BEAUTY, WISDOM AND CREATIVITY SPIRAL THROUGHOUT MATHEMATICS

Date: 2020.06

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Medium: Woodcut printmaking, gel pen

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This piece is inspired by my fascination with the beauty of math. One concept I have included is tessellation, in which a page is completely covered by congruent shapes. The base units are portraits of mathematicians in a chronological order (Pythagoras, Euclid, Newton & Leibniz, Euler, Gauss), intended to represent the history of math. The golden spiral is intended to show how math can explain natural beauty. The fact that the radius of one sector is the sum of the radii of the previous two is intended to symbolize the process of building on past knowledge in math. I have also made the type of tessellation more complex as the spiral progresses (triangle, square, parallelogram, pentagon, hexagon) to represent the advancement of our knowledge.  I have used colours blue and orange because blue symbolizes wisdom and rationalism, and orange symbolizes creativity, which are all very essential in math.