You're reading: Arty Maths

Armadillo Vault held together only by friction

More information at Wired.

via math-fun.

There was a “beauty of maths” garden at the Chelsea Flower Show. Yeah, sure, why not

The Winton Beauty of Mathematics Garden was an entry in this year’s Chelsea Flower Show. It looks like this:

winton-maths-garden

Photo from Winton Capital, via The RHS on Twitter.

Apparently those symbols winding their way around the garden are “plant growth algorithms”, whatever those are.

There’s also a golden-ratio-thingy water feature, of course.

You can thank Winton Capital, sponsors of all sorts of worthy maths projects, for this bit of mathsy art.

Messiaen’s “Quartet for the end of time”, animated by Simon Russell and Marcus du Sautoy

Marcus du Sautoy has teamed up with animator Simon Russell to create this animatino to accompany Messiaen’s Quartet for the end of time. It’s got all the usual arty maths things in it – the Fibonacci sequence and golden ratio, prime numbers, polygons and polyhedra of all sorts – as well as the less well-trodden sporadic group $M_{12}$. It all comes together quite nicely, though I much prefer the elegant end to the spiky-frenetic start.

There’s a page describing all the maths ideas to be found in the video at Sinfini Music.

via Marcus du Sautoy and Sinfini Music on Twitter

Intersections by Anila Quayyum Agha

via Colossal

Tessellation Art by Chris Watson

vortex

Chris Watson has written in to tell us about his site, Tessellation Art, where he sells his heavily Escher-inspired prints. They’re available in a range of sizes and media, and quite affordably priced. I particularly like the print above, titled Vortex.

Le Livre de l’Incomplétude is a lovely take on incompleteness

1500x500

This is a really nice idea. Le Livre de l’Incomplétude (The Book of Incompleteness) is an “artistic appropriation of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem,” initiated by artist Débora Bertol. The superficial understanding of that theorem is that every consistent formal theory contains truths which can’t be proved inside that theory, so the book’s conceit is that it will catalogue as many different arithmetic formulas as possible that evaluate to each of the numbers 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9.

I think it’s a really charming take on one of the most abstract and hard-to-understand subjects in maths.

Google+