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 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.
Read More
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.
Read More
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:
Read More
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, …
Read More
Over fifty members of the Occidental College community, organized by Prof. Jim Brown of the Math Dept., came together (Friday, 2023 Nov 10) to construct a Sierpinski-style fractal based on the regular octahedron. You can read more about it in the The Occidental weekly newspaper; more details will be posted here as time permits.
Read More
Studio Infinity has teamed up with Prof. Jim Brown and the Occidental Math Dept. to create the Oxyhedron on Friday, 2023 Nov 10, starting at 10 AM. The installation will take place just outside Fowler Hall, which houses the Math Dept. I did a site visit today; on the right you can see the quarter-scale mockup being used as a stand-in to plan the event, held in place by Jim.
Read More
Studio Infinity is pleased to announce the preparation of a new traveling art/science exhibit, Polyplane. The producers, Alex Kontorovich and Glen Whitney, are seeking submissions of physical polyhedra to become part of the exhibit. A broad variety of media and styles are welcomed, in support of the central aims of Polyplane: to celebrate the beauty of geometric forms while allowing visitors to directly perceive a fundamental law that governs them, Euler’s Polyhedron Formula. For more information and to reserve space for the polyhedron of your choice, visit polyplane.org.
I’ve used a lot of different materials to build Sierpiński Tetrahedra over the years, including mailing tubes and hula hoops, among other possibilities.
Read More
For this installation commissioned by the Dickinson College mathematics department, we chose a construction technique that goes all the way back to a construction from 2016, but this time with a twist. All previous installations done with this technique used only one length of rod, producing rigid equilateral polyhedra. But I had long wanted to construct a rhombic enneacontahedron, a shape that George Hart introduced me to with one of his artworks.
Read More
I will be leading a group construction of a 3.4m diameter rhombic enneacontahedron next Tuesday, 2022 Oct 11, on the campus of Dickinson College. This is the first time that I will be leading a construction using this system — dubbed ZipStix at the NYC math museum — with rhombic faces rather than regular polygons.
Read More