John Sims knows the Art of Math
“I am inspired by Pythagoras, who saw maths sitting at the centre of art, life and nature.”
This picture of John Sims was taken at a recent exhibition where he displayed 13 math/art quilts, nine dresses based on the number Pi, a blues composition based on Pi and many other mathartifacts. In his own words, “I grew up in Detroit, Michigan, and became interested in maths through a high-school science-fair project on Pythagorean triples. It was in graduate school that I started to connect maths and art. I taught a calculus course where I allowed the students to make a ‘cheat sheet’ of notes and formulae to take into the exam. One was visually stimulating, so I bought it. Later, I met mathematician John Horton Conway and sculptor Brent Collins who got me excited about visual maths and art. Soon after, I went to Ringling College of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida, to develop a maths curriculum for art students.
I admire the work of the sixteenth-century painter Albrecht Dürer, particularly his use of magic squares [number grids in which every row, every column and the diagonals sum to the same constant]. I like the way that M. C. Escher was able to draw on the tradition of Islamic geometric art in a representational context, and I like his lithograph of an impossible waterfall inspired by the work of British mathematician Roger Penrose. In the conceptual realm, I like the surrealist artist Marcel Duchamp for his subversive audacity. However, my greatest influence is the unfolding system of structures, patterns and cycles of nature itself.
It is art that embraces the spirit, language and process of mathematics. Both maths and art are concerned with truth, but they differ in their ways of searching for it. Maths uses analysis and proof; art uses the senses and emotions. But maths can harness the spirit of creativity and art can be analytical. Together they form a great alliance for understanding the world around us.” From an interview in Nature.
