Week 7: Just for this week, a slightly different format!

 Hello everyone! For just this week's class, we will have a slightly different format from the majority of classes in our course: a recorded interview with a guest speaker, and readings. 

Note that there are no required activities for this week, though you are very much welcomed to try out some aspects of Nick Sayers' mathematical artworks as shown in his interview!

A few days ago, I recorded an interview with mathematical/ STEAM artist, Nick Sayers, coming to us from Brighton in the UK. It's almost two hours long (1:55), and is centred on a slide presentation of Nick's many, ingenious science and mathematical art projects. Here's the link to the interview video.

Nick Sayers brings most of his artwork to public education venues including schools and universities, arts and maker festivals, music fests, and international events. In his talk, he traces the process of designing and developing these math/ art/ science projects, and I think the process may be quite informative for you as you begin to design your own math/ art educational projects.

So for this week's class, please do the following, by Monday March 2 at midnight:

1. Watch the full video, and take some notes on the things that make you think, connect, question, remember and ask questions. It would be helpful to note the time code at each of these, so that you can refer to them in your writing.
2. From these, choose 3 or 4 'stops' to write about in your post on your viewing. 
3. Also, please think about and respond to this question:
   What does this artist's work offer you in terms of understanding math-art connections, and what does it offer you as a math or science teacher?
4. If you have questions you'd like to ask Nick Sayers, please add them at the end of your post.
5. Please let me know if you'd like to share your post and/or your questions with the artist, and I will email him whatever people would like to share. He may be able to respond if he has time!

Readings for this week:

We also have our regular readings for the week, and you should post and respond to your reading group's posts as we usually do!

 

Here are our three readings for this week, centred on the idea of what it means to be a mathematical artist. This is a hot topic in the Bridges Math and Art community at the moment, initiated by the George Hart article (reading #1) from the AMA Notes recently which suggested the idea of a Math/ Art manifesto. (A group of us affiliated with Bridges are working on that and hashing out these big ideas now!)

1. George Hart. (2024). What Can We Say About “Math/Art”?. Notices of the American Mathematical Society, 71(4).
   
   
2. Choose one of these two articles: Alison G. Martin. (2015, August). A basketmaker’s approach to structural morphology. In Proceedings of IASS Annual Symposia (Vol. 2015, No. 29, pp. 1-8). International Association for Shell and Spatial Structures (IASS). 
   
   OR Chronaki et al (2025). Circular movements of healing with maths, arts and craft: Reimagining disciplinary transversals for learning. In Proceedings of MACAS 2025, University of Moncton, NB.
    
3. Fumiko Futamuro. (2025). Writing a mathematical art manifesto. In Bridges 2025 Archive, Eindhoven, NL, 589-594.

Enjoy! And next week we will be back to our usual format (an 'everything' sheet including introduction to the week's topic, short viewings, activity and weekly readings).