By Sara Bobok and Do Hyun Kim

Making Math Material

Fall 2018

Pivotal to community building on Harvard’s campus is the Harvard Stadium, a space for sports, theater, and school spirit. Fascinating mathematics are necessary to allow for the Stadium to fulfill these functions.

Trees of Willow, True Love, and Tiling

Mai Nguyen

Math 168: Making Math Material

I’ve been eating off these plates ever since I can remember. No matter how many beautiful or interesting pieces of dishware in our family’s house, I always gravitate towards the “Willow Plate” design.

Housing the largest undergraduate dining hall, a lecture hall, a student bar, classrooms, music rooms and more, Mem Hall is almost always bustling with student activity. Unlike other buildings on Harvard’s campus however, the architectural style of Annenberg Hall is unique, a fusion of New England brick with gothic arches, cathedral-like stained glass, and detail-rich ornamentation. Although a mathematical perspective can shed insight on many facets of the building, two areas of particular interest can be seen housed within the ceiling structure of the 9000-square-foot great hall. 

Lacey Hines and Katja Diaz-Granados

In 2010, Harvard University broke ground on the three year long renovation project to merge its three art museums – The Fogg Museum, the Busch-Reisinger Museum, and the Arthur M. Sackler Museum – under one roof. Architects not only faced the difficult task of building a structure large enough to fit such extensive collections, but they were further constrained by curators’ unique desire to exhibit paper-based drawings and canvas paintings side by side in the same gallery.  

Harvard’s new Smith Campus Center opened less than a month ago, and ever since then I’ve done most of my studying there. While the main Harvard Commons area is all brand-new wood and glass, the building’s main corridor is dominated by large, exposed concrete walls. While exiting the building one day, I noticed that these walls have a particular and peculiar design to them which consists of parallel lines and rows of holes spaced two feet apart. Below are a few pictures of the concrete that I took last week. These lines are either vertical, horizontal, or measured to be at 45 degrees.

Hammocks often symbolize ease, relaxation and simplicity. Yet the mathematics of these structures contrasts with their seemingly effortless nature.

These images were taken during the summer of 2017 when I attended the Biennale in Venice on an exhibition in the main pavilion section, “Viva Arte Viva,”  of the Biennale. This exhibit – WeltenLinie (One in a Time) – by Alicja Kwade uses powder-coated steel, mirror, stone, bronze, aluminum, wood, and petrified wood. The objects are placed on either side of mirrors so that as the viewer walks past, the actual object is replaced by the reflection of another, perfectly lining up as the viewer moves past to create the illusion of a whole object, except with different materials making up each the reflected and actual objects.