Over the next 15 months, the collaborators would spend some 396 hours in virtual meetings and exchange more than 8,300 emails.įrom their separate lockdown locations they painted, sculpted, beaded, embroidered, carved, folded, 3D printed, stitched and welded using a quarter-scale mockup to test out their ideas and visualize how they might look. shut down because of the coronavirus crisis, and we had to reorient ourselves.”ĭespite the disruptive COVID-19 pandemic they decided to meet anyway, over Zoom. “And of course you know what happened then,” Daubechies said.
Originally, the team had planned to get together in person to build the installation starting in mid-March 2020. Even the mountains and cliffs she is heading towards, built from either vertical columns or horizontal slabs, are meant to illustrate different ways of defining integrals.ĭaubechies and Ehrmann first pitched the project and made a call for collaborators at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Denver in mid-January 2020. The tortoise’s ceramic shell is a nod to hyperbolic geometry, its surface covered with a honeycomb-like pattern of seven-sided heptagons. But to mathematicians it’s a Sierpinski tetrahedron, a three-dimensional fractal with patterns that repeat over and over at increasingly smaller scales. To the uninitiated, the kite flying behind her looks like a cross between a pyramid and a block of Swiss cheese. But to reach her destination, she must get there by taking an infinite number of smaller and smaller steps - an idea that is the basis of calculus.Īlong the way the tortoise encounters mathematical ideas and formations that many have never heard of. Nearby, a green knitted tortoise sets out for a hike.
On one side of the installation, fanciful sea creatures frolic in an ocean bay - a nautical scene dubbed the “knotical scene” in honor of the subfield of math known as knot theory.ĭenver-based artist Tasha Pruitt shows off a psychedelic sea slug known as a nudibranch that she made out of blue foam, a tuft of cleverly twisted mathematical knots protruding from its back. See the installation up close at an open-door event from 1:30-2:30 in Gross 355, followed by presentations and Q&A with several of its creators from 2:30-3:30 in Gross 330. The 20-foot-long, 10-foot-wide piece, a mixed-media art installation dubbed “ Mathemalchemy,” is the result of a two-year collaboration between Duke mathematician Ingrid Daubechies, Canadian fiber artist Dominique Ehrmann and more than 20 others devoted to the beauty, fun and creativity of math.ĭon’t miss your last chance to visit on Saturday, Dec.
On the third floor of Gross Hall lies a whimsical island where the landscape and creatures are not what they seem.
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