Anne Ligon Harding and Clayton Shonkwiler

Senior Analyst; Assistant Professor of Mathematics
Grand Rounds; Colorado State University
Fort Collins, Colorado, USA

Anne Ligon Harding is a data analyst and printmaker. She works on improving access and outcomes in education and medicine.

Clayton Shonkwiler is a mathematician and artist. He is committed to using geometry to understand the world.

Light and Dark
Light and Dark
33 x 60 cm
Linocut
2019

The trefoil is the simplest non-trivial knot. It is over-used as a blackboard example, but it is also ubiquitous in a number of other ways: in many random knot models, the typical knot has many small trefoil summands, and a theorem of Harrison Chapman shows that almost all minimal diagrams of alternating knots contain the trefoil as a subknot.

As the (3,2)-torus knot, the trefoil can have both 3-fold and 2-fold symmetry; we demonstrate the former and allude to the latter through color and juxtaposition in this hand-cut linoleum print.