Media Arts and Technology lab at UCSB.
IFF director Margaret Wertheim will present a talk at the Media Arts and Technology Seminar Series at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The title of the talk is Crafting Mathematics: Or Does a Seaslug Understand Hyperbolic Geometry?
Date and Time: Monday October 19, 2020 – 1pm, on Zoom. Sign up for the event here at MAT/UCSB.
Talk Abstract: What does it mean to know mathematics? In the frilled forms of corals and other crenelated marine organisms we witness structures that mathematicians long thought to be impossible. Defying the rules of Euclidean geometry, such “hyperbolic” surfaces are now known to exist in a wide variety of living and physical systems. For the past 15 years, science writer and artist Margaret Wertheim has been working on a project to make sculptural representations of coral reefs using the craft of crochet, thus marrying mathematics with art, science, and handiwork. Her Crochet Coral Reef project – which has been widely exhibited around the world, including at the Venice Biennale and the Smithsonian – is at once a novel enterprise in radical craft practice and a global experiment in applied geometry that makes a case for embodied mathematical knowing.