Jack Love

Instructor, Director of Outreach
George Mason University, Mason Experimental Geometry Lab
Arlington, Virginia, USA

I started experimenting with geometry at City College of San Francisco, first with drawings and then models. One bit of inspiration came in the form of a poster in a hallway of UC Berkeley's math department, displaying a relationship between the golden ratio and the icosahedron. Finding and expressing hidden relationships between abstract objects might serve as a good definition for mathematics, and my work attempts to realize those relationships visually.

14, or, The Fourth Catalan Number
14, or, The Fourth Catalan Number
22 x 36 cm
Marker on paper
2017

The Catalan numbers count notoriously many collections of objects. This diptych represents two collections of 14 objects each (14 being the fourth Catalan number), with a color-coding that gives a bijection between them.