Blackboard drawing of geo-primes by Margaret Wertheim and Richard Nielsen at the 2019 Venice Biennale.

IFF director Margaret Wertheim has made a discovery about a geometric representation of prime numbers. This “geo-prime” system visually encodes the essential difference between prime and composite numbers, and gives a graphical meaning to the statement that the primes are the atomic elements of the integers. Links can be made between geo-primes, group theory, knot theory, and the Fourier Transform (the math underlying spectral analysis of music and holography). This is college level mathematics encountered through drawing.

The IFF is holding a series of “prime playing” workshops – the first 2 were at the Museum of Jurassic Technology and the LA Public Library. To receive info about future workshops email us at: mail@theiff.org.

Prime playing drawings from workshop at LA Public Library, 03/10/2020

Computer rendering of the geo-prime representation of 210.

Computer rendering of geo-prime 210||103.

Computer render of zooming in to the “black hole” at the heart of geo-prime 997||498.

Thanks to Tristan Duke for coding Rhino/Grasshopper program to compute geo-prime images.