Week 2 Post

    The intersection of math and art brings back memories of playing with a Spirograph back in elementary school to create curving paths that started out looking chaotic but always looped back on themselves and created beautiful symmetric paths that could almost look like three-dimensional curvature sometimes. Prof. Vesna's notes in lecture on vanishing points and perspective really interesting because this is something I have struggled with in my own visual art. In the end, this is a mathematical technique to help visualize 3D space on a flat page. 

 

Vintage Spirograph art showing the various patterns possible.  

    These days, my creative hobbies lean more into the fiber arts, so I wanted to explore how these interact with mathematics. It turns out there is a ton of interconnection between fiber arts, mathematics, and the first computers! Knitting patterns are composed almost entirely of two stitches, the knit and purl stitch, with each one involving wrapping the yarn differently around the needles. These were encoded to the 0 and 1 of binary, and some of the first computers at NASA had their computer programs painstakingly knitted into wire by skilled older women. 

 

The creation of Core Rope Memory, also called Little Old Lady Memory (Perini).  

In the many years since then, mathematics has inspired many fiber artists in their craft. Wilmer remarks that "I’ve met many mathematicians and scientists in related areas whose technical interests were sparked by early experiences with fiber arts," (1158). Different mathematical patterns can be really enjoyable to create, like the interlocked crochet pattern pictured below. Since knit and crochet are both created with rows of stitches, increasing and decreasing the number of stitches per row in order to affect the shape, there are also some really interesting mathematical curves that can be achieved with these arts (Belcastro).

    

A novel space filling curve created in intermeshed crochet (Wilmer). 

As for the juxtaposition between math, art, and science, I think that on the surface they appear very different but deep down they all rely on human creativity, and that leads to many connections such as these. All the best scientists I know are also artists, because it helps tend to that creativity.

Sources: 

Abbot, Edwin, "Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions." 1884.  

Belcastro, Sarah-Marie. “Adventures in Mathematical Knitting.” American Scientist, 31 Aug. 2018, https://www.americanscientist.org/article/adventures-in-mathematical-knitting.

Henderson, Linda Dalrymple, "The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art: Conclusion." Leonardo, Vol. 17, No. 3. (1984), pp. 205-210. 

Perini, Abbey. “Knitting as Programming.” DEV Community, DEV Community, 22 Nov. 2021, https://dev.to/abbeyperini/knitting-as-programming-3e5. 

Wilmer, Elizabeth, "Or/And: A Review of Figuring Fibers." Notices of the American Mathematical Society, Vol. 67, No. 8. (2020), pp. 1158-1161.