Roger Vogeler

Assistant Professor
Department of Mathematical Sciences, Central Connecticut State University
New Britain, Connecticut, USA

The notions of counting, classifying, and ordering are among the most primitive thought processes underlying mathematics. Much of my recent work is an attempt to display the fruitfulness of these notions in ways that are visually appealing and intriguing.

Six Circles
Six Circles
60 x 50 cm
Inkjet print
2015

There are exactly 48 topologically distinct planar embeddings of the disjoint union of 6 circles. Each such embedding has many possible geometric configurations. In this piece I've chosen for each embedding the configuration that maximizes the weight assigned by a simple algorithm. The 48 blocks are then ordered, from upper left to lower right, according to this weight.