Welcome to this week’s Math Munch!

The Math Munch team at TEDxNYED

Marjorie Rice | click to watch her interview video

On Saturday, the Math Munch team gave a 16-minute presentation at TEDxNYED about Math Munch!  (Eventually there will be a video, and we’ll be sure to share it with you right away, but you’ll have to wait a month, maybe.)

We started with the story of Marjorie Rice, and in searching for a good picture of her, we came across this wonderful interview in a documentary about Martin Gardner.  It’s so neat to hear her speak about her discoveries.  You can see how proud she is and how much she truly loves math.  Feel free to watch the whole documentary if you like.  I haven’t gotten a chance yet, but I know it’s full of incredible stuff.

In the spirit of TED, I decided to share a few mathematical TED talks.  This one is absolutely fascinating.  In it, mathematician Ron Eglash describes how fractals underly the african designs.  You know how we love fractals.

If you’re hungry for another TED talk, here’s one about connections between music, mathematics, and sonar.

Up next, remember when we wrote about attending last year’s Bridges conference?  Well it happens every year, of course, and this year’s gallery of mathematical art is available online!  Click on one of those images and you get to more of the artists work.  I could easily spend hours staring at this art, trying to understand them, and reading the descriptions and artist statements.  Seriously, there is just way too much cool stuff there, so I’ve picked out a few of my favorites.  Also, I have great news to announce: Chloé Worthington (previously featured) had some of her art accepted to the exhibition!  Congratulations, Chloe!  If you look closely, you’ll see some of my art in there too.  🙂

Bjarne Jespersen

Marc Chamberland

Bob Rollings

Chloé Worthington

Mehrdad Garousi

By the way, if you ever create any mathematical art of your own, we’d love to see it!  Send us an email at mathmunchteam@gmail.com, and maybe we’ll feature your work in an upcoming Math Munch. (Only if you want us too, of course.)

Silk creator Yuri Vishnevsky

Finally, I know many of you like playing around with Symmetry Artist, which can be found on our page of Math Art Tools.  If you like that, then you’ll love Silk!  It’s much the same, but generates a certain kind of whispiness as you draw that looks really cool.  It also lets you spiral your designs toward the center, a feature which Symmetry Artist lacks.  You can download the Silk app for iPad or iPhone, if you like.  Silk was designed by Yuri Vishnevsky, with sound design by Mat Jarvis.  Yuri has agreed to do a Q&A for us, but we haven’t quite finished it just yet.  I’ll upload it as soon as possible, but for now, you can read an interview Mat and Yuri did with a website called Giant Fire Breathing Dragon.

Bon appetit!