular units. Even better if the structure ends up being another recognizable polyhedron, …
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