Sunday 24 May 2015

Greenwich's mathematician in residence

Mathematician in Residence show

As I write, the mathematician Katie Steckles is in residence at the Stephen Lawrence Gallery of the University of Greenwich, where she is demonstrating some fun maths to the public and getting people to take part in various mathematical activities.  It's a fascinating show, covering many different kinds of mathematics, from tessellation to random walks, fractals to Benford's Law, and some graph theory.

For me, what has emerged is the visual connections.  My photo above shows to the left images of blackboards relating to some of the maths research at Greenwich: even without a full explanation of the context the blackboards viewers are intrigued by the look of the mathematics.  The photo below shows a wall of "doodles" by visitors, showing that all such doodles (formed by closed curves) can be coloured in only two colours so that regions with a common boundary are different colours.

graph theory doodles

Katie has curated a marvellous collection full of visual and mathematical interest.  Hopefully the show will persuade people that there is much more to maths than sums!

1 comment:

  1. The photo below shows a wall of "doodles" by visitors, showing that all such doodles (formed by closed curves) can be coloured in only two colours so that regions with a common boundary are different colours.sober living nyc

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