It’s not much of an exaggeration to say that the Dutch sculptor Rinus Roelofs organizes his life around the annual Bridges conference, an international event celebrating synergies between math and art. In July, the conference drew more than 400 artistically minded mathematicians and mathematically minded artists to the Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands.
Dr. Roelofs’s main contribution to the program was a half-ton, eight-foot-tall metal sculpture called “Dancing Cubes.”
“I do not call my art ‘mathematical art,’” Dr. Roelofs said in a video interview about a week later. “It’s art about mathematics. Every artist has a favorite subject, things you want to talk about. For me, that’s math.”
“Dancing Cubes” is a riff on the geometric notion of duality: a relationship by which one form emerges, or can be constructed, from another. “If you have one object, you can make another object, the dual of the first object, and if you put the two together you have a new construction,” Dr. Roelofs said.
Duality played a part in Dr. Roelofs’s dual Ph.D. in architecture and mathematics, which he obtained in 2020 at age 66. His artistic practice had always been research-driven, and in 2012, while creating a sculpture with equilateral triangles, he made a number of mathematical discoveries. For instance, he found a new series of uniform polyhedra based on helical rods. “They look like spiky, twisted cylinders,” said Doris Schattschneider, a mathematician and professor emerita at Moravian University who was on Dr. Roelofs’s thesis committee.
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The post Every Artist Has a Favorite Subject. For Some, That’s Math. appeared first on New York Times.
